With room

"Where there's no moth," he said, "there's no flame."

Some firemen differed.

Other things stayed the same.

Yrs in the ranks

"Afterwards, we'll go dancing," he said, announcing his office hours.

He would not give a Mickey Mouse final (i.e. a final for which you had to memorize facts).

He said, "The book is in the library, it just might not be on the shelf." He told us about people who hide books. "It's a graduate student trick," he said, "to make your classmates look bad in front of the professor."

"It's no way to live," he said.

He said the stuff on stage was not life, but rather a representation of life, and that the people who identify – get sent to the subway when they die.

Heard tell

A blustery man on the rainy bus is telling us how guilty he feels for not being here on September 11th.

"And I'm not even from these parts," he says.

Stakeholder

The perpetual spring is exhausting. Thaw cannot be constant; it is only satisfying if it follows a proper cold. My heart today is with the bears tossing in their caves. They are afraid to miss the flowers and berries come out in full array. I am wound up and up! I am being strung along! I am spring-broken! 

Vignette for a Sunday

Inside St. Rose of Lima, bread and wine turn into body and blood. Meanwhile, down the block, in the garden on the corner, an avocado pit, once firm and impervious, falls apart at the slightest touch. It has mellowed in the heat of the bin; it comes out richer. The collection in the garden gives lie to the notion that these are austere times. Believers come bearing the remnants of their meals – carrot peels, egg shells, apple cores, potato skins, coffee grounds, and much much more. Combined with leaves and sawdust, this will become the blackest of golds. We shovel in concert, turning the bins in which the scraps are gossiping. The air smells jubilant. “Rejoice! Rejoice!” toll the bells at St. Rose of Lima. “Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.”


[This vignette originally appeared on Ditmas Park Blog in February.]

On time

"'On time' means 'on time,'" said one security guard to another. "But for some of these people, 'on time' means 'five minutes early.' They make me look bad," he said.

This was in the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Week in review

In the seabound Q, a man makes the sound of a cricket. “Cricket in the train,” he booms. 

A gleeful boy plucks feathers from his unprotesting mother's down jacket. 

“If it's not your time, it's just not your time,” praises a vigorous woman wheeling an old man along Ocean Parkway.