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Nov. 6, 2024, Politics on the Micro Level:

Yesterday, I got up at 4 a.m. to work as part of Vet the Vote, an effort to recruit military veterans to help work the polls.

I was assigned to an old American Legion on Avenue X, a neighborhood that, when the hall was built in the 40s, was primarily Italian. Now it’s mostly populated by folks who came to Brooklyn from various corners of the old Soviet empire. Our interpreters were Russian.

The hall was not ideal for voting. It was a longish room, with a bar and poker table at the far end and a huge, unmovable pool table toward the front. There were five portable tables lined up on the left-hand wall.

The first was mostly covered with random stuff like extra “privacy sleeves” to cover the ballots, information leaflets, poll-worker instructions, and minor detritus that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. The second, third, and fourth tables were assigned, one district each, to the voter check-in clerks. The fifth belonged to the coordinator, and his supplies.

The middle of the room was filled with what, at first, looked like entirely too many privacy booths, where voters would mark their paper ballots. Within reach of these was a file of chairs lining the right-hand wall for tired voters and poll workers.

Then there was our section—the ballot scanners. We and our three machines were sandwiched between that behemoth of an oak-and-slate pool table and stuff you might expect to line an end wall in an American Legion, including a beer-and-soda vending machine and a big out-of-commission motorcycle. Our scanners were there because it was close to the electrical outlets—and because it was the only space left for them.

The ballot scanners are supposed to be private; they are supposed to have several feet of clearance. Ours—because it literally would’ve taken a crane to move the pool table, and that wasn’t part of our equipment—rated a three- to four-foot aisle.

Just getting to us from the privacy booths was a challenge. From the right, voters had to thread between the chairs and the special Ballot Marking Machine designed to help those with various physical handicaps (It stopped working before noon). From the left, they had to push through three lines of voters waiting for ballots from the tables, and edge past the front wheel of the motorcycle.

Two observers from the Election Commission were disturbed by our positions next to our scanners. They recommended that we stand on the other side of the pool table to avoid observing the actual scanning. It was a solid suggestion.

In theory.

But in practice, most of the more than 1000 citizens who turned out were new voters. Many of them had registered to vote specifically for this election—for Trump.

In theory, I shouldn’t have known they were voting for Trump. But the NYC ballot is not easy for newcomers to understand without reading the fine print. Especially when English is your second language, and you have to figure out what “vote for one” means when you see the names of both presidential candidates twice on the “president” line, because here Trump is listed with the Republican Party and the Conservative Party, while Harris is with the Democrats and The Working Families Party.

Many, many of our voters marked both options for their candidate. Which made the scanner spit their ballots out, declaring that the voter had “marked more than one oval for a candidate.”

It fell to us scanner personnel to figure out what the problem was—which meant examining the ballot, a process that should in theory take one person of both parties. In practice it meant a Democrat who manned the scanner, perhaps wedged between a wheelchair-bound voter next to the defunct motorcycle on one side of her aisle, and a voter with a walker on the other, facing a line of waiting would-be voters, had no immediate access to a Republican scanner-manner.

When a ballot problem couldn’t be remedied, we had to explain the issue, put the ballots back into a “privacy sleeve,” and send the poor voter back to their district’s table, where they’d turn in their unusable ballots for clean ones. Which they would carry back to the privacy booths to re-mark. So it turned out that we did need all those booths.

We had a lot of scrapped ballots, which had to be put into specific receptacles and logged in as deactivated.

As I was about to leave for my lunch break, a wiry grey-haired woman broke from the crowd, waving an Affidavit Ballot, a non-scanning ballot that clerks provide voters who can’t be found in the registration records. “What do I do with this?” she demanded.  

“You mark your vote,” I said, “then put it in its envelope.”

“So who do I vote for?”

“I can’t tell you that–you have to choose your candidates.”

She frowned. “I gotta fill all these blanks on this envelope? It says I gotta put my birth date. Nuh-uh! My birthdate is my own damned business—it’s personal! I don’t have to do it.”

Just then, one of the Election Commission observers I’d met earlier passed by. I pulled him over. “This gentleman can tell you anything you want to know about it,” I told the woman brightly. I gave them a smile and left for lunch, stifling a grin. Let him deal with this secrecy issue…

When I returned a half-hour later, both of them were gone.

I realized, by the time I left Avenue X at 10 pm, that Trump would probably win. This voter turnout, from the new registrations to the polls, was very well-organized. The Democrats, in contrast, seemed far less engaged on this important micro level.

Several women whose ballot errors I helped remediate—lovely, sincere individuals—assumed because I was so supportive of their new voting efforts that I was Trump-friendly. “We must pray this turns out right, or we lose our country,” one told me. Another said, “If he wins, I will put these ‘I voted’ stickers all over myself and dance.” Yet another said, “Good luck to us! This is SO important for us all!”

The men were more restrained. Many seemed morose; some angry. Most appeared serious, determined, and proud of their first big foray into democracy.

This morning, the media are jumping on the Democratic party for not coming out more strongly. I agree with much of this. But I also realized by the end of the long night that whatever Democrats did, they were spitting into a whirlwind of misinformation, from Trump and his media and surrogates, but also from the modern—or perhaps ancient—predilection of our flawed human minds to grasp for simple solutions to complicated problems. It is easier to conjure enemies for us to battle, it seems, than to bring us together with positivity.

Perhaps I’m just depressed this morning, but I’m not sure anything can effectively counter forces like that.

September 29, 2024:

There was a frenzy of shrieking outside the dining room. Male cardinals are noisy, especially young male cardinals. This one was not fully red, and he wanted, needed, demanded the seed in my feeder.

But the dove, sleek, regal, just…sat. Not foraging; simply guarding its kingdom from this Little Twit, with his spiked pinkish feathers and punk swagger.

This dove radiated power.

Another dove, who had been feeding before it, departed, wings whistling, when it arrived. Yet another—pale-grey-brownish, puffy, most likely young, certainly foolish—tried to squeeze in beside it, but flapped off in disarray after an adept peck to his head.

It seems that “peaceful” reputation might be exaggerated.

So…the teenaged cardinal nattered in vain as the big dove sat. When I walked to the window, the dove placidly turned a bright, blue-lined black eye on me.

The young cardinal squawkled off.

My bird feeder is suction-cupped to our second-floor apartment’s dining room window. Technically, co-op rules say we’re not supposed to have one. I first flouted those rules a few years ago, when I hung a cylindrical plastic seed tube from the bottom of the fire escape above our small kitchen balcony. It seemed a fine place to put it. Unobtrusive from the outside, easy to see from the inside when I puttered over the stove. Above ground level, away from urban fauna. What could possibly go wrong?

The first month, it brought flocks of birds—cheeky sparrows, chickadees, red-headed house finches.

Then the squirrels discovered it.

It was a “squirrel-proof feeder.” Right. Those furry little monsters are smart. And persistent. Perhaps you’ve seen this guy’s backyard squirrel obstacle course?

I spent a week climbing out my kitchen window to readjust and refill the feeder. Then, one day, I found the cylinder on the balcony floor, empty, next to a tidy pile of raccoon poop.

I sighed. I had met my match. I gave the feeder away, and gave up kitchen birdwatching.

For years, I missed the birds. When I was leveled by Covid in March of 2020, I listened to the bird population, burgeoning in our new car-less world, and I longed for them. Perhaps the sight of those little winged miracles could heal me—nothing else could, back then. But I was too weak to battle squirrels and raccoons; I couldn’t even climb out the kitchen window. Forgetaboudit, I told myself–which wasn’t hard, what with the brain fog.

Last fall, I remembered. And I decided to try again. This time, I would hang a feeder on a truly squirrel-proof window.

We had suction cupped one several years ago to the window of my mother-in-law’s third-floor assisted-living apartment in Maine. She loved it–except for the doves; they were too big and ate too much, she insisted. She struggled up from her armchair to rap the window until they left.

Eventually, at 102 years old, she grew too frail leave the armchair easily. We bought her a laser cat-chaser, and she shooed them off at a distance with the beam. I felt guilty about the laser. Poor doves. But Ev warmed to the sport.

Ultimately, when Hospice replaced her armchair with a bed, the doves returned. I quietly put the chaser away and kept the seeds topped off.

I digress. The point is, I found that suction cup feeders worked. So last fall, I bought one and conned my long-suffering husband into hanging it on the top pane of that dining room window.

Our windows are old, the hardware cranky. Poor Paul. It was not an easy job. Especially without a balcony to install it from outside. But no balcony did mean no squirrels or raccoons.

The seed sat undiscovered all fall and winter. Then, this summer, it had its first customer—a dove. I walked up to the window, and the bird eyed me brightly, fearlessly.

I told Paul, “Your mom’s here.”

Hey, who knows what comes after this life? If there’s a Purgatory for minor infractions—like maybe chasing doves from your feeder with cat lasers—you just might come back for a lesson in empathy, right?

I’ve come to agree with Ev, though: Doves eat a lot.

About a week after I met the dove, I walked into the dining room to see a brilliantly red, orange-beaked cardinal pecking away at the sorely dwindled seed. He saw me and flapped off, complaining…well, like a male cardinal.

Later, a female cardinal—lovely muted grays and pinks, bright orange beak—landed daintily on the feeder and sorted through the seed remains.

The next day, we refilled the feeder. Or Paul did, climbing on a step-stool, hanging an arm over the top of the horrible window, dumping seed from a measuring cup into the platform.

To his credit, he didn’t rush off to buy a cat-chaser.

Now we have a variety of cardinals. A few adults. Two adolescent birds, one male—the Little Twit—and one female. Twit has progressed from pink to red, and the feathers above his new black mask look disheveled, like the young dove’s after his royal elder pecked his head. Maybe somebody pecks at him, too; I would be tempted, if I had a beak. Especially after that day when he found the feeder empty, and sat shrieking on the window sill for several minutes, glaring at me through the pane.

The adolescent female’s color remains a slightly paler version of her mother’s, but her colorless baby beak has turned bright orange.

And there are new, very young birds. Just yesterday, a mature female visited the feeder. Then two little cardinals, too young to classify, flapped and landed, one at a time, in her place while she watched from a nearby wire.

All these cardinals still battle for the seed—respectfully—with the doves. The young dove is looking adult, although he still has a featherless dent on the top of his head.

I have yet to see any smaller birds at the feeder. Filling the thing has become a twice-a-week task. Poor Paul.

I just sent him a link to a website, and labeled it “My birthday present???” It leads to an Etsy page advertising big wooden bird feeders that can be installed in a window, and filled from inside the room…

April 27, 2024:

Names and Games

On Monday afternoon, in a big, nondescript room on the fourth floor of the Brooklyn Board of Elections, six of us crowded around a table. We stared at the computer monitor in the center, operated by a BOE employee.

“There’s the curve on the first letter,” I said. “Can we see the petition again?”

The computer guy tipped a fat bundle of green petitions our way, and we three members of Team New Kings Democrats examined the signature on the first line. “It looks the same,” said the teammate on my left. The teammate on my right pointed his pen at the signature on the official voting record on the monitor. “The top’s cut off here, but you can see that his letter rises to a point, too…”

The man on the other side of the table, representing Team Brooklyn Democratic Party, shook his head. “Not a match.”

The Board’s assigned Referee, who sat behind the computer guy, looked from the green petition to the monitor. “I agree.” As Referee, her word was law, unless we appealed the decision to a judge at some later time. The teammate to my left made a note on her iPad. The teammate on my right sighed, then read the second voter ID number on his laptop. The computer guy clicked the second official signature onto the screen.

A game?

Depends which side you ask.

It’s a long story, confusing even to us at that table. Or the groups at the other tables scattered around the room.

 A couple months ago, our friend Gina recruited Paul and me and two other neighbors to petition to join the Kings County Democratic County Committee. It’s the lowest rung of the political ladder of the Brooklyn Democratic party. She gave me a clutch of empty petitions. “You’ll only need a total of fifty signatures for all four of you, and you’ll be County Committee members. Get five more just in case any turn out to be invalid.”

