Hole

 8/7/26

 

    I came home after a truly marathon day - 11 walk-ins, one intake, and an absent social worker - with my brain feeling like warm jello, not fully set.

    I was gathering cardboard to put out for recycling when I suddenly noticed a large hole in one of the terrace side first floor windows. I can’t really imagine what would take out almost half of an 6” by 8” window pain. There is no tell tale pattern of a rock impact or a  bullet. I’m familiar with bullet holes in glass because I grew up in Red Hook in the 80s when gangs were battling it out for drug territory. There was often shooting, and a stray bullet hit our bathroom window, luckily while nobody was in there.

    Since I went to the school 8 blocks to the north in the entirely different world of Carroll gardens, my 5th grade teacher was alarmed by the phrase “bullets in the night” in one of my classroom poems and dragged my mom into it who confirmed that it was just a statement of fact.  I was at that school because I was allegedly “gifted” although looking back that pretty clearly meant "white" because they did nothing but look at me before assigning me there. Once I got there, the assessing started as they discovered that between my years in private school and my bookworm nature I could outread everybody in the class. I got moved from reading group to reading group until there was nowhere left to go and I wound up in a group by myself. It was kind of lonely but I was not going to complain about being left alone to read my way through the animal filled books of Gerald Durrell and Gavin Maxwell’s fascinating books about life with otters.

   All that Gerald Durrell got me in trouble at the spelling bee, when I confidently spelled catalog “c a t a l o g u e”.  It was initially ruled one, but something about my certainty made one of the teachers decide to look up, where she discovered it was correct - in England.

     Back to the mystery hole, it’s big enough that I am going to have to do something to keep cats from trying to sneak past the sharp edges to go exploring.  I have some of the chicken wire I used on the kitchen window left, but it’s an ugly solution for a ground floor window.  I guess it doesn’t matter since mine is already the most dilapidated house on the block.  Dealing with this window feels like one more thing on an endless pile of junk.

    I’m leaving for Gloucester in 12 days.  I go every year and I have never found myself counting down before, but I am so wiped out I really need to spend some time listening to the forest.  This will be the first year that John Henry won’t be there, at least for the first three days, because he is working in CT this year and just back for the weekend.  His brother, who also lives in my house, will be on his own vacation that week, but having a few days of silence after spending so much of my time in conversation day after day sounds like a blessing.