THE SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK NOOS

He seized it. It was sitting on the bench, still crisply folded and having the appearance of being just unwrapped. It was just sitting on the bench. In the park. Red. Checked. What Doris Day would have called ‘gingham’ but what my kind would lump under the broad term ‘flanno’. A red flannelette shirt.

I did not look at him directly.

He seized it. He eyed it, sized it up, looked around to make sure the squirrels weren’t taking notes and leapt like a vulture on carrion. Strike. Iron. Hot. He was in the park. A new shirt was in the park. Un-chaperoned. And he had found it. Holding it up by the shoulders, he confirmed the size and it was go, go, go! His flamboyance of movement as he sashayed it on was irritating the corner of my eye.

But. I did not look. Not directly.

Everyone knows that looking at the homeless is like looking at the sun. To look too long is to risk blindness. Only in this case it gets you right in the cornea with blinding guilt. So. I didn’t look directly at this homeless guy. I kept reading my book. I did not make eye contact. He danced in the periphery.

He buttoned the shirt, raised his hands to the sky and trees and in a rather expansive gesture said, “Thank you, Mr Park!”

I smiled at this. I almost had to turn and see if there was a glow on the horizon or the presence of a higher being (since I look for those sorts of signs). But I kept reading my book. Eye corner at code yellow. Read the rest of this entry »

If I were prone to spurts of ‘life is like a box of chocolate’ statements, my first impression of Gotham metropolis might go a little sumthin like this.

New York is like wet paint. You want to reach out and touch the cool, fresh stickiness, but once it’s on your fingers you don’t know what to do with it. Wipe it on your jeans? Of course, the response of a proper New Yorker would probably be to brazenly wipe it on someone else’s jeans, but I am not familiar with the proper way of things yet. I am but a grasshopper to New York’s Shaolin Master and there are many crumbling steps to my eventual enlightenment.

Of course, my mind-blowing wet paint statement makes the assumption that your brain is in some way wired up like mine. That the ‘touch, throw, jump’ gene resides in your genetic makeup. By way of explanation, this gene causes you to act in certain pre-defined ways.

1. If it’s wet, you will touch it.

2. If there is a large body of water in front of you, you will throw it. (’IT’ can be whatever you’re holding at the time, which is why I always tie my camera to myself. It stops my insurance premiums skyrocketing)

3. If it’s high above the ground …well, you don’t actually jump, but the thought about how great it would be to jump and glide right outta here on the next favorable updraft will pop into your head. Plenty of high spots in NY too.

But I’ve drifted off.

We were talking about the wet paint sport of baseball. Yes, we were. You see, the other thing people might mention in conversations about wet paint is that old saying. You know, about how some things in life are so gosh-darn riveting that they are akin to watching paint dry. With that statement in mind, let me tell you this—I went and watched my first game of American baseball. Read the rest of this entry »