County Committee members, all unpaid volunteers, “rep their block”—we’d represent a neighborhood two streets wide and five blocks long in Brooklyn Assembly District 42. We’d go to a few meetings, vote on a few things. The County Committee would comprise a couple thousand of us; it’s not likely we’d become drunk with power.

Democracy, at the street level.

Gina’s a retired lawyer and lifelong Brooklynite, a member of New Kings Democrats (NKD). She’s a good person, a liberal activist, not easy to turn down. “You won’t have to actually run for the office,” she said. “Unless you’re opposed by County. We can discuss that later.”

“What? Why would anybody want my seat, if we do practically nothing and have no real power?”

“Well, the problem is…“ Gina named the Brooklyn Party Chairman.

The current Party Chair is a powerful woman; she’s a member of the NY State Assembly—New York’s House of Representatives. She’s Majority Whip, and belongs to, or leads, several important state committees. She’s also our Assembly District 42 State Representative.

At 52, she’s accomplished in her own right: a child of Haitian immigrants, she’s earned two Bachelors degrees, a couple Masters—former teacher, former engineer, former investment banker. Current law school graduate–which is appropriate, because she’s litigious. Which has everything to do with this story.

As I said, the committee we’re aspiring to can accommodate thousands of members—Brooklyn is populous and largely Democratic. But only half of the seats are ever filled. So you’d think the Party would welcome all Democrats to this supposedly-democratic Democratic process, right?

But New Kings Democrats and their allies have never really been invited to the Party, so to speak.

The group was new New in 2008, founded by idealistic Obama volunteers. Their manifesto states they’re “committed to bringing transparency, accountability, and inclusionary democracy to the Kings County Democratic Party.”

The Kings County Democratic Party didn’t welcome the group. In 2016, under an earlier Party Chairman, they were outright dismissive—so much so that they literally dismissed a key meeting prematurely when NKD members and other reform groups put up a list of transparency and anti-corruption measures for a vote of the Kings County Democratic County Committee. After some heated back-and-forth with no action, Party voices were raised; reformers countered with chants.

BOOM—Meeting adjourned. When it reconvened…those reforms? Fuggedaboutdit.

Now, the Party has answered the group’s latest attempt to democratize it by filing lawsuits against seven candidates the NKD endorsed for District Leaders in six Assembly Districts.

District Leaders are the next rung of the County Committee—it’s a big step into Democratic Party realpolitik. In fact, the Party Chair herself started her political career in 2010 as a District Leader. Which might explain why she’s suing to keep reform-minded candidates away from a position where they might attain power to advance their agenda.

The Party Chair and her party are doing this by challenging nearly every name on the ballots that NKD-endorsed District Leader candidates collected. There are official codes for signature no-nos: NE (Not enrolled as a Democrat), OD (out of district), PR (Printed, not signed), F (forgery)—and ad-hoc notes for “non-matching signatures”: my teammate working the spreadsheet just noted “sdm” (signature doesn’t match) with each decision by the Referee that an autograph didn’t fully match the one on the voter rolls. It was a gentler term than F for suspected forgery.

Whatever one called it, suspected Forgery was the main thrust of the Party’s objections.

Each green petition sheet has ten lines. Each line has a printed name, address, and signature. The petitioner is a Witness; they sign the sheet, swearing the signatures are real. Paul and I and our two co-candidates needed only 50 valid signatures. District Leaders need 500 each, and some collected twice that number.

It’s not easy to collect even 50 signatures. We slogged through a downpour, knocking on registered Democrats’ doors. We got turned away. A lot. We raided apartment buildings, begging every Democrat on our list. Signers scribbled; many signatures were illegible; all were squeezed into a sort of half-height-line, to make room for their printed names beneath.

I thought it wasn’t right for the Party Chair to sue to throw NKD-endorsed District Leader candidates off the ballots after they worked so hard to gather all their signatures. And so it was that I volunteered three hours at a table in a nondescript room on the fourth floor of the Brooklyn Board of Elections last Monday.

 It was educational. It was also tedious, an uphill battle. Team New Kings Democrats, Team Brooklyn Democratic Party, the computer guy, even the Referee—not one among us was a real handwriting analyst. Did all our signatures match the signatures made years ago when these folks signed the voting rolls? Did 80-year-old Mary Jones still sign exactly as she did at 20? Did Hector Sanchez sign differently in a half-inch space than he did on an official form? Will Arlo Brown write exactly the same with my clipboard on his knee as he did on that sheet at the polls 15 years ago?

It was an amateur judgement call at best.

 Again, again, again; table by table; line by line. Five days, a rotating raft of volunteers, several paid Election staff—all these unprecedented challenges. The expense to NKD and other members of the reform coalition; grassroots David lawyering up against Brooklyn Party Goliath. The Democratic Party blithely spending money raised from Democratic donors to insult, accuse, drain money and time from, and disenfranchise, other Democrats.

 Hmm…

Maybe it’s time to reform the Brooklyn Democratic Party.

November 11, 2023:

The Free Shuttle Bus

Last Sunday, I grabbed a plastic bag of ashes and dead roses and walked to my subway station, to find it closed.

The stuff in the bag was the remains of my Dia de los Muertos altar, a remembrance I arrange in our dining room every October: pictures, flowers, candy, and little Mexican totems set around a bowl of sand. The dead, being generous, welcome all to eat the candy, and to stick paper slips with names of lost loved ones in the sand.

I disassemble my altar sometime after November first: I box the pictures and other staples, then burn the name slips. I bag the dead flowers with the ashes, and take the subway to Coney Island—a 20-minute ride—where I send them off on the tidal waves, a fitting goodbye.

Sunday, however, a sign on the locked station door informed me that it and all nearby stations on the Q line—up to Prospect Park, down to Coney Island—were closed for track repair.

We could, it said, take a Free Shuttle Bus to all the stops by walking three blocks to a special bus stop on Ocean Avenue.

The Free Shuttle Bus is great, in theory. In reality, it’s straight out of Dante. It’s a slow bus ride that parallels the Q line: passengers hate the crowding, the traffic, and the agonizing pace. Bus drivers hate the unfamiliar routes, and the passengers, who just want to be on the train. Everybody hates the drivers, especially when they get lost—as often happens.

I considered biking the distance. But it was afternoon, the first day of the time change, so I’d ride back in the dark on a badly-maintained path and roads clogged with traffic. I didn’t want to die, so I gritted my teeth and set off to Ocean Avenue for the Free Shuttle Bus.

A sign at the special bus stop told me the Free Shuttle Bus would go to King’s Highway—halfway to Coney Island.

And…after that?

The bus came ten minutes later. It was full of passengers who, like me, would normally ride the Q subway. Every age, from every corner of the world, we rode in grumpy peace. The ride was glacial, but uneventful. Until we reached the King’s Highway subway station.

There, we disembarked, and I prayed that maybe the subway was actually still open from there to Coney Island in spite of the sign on our station. Alas, no. We were herded across the street by a guy in a neon-orange vest to stand by a closed bus.

After a few minutes, the guy in the neon-orange vest noticed that the bus had a driver inside. He knocked on the bus door and ordered the driver to take us to Coney Island.

“I’m going back to Prospect Park,” the driver said. “I been on all day. It’s my last trip.”

“You’re going to Coney Island.” The guy in the neon-orange vest waved us into the bus.

The driver lasered the guy with a toxic glare, but the guy stood unscathed behind his neon-orange armor. A helpful lady with a Russian accent told a Mexican family bound for Prospect Park that the bus was now going to Coney Island; they hustled themselves out. The driver jerked the door shut, locked himself in his plastic compartment, and we ground away from King’s Highway.

Ten minutes later, three befuddled passengers—a slight, elderly man and two pale middle-aged women—sidled down the bucking aisle to the front. The elderly man knocked on the door of the driver’s clear plastic compartment door. “Ve must get off,” he said, his accent heavy and desperate.

The driver stared ahead, jaw set, unspeaking. Driving.

The man rapped again. “Ve MUST get off HERE!” Nothing. He then added, “Vhere ARE ve????”

Nothing.

The elderly man rattled the clear plastic compartment door. The driver stared ahead, unspeaking. Driving.

The helpful lady with the Russian accent went to the plastic door and knocked. Nothing.

She spoke gently to the elderly man. “You are maybe on the wrong bus? This is a Free Shuttle Bus. Where do you want to go?”

The elderly man asked her, “Vhere are ve???”

“We are going where the Q train goes. This will stop in Sheepshead bay, then Brighton Beach, then Coney Island.”

The elderly man looked horrified. His two companions spoke with him in a mysterious, guttural language.

The helpful lady patted his hand. “You are I think on the wrong bus. We will stop soon.“ She pressed the stop signal. The sign up front flashed “Stop Requested.”

The driver, unspeaking, drove past the bus stop.

The elderly man wailed. The two pale women gasped. They muttered mysterious guttural words.

The driver stopped two blocks later, at a red light. He did not open the door. The elderly man pushed and pulled at the door handle. The helpful lady rapped on the plastic compartment door. The light changed; the driver stared ahead, unspeaking. He drove.

The helpful lady frowned. The elderly man, wild-eyed, shouted, “He is doing NOTHING! Ve are PRISONERS!” The women grew paler.

The helpful lady shook her head. “Pff. You must perhaps take a different bus at Coney Island.”

Someone pressed the stop signal; the sign once again flashed “Stop Requested.” The driver drove past the stop, unspeaking.

The man kicked the plastic compartment door. “You must let us out NOW!” The two women nodded vigorously.

The helpful lady looked up the number of the MTA help line. She tapped it into the elderly man’s phone and handed it back to him. “Tell them,” she said.

He shouted at the phone, “You must help us. The man keep us prisoner on this bus. Ve are TRAPPED here. Ve are KIDNAPPED!!” He said to the helpful lady, “Vat is this bus number?” She pointed to the number above his head, then spelled it out to him.

“He vill not stop,” the man repeated. “He vill not talk. He vill not tell us vhere we go. Only drive.” He nodded to the pale women. “Ve are three.”

He sighed, nodded again, hung up. “He say go to Coney Island, take other bus there.”

The helpful woman nodded. We drove in silence for twenty minutes, then landed, at last, in Coney Island. The driver jerked the door open, then locked himself back behind his clear plastic compartment door.

The elderly man shepherded his charges off. As he stepped out, he turned back to the driver. “You are NOT A GOOD MAN,” he told the driver. “You are…FUCKER!!”

One of the pale women cursed the driver in her mysterious guttural language. The second woman sneered and gave him the finger.

The driver sat in his plastic compartment, staring ahead, unspeaking. The rest of us filed out in silence. The helpful woman took the elderly man’s elbow and led him to a bus stop. The women followed them like pale ducklings.

I walked up the street to the beach with my plastic bag of dead roses and ashes. At the shoreline, I opened the bag and shook the contents into the surf.

I was buffeted by a flurry of wings, as a flock of seagulls dove on the rose heads. Most dropped them immediately in disdain; a few flew off, bearing the flowers like prizes.

One stood fast before me in the dying sunlight, a bruised yellow petal drooping from its mouth; it lasered me the same malice the driver had given the guy in the neon-orange vest at King’s Highway, what felt like hours ago.

The tide scooped up the remains of my altar, and I bid goodbye to my generous lost souls, and watched a magnificent red sun drop into the sea.

Then I turned and walked down to the street, to search for the Free Shuttle Bus that might take me back to Ocean Avenue.

October 16, 2023:

Overheard a couple days ago in Park Slope:

Dude, emerging from the PetSmart store, to his grinning terrier:

“You really shouldn’t pee in there, Charlie.”

January 1, 2023:

Yesterday, on New Years Eve morning, I picked up a Christmas package from France at my local post office.

My Brooklyn post office is a big, tattered facility whose clientele is largely English-as-a-second-language, served by an overextended staff whose own first languages often differ both from English, and those of their customers.

