9.10.4
hurricane frances subway closures
The remnants of Hurricane Frances tore through town early yesterday morning like a shower of hard pebbles against my bedroom window. I did that trick with earplugs I've learned to do in New York - roll over, stuff ears, roll back - and then a few hours later, hair still wet from the shower, I staggered out on the street to work. The rest of my morning would be best described wordless. You could film it like a movie. Here's a scene of frenetic activity - say, me running back and forth between two stopped trains on the same platform, a 1/9 and a 2/3. Cue the Benny Hill theme. Flashback to me silently walking an older Chinese woman from the 7th Avenue stop (after waiting a half hour with no trains) to Grand Army Plaza. Or a train full of commuters sitting in a stopped car on Chambers Street, water flooding the platform, every few seconds someone turns a page in their book or a drop of water falls from the ceiling.But for each New York annoyance there's something like the smell of my neighborhood when I came out of the subway tonight: rain, curry, gasoline, lingering incense from the street vendor who had just packed up his table for the evening...
Dreamt at some point in the past week that I was holding a plump baby, maybe six months old. I felt its weight in my arms and its unbelievably smooth, plump skin, like a silk cushion wrapped around a hot stone. The dream was so vivid that even its fading memory is clearer than my memories of holding actual babies, and still seems realer than everything I've described to you in the paragraphs above.
