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Saturday, February 19, 2005
Volunteer Dog, Etc.
The longer I live here, the more I believe that there is no limit to the craziness possible to see here on 38th Street.
Yesterday began in a not-at-all crazy way. Benny was here all afternoon. We had a wonderful time. We made peanut butter chocolate bars. Then we played video games. Then we drew for a long time. I love to draw with Benny. He approaches it with all the intensity he brings to everything else. Now and then he jumps up, grabs his paper, and dashes all over the house making little noises...clearly he has taken his drawn things into an imaginary activity only visible to himself. Yesterday he drew vultures and gnorcs from the video game.
Since it was a bright, sunny day, we made many, many rainbows with my crystal paperweight. Lucky I did not succeed in giving this away. It is engraved to note my 39 years of teaching at Clintondale. On retiring I determined to accept no junk like clocks, etc. However a number of items came my way. I firmly gave them all away. Funny thing. Those to whom I gave them, managed to smuggle most of it back into my possession. When I unpacked boxes here, after the move, there was the megaton crystal vase from Tiffany's, the crystal bowl fron Lenox, and the crystal paperweight. The crystal bowl and vase are fish bowls and the paperweight is Benny's rainbow maker.
While making rainbows in the office upstairs, I noticed an old thermometer left on the windowsill. Aha! Benny and I began a temperature pilgrimage all over the house. Up in the office, the temp was 80. Downstairs in the unheated laundry, it was 60. In the kitchen, it was 72. Out on the front porch, Benny by now was madly into measuring temperature. Holding the thermometer, "It's going DOWN, Ahno! Still going DOWN," leaping and shrieking for joy. Soon he was rushing from place to place making the red mercury go up and down and calling the score back to me resting on the sofa. After a while he calmed down enough that we could draw thermometers and make each other guess where the thermometer was, based on it's temp reading.
Finally it was time for Benny to go home. He had been wrestled into his shoes and coat and was actually in the door way when the first crazy thing happened. Lydia, carrying the baby's bag of stuff, and also carrying the baby, was in the doorway behind Benny and she seemed to be fighting something. She yelled, "Look at this DOG!" I crowded in to see and sure enough, a dog was trying to get into my house. I mean it was madly struggling to get in past Benny and Lydia. Lydia managed to yank Benny back indoors behind her and, holding the baby high, tried to force the dog out of the doorway using her legs and feet. I pulled the door open a bit more so that I could get out and help her. The dog took this as a gesture of welcome and forcibly mashed it's nose and neck in past my legs. Lydia yelled at me, "STOP! Don't let it in." There we all were squashed into my front doorway; Lydia and the baby, the dog, me, and Benny trying furiously to get back out where he could see what was going on. It was a squirming, yelling mangle of flesh there for a while until Lydia succeeded in getting herself and baby and dog all the way out the door and closed the door behind her. The dog gave the dog equivalent of a shrug and an, "Oh, well," and ran on up the street. Whew! Lydia has been taking karate and said, "I didn't want to hurt an animal, but that dog was about a second away from getting a roundhouse kick out into the middle of the street." In no way did the dog appear to be pathetic. It was chubby, had a shiny coat, wore a collar with a bunch of tags. I have never before seen or heard of a dog that tried to force a strange family into adopting it. Crazy.
The second crazy thing happened after dark. I am developing an ear for 38th Street noise. Since the residents of the yellow brick apartments make a lot of noise at all hours of the day/night, I am reaching a fairly accurate filter for what is a really bad thing going on, and what is just noise. Yesterday evening I heard some really special screaming and yelling. Going to peek through the blinds, I saw something frequent on TV, but never before personally seen by me. Two men beat up a third man. They just hammered the daylights out of this fellow. After a while the victim was on the ground. Then the assailants jumped on him repeatedly and kicked him in the head and chest. Eventually the fighters stopped. To my surprise, the victim managed to scoop himself off the sidewalk and shuffle away. Why didn't I call the police? Have I become a person completely without compassion? Well, having seen those monsters publicly shooting one another, selling drugs, having various forms of sex, assaulting the police, spitting at me as I tried to walk to the store and buy milk, etc., etc., etc...I do not believe that I should ever in any way get into their game. One neighbor actually warned me, "Don't you ever call the police about them. If they ever do something so bad the police need to come, I'll do the calling. If they ever learned that you had told on them, you might not live much longer." So I just let them half kill a guy. Probably one of their own fellowship anyway. The fight began on one of those porches. Crazy. You know, when you see violence on TV it just seems like part of an entertainment. I never feel that I'm looking at something a real human being would do to another person. That is probably true in most of the world. On 38th Street, it's just another crazy thing waiting to really happen.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Garbage Revisited
Yesterday just before the garbage and recycle trucks showed up, wearing plastic gloves up to their elbows, two women came out of their yellow brick apartments. First they wrangled all but three of the tubs out to the curb. Those three tubs were the blue ones overflowing with regular trash...but only supposed to hold recycleables. The women took all the dreck out of the three tubs, one handful at a time, and sorted it into the tubs at the curb. Then they swept the entire area and picked up stray bits of trash.