I find the staff supernaturally patient. Except perhaps at lunch hour, when the lines are outrageously long—not because the staff are eating (They don’t have time; now and then, a keeper throw them tablets of Soylent Green), but because most of the noontime customers are working stiffs on short lunch breaks.

Even then, though, the staff try very hard to be accommodating.

Oh, there once was a clerk–this was some time ago–who railed at his customers when they didn’t present their forms filled out, or spoke with an accent, or counted their money slowly, or chewed gum, or came on a day when his feet were hurting. He was a legend: a clerk at a post office five miles down the road, when I mentioned my local PO, gasped, “That’s where that awful man works!”

I filled out my customs forms and spoke English, so he treated me decently. But one day he complained to me, “I wish I could cut off my hands so I wouldn’t have to do this job.”

I nodded and remarked that that could be a mitzvah for us all.

He stared at me openmouthed, as if struck by a lightning bolt–or perhaps a Divine Revelation from beyond the Plexiglas. Then he finished my task in silence.

Within a month, he was gone. Retired, they told me. I’m sure I had nothing to do with it.

He was replaced by an amiable guy who spends a half-hour sending a package overseas because the system requires him to key the customs info into a computer from handwritten forms. He types one letter at a time, using the eraser-end of a pencil, which demands a supernatural patience from the customer. I send a lot of packages overseas, so if I find I’m next when his window is free, I generously welcome the customer behind me in line to go ahead.

But…back to the package from France. The package that my son and daughter-in-law sent well before Christmas, and began tracking when it had not arrived by the 23^th.

First, they discovered it had been sent to Chicago. Why Chicago? Because it’s closer to France than New York.

I’m being sarcastic. However, once our postmaster herself, a young woman with an authoritative air, tracked down a package for me that I’d sent unsuccessfully to France. She printed its itinerary. “Yes, it should be in France,” she read from her printout, “but this says it’s in the UK.” She looked up at me and asked, quite sincerely, “Where’s the UK?”

Anyway, our French family’s package hit Chicago, in a masterpiece of timing, right before the snowstorm that paralyzed the Midwest. And there it rested until the skies cleared.

The day after Christmas, it landed in Brooklyn. At my post office. It went out on the truck.

Then it went back to the PO.

This worried me. Were they returning it to its senders?

Something I had mailed to The Netherlands returned to me recently. I’d made sure its business-sized envelope was correctly addressed, weighed, and properly stamped with an International Forever stamp, but I received it back two weeks after I’d mailed it. There was a printed notice pasted on the front that said “Returned, no bin.”

I brought it to the post office and asked the clerk, a very efficient Asian woman who calls me Grandma (I call her Granddaughter in return, which cracks her up), what “no bin” meant. She said she didn’t know.

“Why did they send it back? Is this a US notice, or a Netherlands notice?” I asked.

She had no idea; she’d never seen this type of notice. But from its look, she thought it must be ours. “You want me to ask the postmaster?”

“Ah…probably not,” I said.

So now, I worried that the French package might be on its way back to France, and no one would ever know why.

But no: our daughter-in-law texted that their latest tracking claimed the truck had brought it back to the post office because the address had to be “verified”–it didn’t have an apartment number. She texted a snapshot of the label that her French PO had printed: the address was complete, but the apartment number was printed smaller than the street address.

Our package delivery guy, Nguyen, knows us because he was our street postman before he moved up to the truck. He would’ve delivered it, so he must’ve been on vacation. But surely his substitute would notice the apartment number and try to deliver it again? In truth, the PO doesn’t even need an apartment number for packages in our building; they go into a locked cage in the lobby to keep them from being stolen.

For two days, I dutifully unlocked and picked through the mess in the cage. It wasn’t there.

Our French family called the general USPS number, and eventually spoke to a real human in Brooklyn. She verified that the address had to be verified. “She said it had your apartment number, but not your street address. But she said you could pick it up at your post office,” my son texted. “Maybe the label got messed up in the storm in Chicago?”

I went to the post office on December 30. I went during lunch hour–unfortunately–because we planned to go into Manhattan that afternoon. The line was long, as expected, and only two windows were open. The two clerks were also processing the odd passport application, a complicated multi-layered task.

When at last I reached a window, I showed the clerk, Peg, the picture of my kids’ label. She took down the number and disappeared into Unverified Package Country.

At the other window, my Asian Granddaughter was working on a toddler’s passport. She ducked out to take a picture of the child–which wasn’t easy, because the kid squirmed vigorously as her dad held her in front of the white screen.

The line grew. A man three people back asked me, “What the fuck is holding things up?”

“She’s finding my package,” I said. “Sorry. It won’t take long.”

Granddaughter wished the toddler’s family a happy 2023. Her next customer was an ancient man who spoke Russian. I heard her explain he had to wait to do whatever he had to do until the “due date.” He didn’t understand, so she wrote this down on the back of the paper he’d presented her, turned it over and circled the “due date” on the front, and repeated herself.

“Do data?” he asked. She turned the paper over, and pointed to the words she’d written as she slowly repeated them. “Your daughter should do this for you,” she added. “Have your daughter come.”

“Ven she do?”

“On the due date.” She turned the paper back over and re-circled the date, wished him a happy new year, and motioned to the next man in line.

“Ven she do data?”

“On the due date. Have your daughter come then.”

He moved away reluctantly, and she processed another passport application.

He stood near the postboxes and called across the room, “VEN DO DAUGHTER???”

I waited. It was 15 minutes since Peg had gone package-stalking. The man who had wondered what the fuck was holding things up was now first in line. He frowned at me. I shrugged.

 “Fuck this!” He threw his hands up in the air and walked out.

Twenty minutes. Granddaughter had processed yet another application and served two more customers. The line was longer, restless, pointedly deficient in the Joy of the Season.

I waited.

After 25 minutes, Peg returned. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

“Could it be on the truck? If Nguyen was delivering, he’d at least know our names. Is he back from vacation?

“He came back today.“ She lowered her voice. “He was sick. He had Covid.”

“Oh dear.” That wasn’t good. Nguyen smokes—a lot. I would too, if I worked for the PO. I’d also drink–a lot.

“But he is doing deliveries today,” she added. “So…maybe?”

I gave her my phone number in case she found the package. There were now a dozen people in line, excluding the ancient Russian man, who was still staring at the writing on the back of his paper as I left.

An hour later, Peg called me while we were on the subway into Manhattan. “I found it—somebody had taken it into the office.”

And so, the next day—New Years Eve morning—I waited in line for a half hour and picked up the package.

The package was undamaged, its label completely intact. Scrawled in pen next to the street address—almost over the number to our apartment—was a note that said “12/27/22—no apartment #.”

December, 2022:

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to all!

This year, we have learned who owns New York City. 

Well, yeah. We’d seen them in subways, skirting the track edge, darting untouched beneath the third rail. We glimpsed a furry skitter on a late-night Village curb at the edge of a funky outdoor dining plaza. We noted a flash of brown in a pile of trash bags.

But rats are smart, we assured ourselves. Rats know their place.

Last month, we returned from a vacation to find a round hole in the base of a kitchen cabinet. Beneath it, sawdust. Inside the cabinet, pastas and grains leaked from torn packaging and lay scattered in little piles. We heard, somewhere unseen but too near, an insistent gnawing.

Our lives changed. There was before the rats; then, abruptly, during the rats.

If it was edible, we locked it in glass jars or stout plastic storage boxes. The Building Super spent so many days in our apartment—moving dishwasher, stove, refrigerator; stuffing steel wool around heating pipes; baiting snap-traps; filling holes in the kitchen walls with more steel wool, mixed with broken glass and cement; cleaning up; returning to fill more holes; bringing and laying sticky mats for rat traps—that we signed adoption papers for him. The gnawing in the walls grew more insistent. The sticky mats caught two rats and Paul’s left foot. Others left footprints or hair swatches on them. We saw rats in the kitchen, the heaters, our nightmares.

At last, the exterminator arrived. He pumped poison into every wall in the apartment, sealed his bullet-holes with plaster, wiped his hands, adjusted his cape, and flew out the window into the darkening city to rescue his next downtrodden victims.

We tiptoed gingerly into after the rats.

We are cooking again. There are no dirty dishes in our sink, no fallen food bits on our floor. There are sticky mats where there once were baskets of potatoes and onions. We are breathing again. We put our ears to our walls, but there is only silence. All our sticky traps are empty.

Maybe the rats are dead. Or maybe they’re just discouraged by all that steel wool, broken glass and cement they have to navigate just to reach food that’s locked away in glass and plastic.

But rats are smart. I believe they are huddled somewhere, smoking and drinking, nibbling brie and stale crackers. Reading the New York Times as they chew its edges, discussing the news that the city is looking for a Rat Ridder.

Plotting how to engage. How to subdue. How to win.

How to keep their city.

November 8, 2022:

We returned to our Brooklyn apartment Friday, after three weeks out of the country, to find a pile of sawdust under our corner kitchen cabinet. I opened the door. A round hole had been chiseled into the outer lip of the cabinet floor.

I stared at the mess inside: pastas and lentils and beans jumbled together, rice leaking from plastic bags. Little clumps of black.

Rat scat.

We’ve lived here 14 years. I’d seen rats in the streets and subways, but never in my kitchen.

I chased the Super down—calling was futile, because he never checks his voice mail (if I had his job, I probably wouldn’t either)—and by 5 o’clock, we had secured four “humane” sticky-mats designed to catch bugs and mice. The Super assured me they also worked for rats; he’d found a few downstairs while we were gone. They’d had a team painting the basement, and had had to take screens off vents so…yeah, he’d caught a few. Maybe 7 or 8. Or 10 or 11.

He’d caught one in our downstairs neighbor’s apartment. But since she’d bought a cat, he said, she hadn’t seen any. “Maybe you should buy a cat,” he said.

We won’t buy a cat. I love cats, but my kids are all allergic to them (even the son who now owns two). Growing up, my kids had other pets. Rodents. Pet hamsters and gerbils. And rats. Smart, interesting creatures. With personalities.

We once had an infestation of mice when we lived in Massachusetts. Cute little buggers. I relocated them with a humane trap my older son crafted out of an old plastic lunch pail.

Now I found myself with four “humane” sticky-mats for rodents with no relocation potential. Why make a sticky-mat “humane” if somebody kills what it traps?

“If you catch one, call me and I’ll get rid of it,” the Super assured me.

With a heavy heart, I pulled the protective covering off the sticky-mats. We put one under the hole in our ransacked cabinet, and the others in places where I might wander if I were a rat.

Within ten minutes, I heard an unearthly scream. I ran to the kitchen, where a sleek grey rat—a little small, as rats go—struggled to free itself from the sticky-mat. Paul sat at the table, looking panicked. He stamped his foot, and the rat screeched and struggled harder. “I’m trying to get him to stick—he’s breaking free.”

“Don’t stamp. You’re scaring it—upping its adrenaline. You’re helping it.”

“He’s getting up!” Paul’s voice rose. “What are we supposed to do with him?”

I called the Super. His voicemail was full.

I grabbed a sticky-mat we’d placed in the dining room and slapped it over the rat, creating a rat sandwich that screamed all the more piteously. “Oh, god–I’m so sorry,” I told it.

“Don’t touch him!” Paul said. “He’s still going to get out.” He tapped the top sticky-mat with the tip of his shoe, and the rat instantly fell silent.

“You killed it.” My stomach hurt. I can’t kill anything, except mosquitos, which I consider self-defense. I even scoop up those huge Brooklyn cockroaches with toilet paper and flush them, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t kill a cockroach because they swim, and because nothing short of a hand grenade kills a cockroach.

Paul said, “I was just trying to tamp the sticky-mat down.” He looked shaken. “He’s not dead. Let’s go get something to eat; we’ll figure out what to do with him when we get back.”

I looked down at the rat. Definitely dead. We’d killed Ratatouille.

