On Thursday afternoon, Heidi—our Miniature Dachshund—and I went to play fetch in the dog park. Everything was fine for the first 10 minutes or so, and then Rex, a bounding Poodle five times the size of Heidi, came along. The dog was well behaved, playing fetch over on his side of the park, but all the same, it seemed to demoralize Heidi, who uncharacteristically decided to stop playing.
I think I know how she must have felt. Alone and focused on your own task, doing something you love, and then somebody else comes along and in vivid contrast, begins to do it much better.
And so Heidi and I went for a stroll though the streets instead.
A man, in his room on the top floor of a Queen East residential home, twirls a cigarette and then blows smoke out of the three-inch crack of the suicide proof window. In his undershirt, he stares down at the street below.
I tied Heidi up outside of Bonjour Brioche to pick up a quiche, and while I was doing this a woman with a stroller that looked like a kite on wheels–only much, much larger– gave me a look. She shook her head and let an exaggeration of concern wash over her face, “it’s too cold to tie her up outside!” she pronounced.
I smiled and told her she would be fine, and then helped the woman through the door with her stroller, where we immediately bumped into two other women, also with similarly sized baby conductors. Wary, protective and proud, so consumed by their own parenting roles that they couldn’t help but project it out into the world around them, they looked at us with something less than generosity.
At the Dark Horse café, a drifting, sweet-faced barista makes a café au lait while carrying on a conversation with a girl sitting at the counter. Lauryn Hill’s song I Used To Love Him is playing and the music is conveying the young man back to a time and place.
“ I love this song,” he says to the girl working on her laptop, “it reminds me just chilling-out with my sister.” He smiled as he said this, a warmth now infusing his eyes.
I asked him where his sister was now. “As of tomorrow, either Florida or Georgia,” he said. “Because of a man,” he added, with just a little bit of an edge, the warmth in his eyes disappearing.