Judging by the fact that they wore plastic gloves and used new brooms, I am guessing that management paid them to clean up their own mess. Better that, I suppose, than leaving the mess where it was.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Garbage Day
The trucks for both trash and recycle will be here any minute and the mess across the street is as it was. This in spite of the fact that yesterday P.M. a man from some management company the name of which I couldn't accurately read across the street showed up and read the riot act to apartment residents loafing around out front. I'm interested to see if the recycle truck will actually take all that stuff. Surely they won't sort it out. Failing that, the only choice would be to leave it all where it is.
Is the garbage going to go? I want to know.
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
The Better The Weather...
Happily, the weatherman is wrong. We were supposed to get more rain. Not happening. Bright sun and the temp outside is 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
The effect on the yellow apartment dwellers is comical. They must have decided to spruce up their frontage. Everyone has some kind of cleaning related implement or rag. Each of the women has her hair tied up in a towel. What that's for, I don't know, maybe the idea was to keep dust from spoiling their "do". No cleaning is taking place, though; the only dust is whatever just naturally floats in the air. The ground is covered with litter; junk lies everywhere. Whole lotta bustle and hustle, laughing and snapping wet rags and popping one's fellow inmate over the butt with a broom. Several buckets of water stand ready for some forgotten purpose.
I was watching this show from a ringside position on my porch when a neighbor came out onto his next door porch and sat waiting for a friend to pick him up. We watched together in silence for a few minutes. Finally the neighbor turned and looked at me. I didn't say anything; he didn't say anything. He just shook his head. We watched again silently. Then his ride came. Standing to go, he turned to me once more and growled out the side of his mouth, "The better the weather, the worse they is."
Monday, February 14, 2005
Scenery
Perhaps somewhere in the world someone has a more wretched, dreary, disgraceful view from their living room sofa, but I doubt it.
Looking out the window here is what I see... directly across the street, an old man has parked his astonishingly decrepit pick-up truck. The abandoned red brick house beyond him has all kinds of dreck sitting on porch and lawn. The old man is toiling arthritically about picking up this and that and adding some of what he finds to the already towering, tottering pile of junk on the back of the truck. Once in a while he performs a sorting maneuver by which I mean he pulls things off the truck and throws them into the gutter. He has smashed a number of glass items there. To the smashed glass he added several strips of metal and some empty cans. Sure is going to be a dangerous place to park a car when he gets finished. Hard on the tires. This old man is one of the dreary items on the landscape.
Moving along, I come to the yellow apartments. beside them stands a double row of trash receptacles. The blue ones are strictly for recyclables. It is completely totally forbidden to put plastic bags, food waste, dirty diapers, etc into the recycle tubs. Oh well. The first three containers over there are blue ones and they are stuffed to overflowing with no-no's. The lids won't close and trash is all over the ground. Garbage pickup is four days away. Beyond those three overstuffed containers stand thirteen empty containers.
These trash holders are probably 10 feet from the front door of the first yellow apartment building. Standing in that always open doorway is a fat drunk. He is throwing up. What comes out is red. Must be wine. Once in a while he leans over enough to get the throw-up away from his clothes and onto the sidewalk. Sometimes he just stays up straight and lets the vomit stream down his front. Fortunately rain is coming down in buckets so if he stays there long enough, Mother Nature may kind of hose him off.
Moving along the front of that building, we come to the corner where wires from the electric pole run over to the meter box. Someone tied together the strings of a pair of sneakers and tossed them over this electric line. That bit of urban whimsy has been here at least as long as I have. Since the electric line comes across from my side of the street, those shoes have hung over one lane of traffic all last fall and winter.
Now we come to the front of the second yellow brick apartment building. Spread around on the sidewalk are several old, rotten sofas plus some other housekeeping items. No one has called for special garbage pickup so those things have sat there for quite a while. They're already finding a purpose. Last evening a group of loungers sat there watching as a man pulled along curbside in a falling apart car, got out, took a bald tire out of the other side of the front seat...and with a length of frayed rope tied the tire to the front of his car, running the rope through holes in the hood and the grill. Since he only tied the tire at the top, the bottom of it thumped around as he drove away. Those sofasitters, comfortable on the sidewalk, were loudly amused.
OK, so that's the view from my front window today. As I sat with my breakfast coffee, here came little groups of school children through the rain, past all the trash, past smashed glass and metal, right by the vomitting wino, the old junk stealer, and all the dingbat furniture.
Across the street from all that, at the foot of the porch steps I can see my containers of blue and white pansies. They look very nice, but are a small counterbalance to everything else.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Progress
This A.M. was so warm and sunny that I had breakfast coffee on the porch with no jacket. Very cheery.