I didn’t feel like eating. But eventually I would, and we had no fresh food in the house. And pastas and lentils and beans were not an option.

We left.

We came back an hour later. The rat was still dead. I called the Super. His voicemail was full.

I grabbed a dustpan and pried up the sad rat sandwich—not easy, since Paul had stuck the top sticky-mat to the floor with that fateful toe-tap—and took it down to the basement trash cans. “I’m sorry,” I told it. “I’m really sorry.”

There were still two sticky-mats left, so I relocated one to the spot next to the cupboard.

The next morning, I glanced into my bathtub to find the biggest, ugliest cockroach in Brooklyn. “Mother Nature hates me,” I groaned. I scooped it up in toilet paper and flushed it. And flushed again. And again.

I walked to the plaza to look for something rat-proof for storing pasta. The small dollar store there is crammed with random items: cups and saucers; umbrellas; party hats; piles of reading glasses; bright blue betta fish swimming in plastic cups. I bought a couple of stout plastic boxes.

When I got back, I gloved and masked and tackled the cabinet. Nearly every bag had been gnawed open. A brand-new package of basmati rice was shredded; noodles lay everywhere. Beans and lentils spilled from bags; macaroni leaked from an unopened box.

The only salvageable grains were those I’d sealed in glass jars; the only intact pastas were gluten-free–and no, I have no idea why. I dug out a nest of sawdust and spinach noodles at the back of the cabinet, swept, scrubbed, disinfected, and stuck the gluten-free pasta in my new boxes.

That evening we heard gnawing in the dining room. I found the handle of a wicker basket bitten through. Paul saw movement behind the living room radiator vent, and set a sticky-mat in front of it. An hour later, it was untouched, but there were shreds of chewed paper around it.

I noticed the sticky-mat in the kitchen was askew, and shined my phone’s flashlight over its surface.

It was empty, but there were four big, distinct, dusty footprints on its shiny surface.

They spelled out that quintessential Brooklyn challenge: “Hey! I’m walkin’ here.”

April 7, 2022:

Last night, the Universe revealed that the season has at last turned in Brooklyn.

I saw my First Cockroach of Spring.

I try hard to be cognizant of Nature’s beauty in all her wildlife. A deer can stop me in my tracks. I admit that’s due in part to the fear of getting too close and catching Lyme Disease (or, now,  Covid19), but I do have an awe of the creature itself. A fox mystifies me. An opossum in the street sends me to Professor Google, and pictures of little possums riding on their mothers’ backs. I’ve watched the Squirrel Obstacle Course video at least a dozen times, and sent it to everybody I know (https://www.google.com/search?channel=nus5&client=firefox-b-1-d&q=squirrel+obstacle+course+youtube – in case I missed you).

I won’t eat any animal I would refuse to catch, which leaves me basically vegetarian, with an occasional side of fish, mollusks, or shrimp (not octopus; how could I eat something that’s smarter than I am?).

I respect insects, too, even the ones I find freaky: you won’t find me stomping on a spider, and I try very hard to shoo flies to the outdoors—as opposed to my husband Paul, who loves his flyswatter.

So when I saw the enormous First Cockroach of Spring on my bathroom wall last night, I did what any mature, responsible nature-lover would do: I yelled for Paul. “There’s a cockroach in my bathroom!”

He glanced in and said, “Okay…Where’s this—Jeezuz!! That’s…big. What do you want me to do with it?”

“Um…maybe capture it or something? Don’t kill it; it’ll make a mess on the—”

He mumbled something about walls being cleanable, turned on his heel, and returned with his flyswatter. “It’s been what? Three, four months since we’ve seen one of these? Where the hell did it come from?”

Where does any 4-inch cockroach come from? Ask the Universe.

Swat!

I must admit, it was masterful, if nauseating: he smacked it into my bathtub. “Thing is really lively,” he said. Swat!

“You don’t have to kill it—just throw it in the toilet.”

Cockroaches can swim. My own strategy is usually to run the monster down, trap it in a paper cup and toilet paper, drop it out into the toilet, flush it alive—usually a couple times, so it’s past some magical baffle that separates me from the sewer system proper—and tell myself I’m sending it to a happy life there, eating fecal matter with its buddies and swapping death-defying adventures.

So why didn’t I do that this time?

Once Paul had thrown the mangled corpse in the toilet—“See, he’s still wiggling. Don’t worry, I think he’s still alive…”—followed by the remaining disembodied legs and smelly unidentifiable parts, I asked myself that very question.

Maybe it was the surprise of seeing one after so long without a cockroach-sighting. I’d let my guard down; it felt like they had all somehow vanished: Poof!—no more cockroaches in this house.

Maybe it was its size. Brooklyn cockroaches are big, one to three inches of body, plus leg and antennae length (not that I actually measure them), but this one was freaking outrageous: the thought of stuffing it into a four-ounce paper cup was laughable. Even the wide mouth of an eight-ounce plastic cup, which I could’ve grabbed from our storage closet, wouldn’t have fit over the thing without squashing a leg or three, never mind those obscenely long antennae.

Maybe it was its color—don’t get me wrong; I’m not a cockroach-racist, it’s just that it was Very Dark, nearly black, and the last time I saw a Very Dark cockroach (in fact the only other time, two summers ago), it was in our living room, and it flew down from the ceiling. Which really creeped me out, because yes, they have wings, but I had never, ever seen a cockroach use them. So after Paul beat it out of the curtain where it had landed, I went to Professor Google and I learned that the American Cockroach, including that Very Dark one then expiring on the floor, can “glide” (to euphemize the horror).

That’s also when I learned that cockroaches can swim up through drain pipes. And Scientific American, no less, announced that a cockroach can live for some time without its head.

Without its head. Google it.

So maybe Paul’s right. Maybe the First Cockroach of Spring really is still alive, even though it’s missing parts.

And maybe it’s swimming up the drainpipe, past those magical baffles…

December 23, 2021:

Last Friday, I got the staples taken out of a six-inch incision wound. At the same time, in a different part of the hospital, Paul got his stitches taken out of an inch-long wound in his finger.

I’m taking more drugs than I’ve ever taken in my life—Celebrex for inflammation and pain, a stomach acid suppressant for the havoc Celebrex can cause, calcium, Vitamin D, an aspirin for blood clots, Tylenol at night to control pain. An opioid that makes me cranky and shaky.

Paul is taking an antibiotic as a precaution. He’s also taking a nap, because the antibiotic’s wiped him out. And he’s worried that the incision doesn’t look quite right.

Paul, my husband of 51 years, is a large man with a large personality. He loves to laugh, to tell stories, to wow you with facts he’s gleaned and remembered. If he’s met you, chances are he’ll remember something you said in passing twenty years later. It’s a trait he inherited from his late mother. I find that kind of memory from somebody who can never find his glasses downright mystifying.

He’s a leader, a retired CEO—much more assertive than I am. And louder. People follow him because he’s the Tall Guy, the one who radiates assurance. If you meet the two of us for the first time, you’ll remember him. Me, maybe not so much.

I love him; he’s a good man. But sometimes I feel I’ve been seduced into a mysterious competition whose rules I don’t understand.

For instance, after we both were sick with Covid back in 2020—a lifetime ago—and were finally given blood tests, his antibodies count was higher than mine. He still brags about that.

Several days ago, when I came home from the hospital after my total knee replacement, our daughter Kym brought me a big, gorgeous bouquet of white flowers. She put them in a vase with water and the accompanying flower-reviving powder, but warned that she didn’t have a lot of time to spare, so we should probably cut the ends off the stems so they live longer.

I wasn’t up to chopping flower stems, so I delegated the job to Paul.

The next morning I jerked awake to his calling my name. I limped out of the bedroom to find him holding a balled-up paper towel around the pointy-finger of his left hand. Paul takes blood thinners, and the blood was thin—and plentiful. The kitchen sink and the counter looked like an abattoir. “I think I got it to stop,” he said, and withdrew his impromptu wrapping enough for me to see the back of the finger, where the cut was obviously deep enough to require several stitches.

He had been trying to cut the stems of my flowers, he explained, and the big knife he was using hit the marble of the cutting board and skipped over the back of his left hand.

I texted Kym and explained her dad’s dilemma—did she know a good clinic close to home? She came up with a five-star-rated walk-in that was less than a mile away.

“Let’s go,” I told Paul. “If you can’t drive, Kym said she’ll rearrange her schedule and drive us.”

“It’ll be fine. We have a Zoom this morning, and I can’t miss it.”

I checked the clock. It was 8:30 a.m. “The Zoom is at 11. There’s plenty of time. You need stitches—every time you bend that sucker, it’ll break open and bleed.”

“I’ll go to the VA after the Zoom.”

“The quicker you get to it, the better. You don’t want it to get infected.”

Nope.

I threw up my hands. “Right after the Zoom, we’re going to the VA.”

The meeting was over at noon. Janina, who cleans our apartment every couple weeks, had arrived, and Paul showed her his wounded finger.

“That looks bad,” she said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“I’m fine,” he said. “It’ll heal. I’m staying here.”

I do not get angry easily, but at that, I lost it. “You are GOING!” I said. “You’re GOING if I have to DRAG YOU THERE.”

Paul looked flummoxed. “Sorry you have to hear that, Janina,” he said.

Janina is a recent widow; she lost her husband last year. He was a good man with some serious health issues, and they caught up to him, blindsiding her and the rest of the family. She paused as she arranged her cleaning supplies. “Maybe I should have yelled at my husband more,” she said.

Paul, for once, had no reply.

So we went to the VA. Where they spent a long time stitching layers of the top of his finger back together, then wrapping his hand in so much gauze that it looked like one of those oversized foam We’re-Number-One pointy-fingers from a football game. They gave him a regimen of antibiotics to prevent the infection he might’ve picked up while he Zoomed and dithered.

So here we are. Friends and neighbors ask about his wound; he tells them how he injured himself cutting my flowers, and they shake their heads and commiserate. Strangers gawk at his bandages and smile in sympathy. I have a new knee and a cane, and I can’t compete with We’re-Number-One.

I Zoomed with my Amsterdam son Kel this morning while Paul was out playing tennis—after carefully re-wrapping the finger to avoid re-injuring it—and I told him the story of his father’s wound. Kel shrugged. “He’s gotta have the spotlight.”

Sigh.

November 30, 2021:

I took my doomed knee out for a two-mile walk today, up to Cortelyou to get a few small groceries, then down that commercial street to Madeleine’s Café for a green tea. Actually, I took both knees—the relatively healthy one insisted on coming with—and I took pictures of the trees, which have finally turned red and yellow now that November is, as am I, on its last leg.

Tomorrow, I show up at the obscenely early hour of 6:45 at the Brooklyn VA to have my right knee replaced with metal and plastic. I have lived with this knee for 74 years, and I suppose I will miss it; the replacement is not, I was informed, going to make me SuperBionicWoman—in other words, Nature still makes the best body structures out of its magical bone and gristle. But I figure if I can walk up the subway stairs without blocking a line of impatient able-kneed fellow travelers, that will be a welcome change from my status quo. And if I can get back on my bike without having to slather the joint with Volteran Gel, that’s a bonus.

I feel a bit disloyal, disposing of this body part. It has served me well. It carried me though hours of standing, in my youth, at Operating Room tables. And when our Peace Corps program disintegrated, it staunchly refused to do the same as I trudged up Pico Bolivar in Venezuela while we waited for the reassignment that never came. I forced it to jog for years on pavement–even while I was hugely pregnant.

This knee was rudely invaded by a scope when it was 40 (probably because of that jogging; like it’s said about the bee, I am not designed to fly). It suffered a bit of trimming and sanding, but it promptly forgave me and performed like a champ on all those weird stone steps in Positano. It danced at weddings, climbed all over Mount Desert Island’s deserted mounts, and biked the outback roads of Eastern Mass from Andover to Cape Anne and back.

