August 2025

Lost summer days pass quickly. 

And I don’t mean that in a good way. 

Three knotty problems loomed over resolve:  a snarled legal issue, a dull insurance matter, and impending credit card fraud. None of these could be handled over the internet (as recommended). Phone calls were made, transfers achieved, information foraged and checked, rechecked. Passwords were changed, codes sent, emails confirmed. In between we made our way to the grocery store, assembled food, partook of caffeine, and took naps. All the while workmen drilled and hammered on the outer wall of our dwelling in order to comply with “Local law 11.”

Days like this seem to occur more often. I’m told to reduce stress—the gods are amused. Exercise is difficult amidst workmen, extreme heat, and harmful air quality. Meditation? The monkey brain says “no, just no.” Television is a frightening mix of grim news and dark storytelling. Books, my old reliable escape, become problematic distractions under duress.

Comfort and ease are elusive. Surprise has taken on a dire aspect.

Where is the celebratory cake? 

The found money? 

The message from a long lost friend?

I take solace in the fact that my white Keds came (somewhat) clean in the washing machine, as recommended by YouTube. That my glasses have been found despite the fact that they now fall off my face when I look down because my husband mistakenly wore them. That a neighborhood butcher sets aside generous bags of dried hibiscus for tea, and sells them at an affordable price; and that I have a neighbor good enough to pass along that secret.

The bowls that I eat out of when I’m gloomy are handmade and glazed with subtle colors amidst confusion. They make me feel secure and hopeful. The world revolves in chaos about these small works of art and rids my thoughts of all, save sense of taste and satisfying tactile feel of their irregular surface and heft. 

Christmas in Zombieland

The windows of the corner store that we pass by on the way to the subway station were changed once. It had been Halloween for at least four years, since we moved into the neighborhood. Two years ago it became Christmas and has remained so since.
The window is festooned with trees, green ones and silver ones, ceramic and paper. Garish stars and pious angels look down from the tops of each. Though it’s July now, multicolored lights twinkle and boxes wrapped in festive paper litter the floor of the display, nutcracker men in military formation watch over all. A sign with a neon countdown flashes, “— shopping days till.” Another displays “Holiday Greetings” in red and green neon. Tinsel garlands wind through it all.
Outside on the street, junkies bluster and nod, trade meds and illegals. One sleeper has no shoes. Near him, a woman in a tee-shirt that says “Florida Sunshine” dances with her walker to a slow rhythm that only she can hear. Two men discuss Medicaid strategies with a woman who is bent over a shopping cart, staring at the ground. Someone with bright orange hair and grey roots fumbles a tinfoil ball. A one-legged man naps in his wheelchair while his friend murmurs in his ear. It might be a song or a prayer, but the voice is an insincere rasp, more likely a hustle.
The Kush man hawks his wears.
Behind them a women totters next to the window and puts a skeletal hand on it to steady herself. The holiday lights animate cheap rings on four of her fingers. The woman looks in the window and smiles—at the trees? Or her own shabby reflection? Whatever it is that pleases her, puts her to sleep on the spot. The glass obstructs genuine connection, possible meddling, but serves to hold her up.
The display outside the window moves in slow motion, ignoring people with purpose who hurry past to the subway entrance.
Above it all, a sign on the building reads “Two Dollar $tore,” the D slightly askew.

Sundays


I don’t like Sundays. I’ve never liked Sundays. The devout are made pious. The sinners plot their next transgression. Heavy Sunday food caries the curse of daylight drowsiness and if you nod, time passes at an uneven pace. It interrupts your night sleep, leaves you exhausted and unprepared for the work week.
Sunday doldrums sneak up on you after a busy Saturday and festive evening. The news summarizes the disasters of the past week, the daunting intent of the week to come, the futility of impossible hopes, the relentlessness of Time.
Sunday’s children “full of grace” or “ blithe and good” assert their dominance over lesser creatures like ourselves. They gird us into resistance. They undercut the peace.
In the drowsy atmosphere of Sunday afternoons, I sleep too profoundly—or too shallowly. I dream too deeply. I awake befuddled.
I’m happy when the onset of the new week unleashes it’s dominance.

When I was a child, my family would often go for “a drive” on Sunday, up the mountain for fresh air and Nature. I had no siblings to cavort with, no friends willing to be confined in a car on an aimless journey, with geeky grown-ups controlling the radio station. Sometimes we’d drive to a small airport to watch planes take off. This was my father’s idea of excitement, not mine. It wasn’t that I didn’t dream of embarking on an adventure far from my small town and modest life like an airplane ascending into the unknown, but this was a dream too monumental for a stifling Sunday, and it was too frustrating to watch others test their wings.
I do not like Sundays.

The Dancing Bookkeeper


She taps her feet in harmonious rhythms as she taps the keys. Numbers swirl about her. She’s happy to produce figurative symbols in neat columns and rhythmic intervals.They are so much more manageable than the matters they stand for. The dancing bookkeeper remains oblivious to what her numbers represent—it’s music that swirls about her, and digital scratchings that appear on the screen before her like runic invocations.
She prefers illusion to reality but knows how important it is to keep count. Numbers behave and can be changed to suit circumstance—something she knows nothing about but sustains in memory for the potential of last refuge. She is given only digits to place in existing columns and the task of tallying them. Lately numbers have surged. She’s not intimidated by the growing numbers; she’s fascinated. She has only to expand the width of column and elaborate her tapping, both finger and foot.
She conducts a grand symphony of percussion.

Below her, in a ground-floor apartment, a young man moves to her rhythm—when he’s not jacked into his own network of data. He dresses, undresses, showers and performs personal activities to the cadence of her tapping, unaware of this synchronicity. She too is unaware of the percussive nature of their connection.
Occasionally each of them make their way into an unrhythmic outside world. For a long time, they do this separately as even the most synonymous tempo is not always precisely coordinated.
One day the dancing bookkeeper returns home just as the young man is leaving. As their paths cross, they recognize accord. By some mysterious internal mechanism that neither can explain, they are drawn into each other’s context. The result is new improvisation, periodic adaptation and adjustment.
The dancing bookkeeper circles the young man, she leaps and flexes.
He is transfixed.