Another nice thing...there's a woman at church who has battled brain cancer for over a year. Last fall I went along as Lydia took her to a chemo appointment, and at that time she really did not look like a person who was going to be around come next summer. This morning I noticed that her hair is growing back. She was able to walk without help and was bright and chirpy. This week she had another MRI and there is no evidence of any cancer whatsoever.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
The Little Pig Was Up Early....
You remember that story about the little pig who could not get to the fair before the big bad wolf arrived? Right then. Imagine a little old lady....me....toiling her way toward the ghetto grocery at 6:45 A.M. today, dragging along the collapseable shopping cart, hoping to arrive and return before the people in the yellow apartments are up and out.
The journey outward bound seemed a bit cold for this time of year in this place. I actually had to wear a jacket and I stopped to blow my nose several times. The nice part was that no one but me was out and about. I had all streets to myself...no running across the intersection where toys and a photo on the street light identify the last person to get smashed to death at that spot. I just strolled along and enjoyed the trip. Yes, I did have to pause to engage an elderly drunk in conversation. He insisted and I was glad to oblige. I have no idea what he was trying to tell me because his down-south accent was so thick it could not have been cut with a knife. He seemed to be satisfied that I listened and made sympathetic noises.
Later at the store I had the place to myself and the employees. The checkout was "manned" by their triplefast clerk and a huge, cheerful and funny college boy attending Old Dominion University up the road a few blocks. We all had a bunch of laughs and jokes and the college boy packed my groceries into the collapseable cart far more sensibly than any previous baggers have done. It's hard to pack one of these carts, and if done wrong, the soup cans are halfway to the ground before I reach the SoapSuds Car Wash.
Going home I only met a young man who carried a huge Santa's sack of dirty clothing and in his other hand was a gallon-sized jug of Cheer detergent. He gave me a big, gleaming white smile and a "God Bless". Also, on the way home, the air was warmer.
Whew! I made it all the way home before 8:00 A.M. Just as I reached my sidewalk, the school bus next door fired up. I waited to see who was driving today. It was sonny-boy. He said that he was going to drive neighborhood basketball teams to their games. These good people work all week at their jobs and on evenings and weekends coach basketball, football, and boxing for local youth. They bought a used school bus in order to more conveniently haul the kids to games/events. Nice.
So I was up early and now am home again. Saturday. It's all good so far.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Spring Weather
Sunshine and warm temperatures. Across the street on Wednesday the police made three visits between 5:00 P.M. and midnight. At one point from my upstairs office window I counted 38 young men fighting like lunatics. A young girl wore a bikini top and short shorts and was bumping and grinding her way through the throng of fighters. It was completely crazy.
I, on the other hand, am extremely sleepy. If I sit down for a few minutes, I fall asleep in the chair. Two different ways in which spring fever may reveal itself.
Tuesday, February 8, 2005
Those Least Able
How God avoids discouragement, is beyond me. Consider all the beautiful, and talented children God makes each day, sets them on their way through life with more than sufficient advantages. By the time they're grown up, how many of those special editions of the human race are of a mind to do God's work in the world? Almost none. Most gladly take credit for their superiority to others, spend their lives patting themselves on the back, and chiefly contribute to their own well being. God's work is so seldom done by the A Team. It is done, however. Those least able are the willing ones. Whoever places him/herself on the path to God's goals finds him/herself skilled to do the necessary work. Weak and sick people find themselves strong enough. Those born without gifts discover that they can sing, draw, speak, entertain. The too-shy see themselves talking to others in need of well-intended human contact. The poor begin to give in spite of their lack of resources and discover that they have more than enough. The unattractive begin to smile where a smile will do some good and those who see the smiles think, "What a beautiful face." Often I remember the story of Jesus' disciples on their walk to Emmaus after the resurrection. The important words in the story are these, "While they were in the way, He met them." Exactly. God meets the willing as they place themselves on the way to do His work...and He makes them able. So there is never an excuse to avoid doing what one's heart indicates should be attempted. Once a person starts, is "in the way", God provides all the necessary ability. As I'm older and more delapidated, I forget this and allow myself shirk. So here I remind myself..."Walk into something impossible."
Good News
Good news; After toiling through paperwork since last night at about 6:00, I finally found all the items the department of motor vehicles claims to need in order to issue me a new driver's license and auto license plate + registration. Scene fraught with gloom, horror, tension, loudly uttered terms of oppobrium, etc throughout the search period. Now, I am under no illusions. Whether or not I have all the "necessary" documents, no doubt I will find that I need MORE of something or other. However, I have at least gone over the first hurdle and am on my way toward licensure in the State of Virginia.
More good news; the sun is shining and outside the temps are in mid 60's. This is a beautiful day.
More good news; it's Shrove Tuesday and tonight is the church Pancake Dinner and Pancake Race. Since all church dinners are prepared by a church member who could be chef at a gourmet restaurant, this means that although the menu only features pancakes, they will be really good. I have no clue about the Pancake Race, but it sounds goofy...and that's a good thing.
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