I’ve badly mistreated my knee, and yet for years it was stunningly kind to me. There was that hot day when it walked me down the Grand Canyon—and the walk back up nearly killed it, and me. We had to rest for two days from the dehydration. I lay in our hotel bed, engrossed in the book I’d found in the gift shop below: Death in the Grand Canyon. So humbling, to read that I’d been a bottle of Gatorade short of being one of the characters.

There was the climb up and down that hill in New Zealand that put a brace on its companion and landed me on a cane. That left knee snapped back beautifully with physical therapy. And then there was the time I chased a bus in London and tore the tendon on that same left leg. More bracing; more therapy.

Pampering the left leg took its toll on my patient, steady right. It hinted that I should buy one of those walking sticks they sell at the head of the St. Sebastian trail in the Basque Country; the couple of miles we walked there were uneven and rocky, and I was amazed at how much it helped.

Tripping up that step in the bar in Helsinki added to its annoyance. Then, when Covid took its whack at my joints in April, 2020, my right knee became distinctly unhappy. I tried Zoom physical therapy, but unlike the left, it would not be mollified.

It creaked up the stairs of my little sister’s house in St. Paul, and crackled back down. It limped along the Mississippi River when I left her to visit with her friends.

It hobbled over broken turf when our kids who live in Paris and Amsterdam came to visit this summer. My older granddaughter, seven-year-old Izzy, grabbed my now-quite-handy walking stick one day, and portrayed me lurching on it as an old bent crone.

Sadly, the spoof was more accurate than I wanted to admit.

Grandchildren were the deciding factors.

Faced with the realization that there’s no way I can navigate the five-floor stairway to the Paris grandson’s family lair, or wander the cobblestones of Amsterdam with the grand-girls, or even walk the rolling ground of Prospect Park’s ballfields where my Brooklyn grandson plays, or climb those concrete steps after his brother on his college tours, I am resigned to the certainty that my right knee and I must part company.

I also have the goodwill of my left to consider: the tide has turned, and it is taking up the burden of its mirror twin. That doesn’t seem fair.

And so we walked in the beauty of a brilliant late-autumn afternoon today, my old knees and my old me. We have been so fortunate, to have walked, run, climbed, and biked where we have during these 74 years; I have no regrets, although my knees probably do. I suppose the right might feel cheated—all that work and play and stress and fun, and it finds itself disposable.

I drew a face on it tonight with magic marker, squinty eyes and cringe-y mouth, to celebrate its feelings. I hope the wipes I have to use in a couple hours don’t remove it.

It should be permitted to express itself.

Also, I want to make sure the surgeon knows which knee to replace.

November 11, 2021:

Last Sunday my nephew called and told me that his mother, my little sister Diane, had died that morning, shortly after midnight Minnesota time.

I expected it, but…not so quickly. It was only a few weeks ago when Matt told me she had lost 30 pounds.

Thirty pounds is a lot; Diane was not a large person, even before the cancer.

I wondered if the problem was her immunotherapy. Back in April, when she had her first infusion, it knocked her taste buds sideways. Matt had told me in October that she had resumed it.

Late last month, I sent her a box of junk food–candies and snacks that she’d eaten eagerly back in June, back when I spent a month sleeping on her terrible couch, feeding her and her cats, trying to simplify her life after her second hospitalization.

I sent the box and called her phone, called again, again, again; no answer. She told her friends, when they visited, that she didn’t want to talk on the phone to anyone. It was hard; her hearing aids were bad.

She lost more weight, and her friends agreed with her son that she was depressed.

Diane had much to be depressed about.

She had looked forward to retiring on her 66^th birthday, April 27, after a lifetime of work, thirty years of it spent as a single mother after her husband’s death. She had planned to do some much-needed upgrades on her house once she had that free time—she had an impressive assortment of tools scattered about her rooms upstairs, primer on her ceiling seams, an industrial-sized ladder in her dining room. Next to that, her bicycle sat at the ready. Her friends and she were planning group trips…

Then, two weeks before her birthday, she collapsed, and was rushed to the hospital. She had lung cancer, metastasized to her brain. Then, immunotherapy; life looked optimistic—until the seizures, the weakness in her right arm and leg, aphasia, radiation, steroids, re-hospitalizations, therapies, and—even after all this—the imaging that showed one brain lesion dying, while others popped up like some twisted game of Whack-a-Mole.

And this spunky, argumentative, wry survivor of a tough life found herself in a wheelchair in an Assisted Living apartment with her two geriatric cats, concentrating on her words; this gifted artist now signed her name laboriously with her non-dominant hand. She was unable to walk without assistance, unable to drive—never mind riding that bike in the dining room of that house whose sole bathroom was on the second floor, accessible only to those who could climb its narrow, uneven stairs.

Diane was no longer the person she wanted to be.

She reminded me more than once, back when I was with her, that she was not a patient person. If one of her cats were as sick as she was, it could die with dignity. “I wish…I lived…in…Oregon,” she had said with effort, “where they…let you…end it.”

Matt called on November first to tell me she’d signed up for Hospice.

I have been a Hospice volunteer; I applauded the decision. But I also know how boring it can be sometimes, waiting to die.

I thought she might enjoy a challenge that was pleasant, for a change. I Amazon-shipped her the updated version of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” and gathered sketching and painting supplies, choosing quality stuff that respected both her talent and her new limits.

I keep a Dia de los Muertos altar every October: it is crowded with photos of those who’ve departed my life, tiny skeletons and sculpted animals, flowers, and a dish of sand where anyone who wishes can insert a paper slip with the name of a beloved ghost. Sometime after November first, I burn the paper names, put their ashes in a bag with the flowers that are left, and scatter them in the ocean.

On November fourth, I hauled my art box for Diane to the post office, then took the subway to Brighton Beach, where I scattered the ashes and blossoms in the surf. It was a glorious day, unseasonably warm, sky alive with puffy clouds and sea gulls. As I walked back from the beach, my phone rang.

It was Diane’s Hospice nurse, calling me at Matt’s request. “He thought you might want to know,” she said: Diane now seemed to have begun the hard work of “Actively dying,” a term I knew well.

As I hung up, I cursed myself for being a month too late with my box—for not sending it instead of mere food. Not that I was sure that she’d have found it any more intriguing, of course, but…a weak hope, in the face of her despair.

I FaceTimed with Diane later that day, courtesy of friends who were visiting. She was pitifully thin, laughing, loopy on Hospice morphine–and beer, which she sipped through a straw with her buddies’ help.

The next day, more friends came to visit, and I Zoomed with them and her. This was brief; she was restless, anxious; the desperation in her eyes reminded me of the night, back in June, when I held her as she cried, and she asked if I thought that there might indeed be a God like the Catholic one we were brought up with, who would punish us for our sins when we died.

I told her a god who made people imperfect, then punished them for their imperfections, made no sense at all. This seemed to calm her.

I wanted, when I saw her in my phone screen, to reach through, touch her face, assure her that nothing she did in her life was beyond redemption. But all I could do was tell her I loved her; all I could do was say goodbye.

RIP Diane Pajunen: April 27, 1955 – November 7, 2021.

October 27, 2021

In March, I wrote here about the trials of duplicating a high-security Medeco key for my door—about my Medeco security ID card, mysteriously lost until it fell out of my husband’s wallet.

Copying a Medeco key requires this card and a special key blank. That first time I got copies, a gray-faced, wraith-like locksmith at a hardware store two blocks from home ignored the card, grabbed a blank, duplicated the key, then scarfed a package of Peeps (it being Easter time). He charged me $67 for three (keys, not Peeps). One replaced a key our son had lost; I gave another to our daughter, and the last to our building super.

Our daughter recently lost our keys—the Medeco key, plus our ordinary mailbox key.

I walked, again, to the hardware store two blocks from me, but it was closed for the Jewish holidays.

The next day, I presented my card in a different, goyish, hardware store. The keymaker looked at it and said, “I can’t do that today—the Medeco machine broke. The part comes in tomorrow; come back then.”

I handed him my mailbox key. “Can you do two of these?”

“Sure.” He ground two new keys, using mine as a template. The machine shuddered and bucked, vibrating the counter. He returned my key, and charged me less than a dollar for the two copies.

At home, I tried my new mailbox keys. They didn’t work. I tried my old key. It didn’t work. I hit the keyhole with WD40; still, nothing worked. The guy had made lousy copies and ruined my original. I would not bring him my precious Medeco.

I found another hardware store where a sign said they copied Medeco keys. I gave the clerk my key and my card. He looked at the key. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t have the blank for that one.” But he made me three cheap mailbox keys. They worked.

I returned to the hardware two blocks away after the Jewish holidays. The store had changed hands since my first copies were made there: gone were the gallons of roach-killer and the dingy displays of mouse- and rat-traps that I remembered. Now everything was sun-bathed and clean. There was actual hardware—on shelves, scattered over the floor, strewn on the refinished counter.

The new owner, a plumpish middle-aged man, agreed to make two duplicate Medecos for a mere $30. I gave him the money and the card. He fingered the card. “What’s this for?”

“Security,” I said. “I guess.”

He handed it back. “I’ve never seen one of those.” He studied my key, jotted numbers on a receipt book, selected a Medeco blank, and ground it into shape.

I watched uneasily as he held his new key up to mine. Was he squinting? Did he need glasses? It all seemed too easy.

“You need two?” he said.

“Why don’t you give me this one now, and let me make sure it works?” I said. “Then I’ll bring it back and you can make another.”

He agreed. I walked home and tried the key. It didn’t work.

I walked back to the store. “It didn’t even fit in the keyhole.”

He took his key, took my original, and compared them. “Maybe it needs a thinner blank.” He rifled through his inventory, selected another blank, and once again ground a duplicate.

I walked home and tried the newer key. It didn’t work.

I WD40-ed the keyhole and could force the key in, but it wouldn’t turn.

The next day, the guy selected a longer, thinner blank and ground it down to size. I compared it with mine: the tip looked wider, rather squashed. But he was so proud of his custom-ground key that I didn’t call his attention to it.

This one didn’t fit into the hole at all, even after I greased it with WD40. I brought it back the next day.

He sighed. “I’ve got a guy who’s been doing this for more years than I’ve been around. He comes in tomorrow. I’ll have him do it.” He took my number.

Three days passed; no call. I stopped in. His guy, he said, had a family emergency and didn’t come in. Could I give him two days?

“Sure.”

I came two days later. He gave me my $30 back.

And I was back to Square One.

I asked Google Maps to find me another locksmith in the neighborhood. It gave me an address four blocks from my home.

The street was one I routinely walked. I’d never noticed the place before, although I must’ve passed it hundreds of times. It was a cramped storefront: A shoe-repair, watch-cleaning, key-copy place that could undoubtedly buy your old silver, make passport photos, send telegrams, and wash your cat on demand. A vintage Brooklyn business.

I walked in.

One tiny room, packed with dusty boxes, bags bulging with mysteries, scraps of dark fabric and leather, stray boots, loose shoestrings, spools of thread, old watches, Russian-language newspapers, old and current. An elfin old fellow sat on a stool in the corner, behind an ancient sewing machine. He was bent over, sewing a buckle on a shoe.

There were no keys, no blanks, none of the machinery I’d seen in those hardware stores. “Do you make copies of Medeco keys?”

He glanced up. “You have a card?”

I held out my Medeco card.

He took it read the embossed number on its front. I handed him my key. “You’re certain this card—“ he waved it, “belongs to this key?”

“Absolutely. I need two copies.”

He jotted my phone number on a paper scrap, returned my key, set my precious Medeco card among scissors and thread on his desk. “I will call you.”

I edged back down the cluttered aisle to the door, praying that he would keep my Medeco card safe.

He called me the next day.

I arrived to find him re-soling a boot, telling a man in a yarmulke that he had no time to chat. He glanced at me, picked a key ring from a nearby hook, and handed it over. It held two keys, my Medeco card—hanging by a small perfect hole he’d punched in its corner—and a blank ID tag. “Fifty-five dollars.”

I paid him in cash. A lot, yes—

But the damned keys worked.

September 18, 2021:

It was a dilemma: I was as dressed up as I get—which is to say, I put on a legitimate pair of slacks and a silk shirt—and I had come to the shoes.

I rooted through my closet and found a pair of black ballet-style flats. I slipped them on and realized immediately that I had bought them before I’d acquired the bunions and the little toe-spacers I wear to make the bunions livable. That was a few years ago, and I was dismayed to see that not only were the ballet flats a bit smallish, but with their fine, stretchy leather, they made my feet look as if I were smuggling a pair of squirrels.

I put them in that bag I keep for St. Mary’s thrift shop.

I rooted some more, and found the glitter-covered gold sneakers I’d bought for two Bar Mitzvah after-parties we’d gone to in quick succession two years ago. Fun faux-formal. But this was a memorial service for the lovely wife of a friend, and…not so appropriate.

I used to have a good black leather pair of Mary Janes that went with all my dress-up clothes, except for the beaded gown I wore for an Emmy Award ceremony twenty years ago, for which I had bought a pair of fine gold flats. I only ever wear flats; I’ve never felt comfortable in heels. Not even as a teenager, when I wore them because I was a teenager.

But I’d recently thrown the Mary Janes out.

I hadn’t worn them since the Pandemic was declared. Then, a few months ago, my husband and I were going to the wake of a friend’s husband (*NOTE: at my age, my dress-up affairs are wakes, funerals, memorial services, and the Bar Mitzvahs of grandkids’ friends). I put on my dress slacks and silk shirt and my Mary Janes and jumped into the car.

We got out at the funeral home, and I noticed a clump of dried mud on the ground and kicked it away. Then, as we walked into the building, I noticed another.

I scraped my shoes on the step, and a small clod crumbled off, which made me wonder if the last time I’d worn them had been in a muddy barnyard. But I couldn’t remember going to anything in a muddy barnyard that required dress-up shoes.

It was certainly curious.

I settled into a pew in the little chapel, and looked down at my shoes. The right one looked strangely unbalanced. I slipped it off and turned it over, and discovered that those black dirt-clumps I’d seen were parts of its disintegrating sole.

Once you realize you’re wearing half a shoe on one foot, it’s hard to act casual among mourners in a reception line. We made our way through to comfort the widow and her family, and I felt another piece dislodge; I didn’t dare look down, where it would mock me from the maroon carpet.

I walked out at last with as much dignity as I could muster, my right foot a half-inch closer to the ground than my left.

My Mary Janes did not go into the St. Mary’s bag.

So. Back to this week’s memorial service:

I briefly considered the fine gold flats I’d worn so many years ago to the Emmy Award ceremony, long before the grandchildren’s friends’ Bar Mitzvahs and my friend’s husband’s (and coincidentally, my Mary Janes’) wake. But they were too formal for my current outfit—and although they were more elegant than the black ones, they, too, were ballet-style shoes, so there was the squirrel-smuggling factor to consider.

I put them into the St. Mary’s bag, then took them out. What if one of my kids or grandkids wins an Oscar or a Nobel or something, and I have to don that beaded dress again on a moment’s notice, and I’d just happened to get bunion surgery in the meantime?

I re-shelved the fine gold flats.

Paul told me it was time to leave.

“Just a minute; I’m looking for my shoes–” It was still warm out, so I assessed my sandal collection. Three pairs: brown leather Birkenstocks that I don’t wear because they hurt my feet (Into the St. Mary’s bag), rubber Tevas that I do wear, but only on the beach, and a pair of sweet black dress sandals that—could it be?—I bought for our daughter’s wedding. Her first wedding, more than 25 years ago. The fancy wedding in Deerfield Village, with our daughter radiant in white, trailed by a flock of bridesmaids in long, narrow black floor-length dresses (the wedding I call The Theme Party).

I think I might’ve worn the sandals to her second wedding, too.  

I turned them over—the soles, to my amazement, were still intact—but I realized that they wouldn’t work because both weddings were before the bunions, and I would never be able to squeeze my deformed feet into the cylindrical suede sleeve in the front. Which, given the fate of both marriages, would probably be a relief to my daughter if she ever happened to stage a third wedding. Not that either of us is superstitious (Knock wood).

Into the St. Mary’s bag…

I had boots—but the season was wrong. Also, they were hiking boots. That, and a pair lined with fake fur, for snow.

There was one brand-new, unworn pair of black-and-navy sneakers I had bought at the New Balance outlet in Lawrence the last time we had passed through Massachusetts. It was on our way to Maine, to collect Paul’s Mother’s ashes from a Kennebunk funeral home (see *NOTE).

“Seriously,” Paul called. “We have to leave.”

I brought the black-and-navy shoes down from the shelf, strung their laces—wishing those laces were black or navy, and not bright white, but oh well—transferred my orthotics from my current grubby grey sneakers, and put the new ones on my feet.

“Those are new sneakers?” Paul asked.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you have any dark laces?”

“No.”

He gave that little shake of his head that’s the equivalent of “It Is What It Is,” and we left.

The memorial ceremony was beautiful.

July 2, 2021:

Note: I’ve been away physically; at the same time, my site has been ported to a new owner, and has also been gone for a few days. In gratitude for getting it back, I’m giving you readers a little mental vacation to the Brooklyn I know and love–a small essay I named:

Barhopping in The Slope

I edge up to the subway booth again today, to check the panel of security-camera photos taped to the smeary glass in the corner opposite the attendant, who’s texting on his phone. I pause briefly to register the photos’ subjects—a teenager in a blue hoody; an old guy with a round belly, frozen in an admirable leap over the turnstile; a kid ducking under, backpack scraping the metal bar—then I slink up the stairs to Brooklyn’s 7^th Avenue.

There is no purple-haired old woman. I’m not there.

Not yet.

Why am I so furtive? I gave up religion long ago, but Catholic guilt stalks me like the ghost of Sister Stanislaus and her knuckle-whacking ruler.

It’s been a month since the crime.

It was a Tuesday, 3:45 in the afternoon; I had descended into this station from my yoga class in Brooklyn’s hip, upscale Park Slope neighborhood. I’d stopped at the Food Co-op, so I carried my rolled yoga mat and my ecologically-correct cloth bag of organic groceries. I was tired, disheveled, eager to go home; I shifted bag and mat, and swiped my Senior Citizen Metrocard through the reader at the first turnstile.

The green words in the turnstile’s little window said: Swipe Again at this Gate.

I re-swiped, pushed the turnstile. Nothing. Swipe Again at this Gate.

I cursed, swiped again. Pushed. Nothing.

Card Already Swiped at this Gate, the little green words crowed.

The turnstile didn’t budge.

The gate’s electronic brain believed I’d successfully paid my fare, so my card wouldn’t work again—a security measure, so I can’t sneak somebody else in on my reduced-fare card.

Which would be fine, except the turnstile wouldn’t let me pass.

This had happened to me once before—same turnstile, same station—and the man in the glass booth had buzzed the barred door next to the gates open for me. He hadn’t even looked at me; this must’ve happened all the time.

I rebalanced my bag and mat, and turned to the booth.

It was empty. In my 12 years in Brooklyn, I had never seen that booth empty. But it was. The entire station, in fact, was empty—except for me, my non-functional card, and the locked turnstile.

I turned to the second gate, and swiped my card there.

Card Already Swiped…

The other two turned me down, a united Great Wall of Fuggedaboudit.

Downstairs, beyond the gates, a train ground to a stop. I had two options: I could wait for the booth attendant to come back from wherever—Starbucks? The hospital down the street? The dead?

Or I could buy a full-fare card at the machine, for twice what my Senior Metrocard swipes from my bank account, plus a dollar for the card itself.

I should give the MTA nearly three times my Senior fare because their turnstile was screwed up? Seriously—the erratic, overcrowded, under-repaired MTA? Why would anybody do that?

The train below rattled away; heels clicked on the stairs, in the Forbidden Zone beyond the gates. A woman in a designer business suit emerged from below. I waved my useless card, and called, “Could you open the door for me?” I nodded toward the barred door, which, without the attendant, could be opened only from her side. “I swiped—“

She looked me up and down. “I don’t think so.” She pushed through the turnstile and clicked past me up the stairs to the street.

I ground my teeth. More than two million people in Brooklyn, and I get the one who would actually Say Something if she Saw Something.

It was now 4 pm. Almost rush hour; I had to catch the next train, or I’d stand all the way home. The booth was still empty. The station, again, was empty.

I examined the turnstile.

I couldn’t clear the top of it; at 72, I can barely clear a Downward-Facing Dog.

Another train pulled in below; it was now or never. I shoved my bag and mat beneath the gate and ducked under the bar.

The space beneath the turnstile was limited—and, unfortunately, yoga had not rendered me über-flexible. I scrabbled under the bar on tender hands and arthritic knees, as a gang of commuters wandered up from the platform, and a gaggle of hipsters in vintage T-shirts and man-buns descended into the station from 7^th Avenue.

There is no way to look nonchalant as you stagger up from under a turnstile. In Brooklyn, people don’t stare; they avert their eyes and pretend they didn’t see a bedraggled old woman with purple hair drag her illegal self under the bar. I brushed dirt off my jeans, grabbed my yoga mat and groceries, and double-timed down the stairs to catch the train.

The train was gone. The platform filled up, but I stood alone, in an empty cone of condemnation, invisible and too visible. I ached to defend myself: I wasn’t a criminal; I’d paid my damned fare—just ask the first turnstile.

But if I engaged the people who carefully avoided me, I’d no longer be the grubby old purple-haired cheater-woman. I’d be the raving purple-haired harridan who just might smack you with a yoga mat.

A train came, at last. I shoved into the rush-hour crush of bodies and stood, sweaty and unfairly ashamed, all the way home.

I pass through the Park Slope 7^th Avenue station three times a week. There is always an attendant in the booth. He never looks at me. Or anybody, unless they knock on the glass after the first gate takes their money and denies them entry.

My photo is not taped to the glass of his booth. Not yet.

But my skin crawls when I check: Somewhere, someone is looking at my picture. Passing it around. Judging.

Perhaps snickering.

And he’s reaching for the tape.

June 13, 2021:

My sister, eight years younger than I, was sick of being in the hospital. She’d cooled her heels there—the left heel would notice cool, but not the right—twice in the past two-and-a-half months. She had come in the first time with what she thought was a stroke; it turned out to be a seizure: brain metastasis from an undiagnosed lung cancer.

She was healthy, two weeks from retirement from a tech desk job, about to graduate to do something she loved more: repairing, painting, upgrading her small house in Minnesota. Her dining room was full of tools and paints and an industrial-sized ladder.

Her first hospitalization had produced a zap of brain radiation and one infusion of immunotherapy. She was doing well when she was discharged. Her son had requisitioned a newer iPhone for her; he’d put some helpful apps for aphasia on it, because she could take in information, but when she tried to speak what she knew, her once flowing words slowed to a crawl. When he felt confident that she had regained her independence, he went back to Florida, where he lives, works, and studies.

Then came the second seizure, a pile-on of fear; a scan that claimed nothing was amiss, even though her right leg and arm had grown numb. Her Aphasia deepened; she had to fight her brain to put out a coherent sentence.

The answer, said the docs at the hospital, was more Physical Therapy. More Occupational Therapy. More Speech Therapy. She could ramp it up by transferring to a rehab floor on the hospital for a short term—maximum two weeks, they promised—combined therapy program there.

All she needed was another imaging to make sure everything in her brain was still just fine.

We waited for her to go to Radiology, she in her bed, I in her folding guest chair. She picked up her new iphone, casually fingered in her access code. The phone’s security screen opened. “Oh!” she said, “You should…write it down…for me.” I hadn’t seen the numbers she’d touched, so I asked what she’d entered.

She closed the screen and tried to reopen it. Nothing. She could remember, with great difficulty, only four of the digits.

“Oh, dear–So…you haven’t seen your son’s Aphasia apps?”

“No. I…can’t…the code.” She grimaced. “I have…Aphasia.”

Suddenly that struck us both as hilarious; we laughed ourselves to tears.

That morning, I had decided to make my killer granola for us. I had noticed that her gas oven’s dial, unlike the range’s burner dials, didn’t have a “light” feature.

“I saw you have a gas oven,” I said to her. “Do I have to do anything special to make it work?”

“We don’t…use the…oven,” she said.

“Why not? Will it blow up the house?”

“No. Not…that.”

“I have to light it manually?”

She shook her head. The words were stuck.

“Your cats live in it?” I suggested. Her two elderly cats are mysterious; I’d been in the house for two days, and the only evidence I had that they existed was their disappearing food.

She rolled her eyes. “NO! Not…complicated. Just…we…” She sighed. “We. don’t. use. it.”

She was waiting for the new scan results when I went home.

I filled a bag with workout clothes to bring her for tomorrow’s rehab transfer, then assembled ingredients I’d bought at Trader Joe’s for my killer granola. If the oven wouldn’t burn the house down, didn’t need to be match-lit, and wasn’t hiding her mystery cats, I reasoned, what could go wrong?

I turned the dial to 325 to preheat.

I turned it off five minutes later. A half-hour after that, smoke still filled the house. I opened windows and doors—carefully, given the mystery cats–and flapped towels to disperse it, but the smoke alarm shrieked like a banshee. At last, I set up the industrial-sized ladder, disconnected the damned alarm, and buried it in my flapping-towel.

We don’t use the oven.

As I headed upstairs to bed, one of my sister’s two mystery cats appeared, mewling and pacing. Josie, the female. She looked desperate; she led me to my sister’s bed. She looked under it, so I did. This exercise had a Timmy’s-in-the-Well vibe–was her older male companion, Howard, in trouble? What if–oh, god!–Howard was…dead? I’ve never had cats; we had rodents when the kids were growing up. You could bury a hamster in the back yard.

But…a dead cat?

Josie led me to the closet.

No Howard.

How would I tell my sister??

Shaking, I went downstairs, sat on the couch. Howard leapt out from behind an overstuffed chair.

He stood still, grey and indignant, burned me with his marble-eyed stare for a moment, then sashayed off through the still-smoky living room.

I brought my sister’s clothes the next day, but she was still in her old room–she had yet to hear the scan results. I tried to leaven her anxiety with tales of burning down her house and killing her cat, but she was distracted. Ultimately, she dismissed me because I was too annoyingly helpful.

An hour later, her nurse called and asked me to come in again.

The scan had been read. Near the now-zapped and shrunk original tumor was another, larger tumor, surrounded by edema.

We cried together. I listened to her hard-fought, agonizingly slow existential questions: Why me? Why now? We were stricken that there were no answers.

She wanted to go home. Now! To her little vintage two-story house whose bedrooms and sole bathroom were upstairs, reachable only by a narrow, steep stairway with one railing that, going up, would be on her affected side.

But her docs wanted her to stay for a little more PT, a little more OT, a little more Speech T…

She wanted off her emotional-roller-coaster steroid regimen, which her Radiology doc had hoped would reduce her brain edema after her radiation during her first hospitalization. Back then, it had seemed to work, to return her to near-normal. But after that, it seemed to have done nothing; the new scan had shown that in spades.

She wanted them stopped.

NOW.

Her Radiology doc, standing at a screen displaying her April brain against her June brain, told her it wasn’t wise to go off steroids cold turkey. She needed patience, he suggested gently.

“I…am…NOT PATIENT!”

He conceded that there was no proof that the steroids had worked; but would it have been worse without them?

“Bullshit,” she told me. The word was quite clear.

May 30, 2021:

I voted last week. By mail, because I will not be in Brooklyn for the June 22 primary election.

I have voted in person at the polls many, many times in my life. There, I just sign in, verify my signature, pick up a ballot, carry it to a poll booth, mark it with the pen they provide, carry it to the vote-counting machine, and slide it in.

This primary was my first mail-in vote ever, and I was surprised at how much more complicated this process was:

First, I had to read the instructions. Then I had to unfold the ballot and ink in the spaces next to the names just so, and refold it just so. Then I had to sign and date the ballot envelope just so. Then I placed the properly-marked, properly-folded ballot just so in the signed and dated ballot envelope. I then put the filled ballot envelope in the provided addressed envelope, positioned just so, so that the barcode showed through its little cutout window. Finally, I stamped it, and dropped it in my corner mailbox.

Further complicating this procedure, New York adopted “ranked choice voting” this year for the first time. There are roughly eight and a half million people in New York City. This year, four million of them are running for mayor.

So I had to not only choose my favorite candidate, but also four runners-up. And ink in each little space next to the names in the proper columns.

Whew.

Don’t get me wrong; I did discover that there are some good things about voting by mail:

I could sit at my computer and Google the backgrounds, statements, and goals of the candidates before I marked my ballots. Considering the number of mayoral candidates, this cut through my confusion about who had done what nasty stuff, or said what dumb things, that led them to be publicly mocked by which other candidates.

Also—again thanks to my proximity to my computer—I actually got some substantial skinny on the judge candidates. At the polls, I’m always a deer in the headlights when I face the lists of judge candidates. Trapped in my little poll booth, poring over a slate of twelve people I’ve only met on posters taped to telephone poles by their campaign managers, I’m asked to “please choose six,” and I panic and forget everybody’s bona fides. There have been times when I’ve left the whole section blank.

But—thank you, Google!—not this time.

And, of course, I can vote at home without a mask. I can vote in my underwear—or even stark naked (although I would certainly wear my mask to the mailbox).

So now I understand why—even with the marking, folding, dating, and footing the bill for a postage stamp—a friend in Washington State actually prefers voting by mail. Not that he has a choice, since everybody there can only vote by mail.

Which brings me to those states where the legislatures are tightening up on mail-in voting because it is unsafe and fraudulent:

It seems to me that making it even harder to fill out and mail in an absentee ballot is flat-out discrimination, because it adds actual burdens to a process that is already more complicated than walking into the polls, verifying yourself, picking up, marking, and sliding a ballot into a counting machine.

It therefore discriminates against people who have to stay home.

It therefore discriminates against people who want to stay home.

It therefore discriminates against Washington State. And, for that matter, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, and Utah—also states where you can only vote by mail. Because all those reforms are being made because mail-in ballots are unsafe and fraudulent, right?

Therefore, the reformers are mocking Washington State, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, and Utah for running unsafe and fraudulent elections.

You might ask, “Sez who?” Well:

Sez The Former Guy, whose knows, because his very own write-in ballots are unsafe and fraudulent.

And sez the entertainment commentators on Fox Entertainment Channel.

And, most importantly, sez the Republican Party, which is intent on reforming all those unsafe and fraudulent mail-in systems.

Frankly, I don’t know how Utah has been allowed to stay in the Republican Party, considering they vote exclusively by mail. Seriously. If Liz Cheney got herself kicked out of power in the House because she disagreed with the new, improved Republican Party line, why doesn’t the state of Utah get disempowered for the same sin? Why doesn’t the Republican Party insist that the state of Utah be downgraded, perhaps to a territory like Puerto Rico, or a non-represented whatever, like Washington DC?

And so: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, and good old Washington State all mailed in unsafe, fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election—predominantly for Democrats. Because mail-in voting is unsafe and fraudulent.

Utah mailed in unsafe, fraudulent ballots in the 2020 election—predominantly for Republicans. Because mail-in voting is unsafe and fraudulent.

So how does the Republican Party and Fox Entertainment, which clearly know their un-safety and fraudulence, let their Utah get away with that??

It’s a mystery.

May 19, 2021:

Last week, we buried Paul’s mother’s ashes in St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Northampton, MA.

The box had sat on our guest-room shelf for nearly a year. I opened it once, considered scattering pinches of her ashes in some of her favorite places—Longwood Gardens, Maine’s Marginal Way; maybe even Fenway Park. But Ev tended to keep herself to herself and soldier on—her Spirit Animal, I swear, was Scarlett O’Hara (“I’ll think about that tomorrow…Tomorrow is Another Day”)—and reaching into the plastic bag for the grey dust that was once her body felt too intimate, too invasive.

I had the privilege of tending Ev in her Assisted Living apartment for over a month, after her bout with pneumonia in January, 2020. A slim, elegant woman, she grew skeletal in a Hospice hospital bed in her living room as we watched the Tennis Channel together. At 102, she still held court for staff and visitors, remembered details from their lives, chatted with them about their kids, their ski trips, the new garage they’d built.

My husband Paul, too, gathers bits of intelligence about people to spin into conversational common ground. Who knew this was hereditary?

Paul tells stories, and is known to embellish for entertainment value. Even so, his odder tales about his mother are true.

Their first story: he was her second child, born two years after his sister, and his parents were thrilled to have a boy. They named him R. Paul O’Neill. The “R” didn’t stand for anything; it was, Ev admitted, code for “Our.”

The town clerk of Northampton, where he was born, knew his father, “Sport,” whose real name was Raymond. So when he issued the birth certificate, it said “Raymond Paul O’Neill.” His parents never corrected it—probably because it would have been too embarrassing to admit they’d named their little darling “Our Paul.”

And then there was the story about how Ev hit him with a baseball bat when he was five. She was showing him how to swing the bat, she told me, and he stepped too close. He still has the lump on his skull.

You’d expect a dad called “Sport” to teach his son baseball—but it was Ev. Sport worked long days as a construction supervisor, and drank long nights. His paycheck suffered from rounds he bought for his buddies at local watering holes, and by horseracing bets that, as he put it, went for the “betterment of the breed.” They ultimately had three kids, and there wasn’t enough left to get by, even though they lived in Ev’s parents’ house and she made clothes for the kids and herself. So she took a job as a secretary—unusual, almost scandalous, in those days, for a woman whose husband earned good money.

By the time I met Paul, Ev and Sport lived apart. Sport was working his way through AA’s 12 steps, and Ev was, in the parlance of those times, the uber-competent “Girl Friday” to the CEO of her company.

When Sport tackled Step 9—make amends to those you’ve harmed—he asked his estranged wife what he could do to atone for the trouble he’d caused her. She said, “You can give me a divorce.” She had fallen in love with a man she’d met through work.

And so began her Second Chapter, which seemed charmed: as the fourth wife of the wealthy Mr. Eble (pronounced “ebbly”), she lived in a Philadelphia suburb, joined a country club, golfed, and played killer bridge. She hosted friends with grace, dressed in fine store-bought clothes.

Catholics can’t remarry after a divorce if their first spouse is still alive; they’re excommunicated for bigamy. Instead, they need an annulment—a laborious, costly slog through mountains of paperwork, at the end of which the Church rules that the first marriage never happened. Ev became a Lutheran, but you could see her heart wasn’t in it.

Once, at a family gathering, my older son asked her why, if she really wanted to stay Catholic, she had gotten a divorce rather than an annulment.

She said, “I would not make my children bastards.”

The assembled kids, spouses and grandkids laughed. Someone pointed at Paul. “Too late for one of them.”

She tried to be offended, but couldn’t resist a laugh, even at her own expense.

A story: back when Kym was three, Ev came to babysit her so we could get a weekend away. We came back to hear she’d met the mother of one of Kym’s little friends in the supermarket. “Are you bringing her to Denise’s birthday party this afternoon?” the mom had asked.

A party?!? She rushed Kym off to buy a present, dressed her festively, and schlepped her to the event. “She had a great time,” Ev told us, “but I wish you’d warned me.”

I explained that Denise was a casual friend; she hadn’t invited Kym.

“I thought her mom looked surprised.” Ev laughed as heartily as we did.  “Well, Kym gave her a very nice present, so I’m sure we’re forgiven.”

Story: years later, after both her husbands had long been buried and she had fallen too many times in her staircase-filled house, we took Ev around the Philly area to check out Assisted Living facilities. At one, we learned that two of her second husbands’ three ex-wives lived there. “You’d have a lot in common,” I said. “And as a bonus, the staff wouldn’t mispronounce your name”

“Thank you,” she said. “But I think I’ll pass.”

It was a tale we laughed about with her at the Maine AL where she ultimately lived, near her older daughter.

Which brings me to one more story, from that last period together: One evening, a vicious Maine thunderstorm knocked out her building’s electricity. A generator kicked in to handle the lights, but the outage also tripped her ceiling fire alarm. We stuffed cotton in our ears, but even Ev, who was nearly deaf, still suffered its banshee howl.

Paul found a maintenance man downstairs, but he was rigging lines for the kitchen freezers; he would get to Ev’s alarm when he was free.

Paul pulled a chair under the shrieking fixture and began to remove the casing.

“Leave it alone,” Ev commanded. “You’re just going to mess it up. Let the man fix it!”

He stepped down. “Yes, ma’am!” He snapped a salute.

We passed an hour together, ears muffled but still assaulted. At last, Paul said that since he couldn’t help, he might as well go back to our niece’s house, where he was staying.

Ev was outraged. “You’re going to leave us here by ourselves? Two helpless women?”

I laughed, picturing Ev and me, tied to the railroad track, train bearing down. WhoooWhooo… But she would not be jollied.

“There’s nothing I can do, Ma,” he said. “You told me yourself. I’ll find the maintenance guy on my way out and remind him about the alarm.”

He bent to kiss her cheek; she turned away. “I cannot believe you’re leaving us alone like this.”

Minutes after Paul left, the maintenance guy removed the alarm casing and disconnected a wire—an operation Paul could have performed.

We went to sleep, wrapped in silence.

In the morning, Paul arrived bearing Dunkin’ Donuts. His mother greeted him icily: “Oh, look, everybody—the HERO is back.”

So much for “Our Paul.” Who knew sarcasm, too, is hereditary?

To my relief, she was speaking to him again by noon.

Late on nights when she couldn’t sleep, Ev told me stories of her life. She sketched—in spare, reluctant strokes—pain and disappointments that had lurked beneath the gleaming skin of her Second Chapter. She touched upon her grief over her younger daughter’s estrangement. Those were restless, two-sleeping-pill nights, and they were few.

Her more numerous good nights were warmed by memories of her parents, who came here with nothing and made a life rich with love; whose care fortified her to soldier on through dark times, doggedly reaching for that Tomorrow that is Another Day.

Born on the eve of a plague, Ev ran out of Tomorrows on June 16, in the plague year of 2020. She was in her older daughter’s care then. Now, she’s back with her mother and father in Northampton.

Rest in peace, Evelyn Shebak O’Neill Eble—1917-2020.

May 1, 2021:

She came late in my shift on Monday. A tiny, wrinkled, bird-boned woman, crooked and bent, dragging a small wheeled suitcase. She showed me a paper with the note, “Medical Records.”

The journey to Medical Records in my hospital is long and tortured. I said I’d guide her.

“I KNOW where it is—it’s right HERE.” She pointed to the nearest elevator.

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “How long has it been since the procedure—the one you need records for?”

“Two weeks.”

“And you were told they’d be at Medical Records?”

“Yes. And Medical Records is right up HERE.”

“Trust me—I’ve led a lot of people to Medical Records. It’s kind of far, and very confusing.” I added, “There are people I took there last week who are still wandering around, looking for the exit.”

She was not amused. “Hrumph. Take this.” She pushed the handle of her wheeled suitcase at me.

We set off to a more distant elevator bank. I was surprised at her spry pace, considering her age.

“I KNOW Medical Records is not this way,” she insisted. We rode the elevator to the second floor, then stepped out to follow a long, meandering hallway. She mumbled, “How do they expect anybody to find this on their own?”

Eventually, we reached a cul-de-sac with several closed doors, and a little elevator hidden in a side wall. I pushed the button. “That first elevator put us on the second floor. Now we’re on the lobby floor,” I pointed to the L next to the door, “with no change in elevation, right? This elevator—” I motioned her inside—“takes us to the second floor. Again.” I bowed. “Magic.”

She was not amused.

“This is the lobby of the old hospital building,” I explained. “The new wing, where we were, was built on lower ground.”

The elevator door opened; I deposited her at a plexiglass window labeled “Medical Records,” and handed her the wheeled suitcase. “To get back, press the button for ‘Lobby.’ Then just follow the long hall back the way we came.”

“NO!” she demanded. “You stay right here—You can’t expect me to get back by myself.”

I let the elevator go and joined her.

She knocked on the plexiglass window, pulled down her mask, shouted, “I NEED MY RECORDS.”

The woman in the office pointed to a clipboard on our side of the window. “Fill out that form, please,” she said.

My companion did so, and held it up to the plexiglass.

“You need to sign it, and put your date of birth,” the woman said.

My companion frowned at her. “I’m NOT IN THE RIGHT PLACE.”

“When was your procedure?” the woman asked through the window.

“TWO WEEKS AGO.”

“You’re in the right place.”

“HRUMPH.” She signed, jotted a date, again held the paper to the window.

The woman inside did a double take. “That’s your date of birth? 1963?”

“THAT’S IT,” my companion said.

She was nearly twenty years younger than I.

I deposited the completed request form into a box that was too high for my companion to reach. “Now, WHERE ARE MY RECORDS?“ she asked.

“We’ll mail them to you. Five business days.”

“NO!! DON’T MAIL THEM. I DON’T TRUST THE MAIL.”

The woman explained that it took time to find and copy the records.

“I WANT THEM NOW.” My companion gave me a withering look. “I TOLD you this wasn’t the right place.”

I asked the clerk if my companion could pick them up in person when they were ready.

“Certainly, she can do that.”

My companion hrumphed. “CALL ME WHEN THEY’RE READY.”

“We don’t call you—you call us. Next week, call and make sure they’re completed.” The woman jotted a number on a slip of paper.

“I DON’T HAVE YOUR NUMBER.”

The woman sighed. “I just wrote it down for you.” She pushed the paper through the space below the window.

I grabbed the wheeled suitcase and we took the little elevator down to “lobby.”

She halted and pulled a flip-phone from her skirt pocket. “The car company said they’d wait for me. I bet they didn’t.” She jabbed a number, and immediately lambasted someone on the other end: “My driver SAID he’d WAIT; is he there? He BETTER be.” She snapped the phone shut—I swear it hrumphed—and walked on.

“You really do have to pull your mask up onto your face,” I reminded her.

She stopped and gave me a knowing look. “These masks are KILLING us.”

I told her Covid was killing us, not the masks.

Hrumph!

“No, really,” I said. “I had it. Bad; I thought I’d die.”

“You SAY you had Covid.” She shook her head. “You had a bad immune system.”

“My immune system is fine.”

“Oh? You checked your Vitamin C, D, Iron, Potassium—“

“My doctor keeps close tabs. My immune system is not a problem. Look, you really don’t want Covid. Do you plan to get vaccinated?”

She folded her arms in front of her crooked, bird-boned chest. “I pray to God every day. He protects me.”

“You’ve heard that joke?” I said. “Guy gets sick, he says to God, ‘God, I’m so sick–you said you’d protect me from this!’ And God says, ‘I tried. Why wouldn’t you take my vaccine I made for you?’”

She was not amused.

When we reached the entrance, she pulled up her mask, but not over her nose. “You took me to the wrong place. Let me go where I had the test; they’ll give me those records now and I won’t have to come back.”

“The Medical Records clerk said you were in the right place. She would know.”

She hrumphed once more, and stalked off with her wheeled suitcase to find her driver.

He BETTER be there, I thought.

April 23, 2021:

I didn’t know the number, but the caller ID said Hoagland, Indiana, where I have family, so I picked up the phone.

“Hello?” An older woman’s voice. “I’m calling from Consolidated Research—“

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Agh!! Please don’t hang up!” the voice rough, New Yawk-tinged, panicked. “It’s just a survey. I gotta get somebody to answer or they’ll close me down! Please! It’s quick, I promise. You may not even have to answer; it’ll kick you off if it doesn’t like your zip code.”

“A survey. On behalf of whom?” I demanded.

“I don’t know. I just read ‘em. You ask me, this is the stupidest survey I ever gave. Questions about Coney Island. You know Coney Island?”

I sighed. “Okay.” I sat down, phone cradled to my ear. “Ask me.”

What was my zip code? “Oh, that’s great—you qualify.” Did I work in…a long list of employment categories?

“None of the above,” I said.

Did I have kids under 18 living with me?

“God forbid.”

“Do you speak Spanish in the home?”

“If I did, nobody’d understand me. My Spanish sucks.”

“So…did you grow up speaking Spanish? Are you Hispanic? Or are you Caucasian?”

“Caucasian.”

“Ah. Okay.” Did I have a driver’s license? “Great—it would kick you off if you didn’t.” A car?? “Great! So can I ask you the survey questions?”

“Go for it.”

“‘Do you ever go to Coney Island?’”

“Sure–I live in Brooklyn; it’s close. But I don’t go to the amusement park.”

“It doesn’t ask me that—like I said, it’s really a stupid survey.” A pause. “Oh gawd. My computer—Agh, I clicked something—Please, don’t hang up. You still there?”

“Yep. I’m here.”

“You have no idea how hard this job is—nobody wants to talk to me. So…Coney Island is close to Brooklyn?”

“It’s in Brooklyn.”

“In the city? I didn’t know that. I was a kid, I grew up down in Wantagh. Never much got off Long Island till we moved away. I never been to Coney Island. Never, that whole time.” Pause. “Okay! Whew! My computer’s back. So. ‘How do you go to Coney Island? By car, by bus—‘“

“Subway. It’s faster than driving.”

“Subway. Okay. Now. You ever heard of ‘New York Surrey Service?’”

“No.”

“Have you seen ads about ‘It’s safer to drive alone’?”

“No.”

“How about…um… ‘Ride Share.’”

“Don’t know it.”

She read a long list of transportation options; the only one I recognized was MTA’s Select Bus Service.

“Okay. So…the subway. ‘Do you have fears about using the subway?’”

“I did at the beginning of Covid. But now that I’m vaccinated, I use it a lot.”

“You been vaccinated?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Have you?”

“I’m in Florida—it’s not so easy, you know? My mom just got hers—Johnson and Johnson. I’ve heard some bad things; I’m thinking maybe I might not get it.”

I explained about the rare blood condition found in the J&J case, and about how it mostly seemed to affect women between 18 and 48. “I assume your mom’s probably okay.”

“Ah. That’s good to hear. What kind did you get?”

“Pfizer.”

“That’s two shots, right? Was it bad?”

“I had some side effects,” I said. “They were worse than a lot of people’s, but that’s because I had the disease.”

“What disease?”

“Covid.”

“Wow. You had it?”

“Yeah, a year ago.”

“Oh, wow! How’d you get it?”

“We got it on a plane back from California. It was when everything was closing down, and this guy who sat behind my husband on the plane was coughing all night.”

“So that was what, back in March? Geez. I bet the guy gave it to the whole plane. Was it bad?”

I gave her the quick sketch: three weeks fighting for breath, the ground-rocks cough, aching joints, exhaustion, rolling bouts of chills, nausea, dizziness, and one baffling day with no sense of smell.

She tsked. “Well, God bless—you managed to survive.” Survoive. “Your husband had it too?”

“Yeah. We both pretty much lost the month of April 2020.”

“Well, thank God you survoived. Friend of mine and his son, they come down from North Carolina two weeks ago? We went out on a boat together. They had the test, you know? right before they came down, and everything was fine, right? They go back, and the guy,” she lowered her voice, “He. Has. Covid. He’s sick now. His son didn’t get it, and he was sitting right next to me on the boat.” She paused. “So I think I’m okay, but I’m thinking maybe I should get the test?”

“Oh, I’d get tested. You can pass the virus around if you do have it—even if you don’t have symptoms.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’d definitely get the test, if I were you.”

“Huh. Maybe I should. What do you do—you retired up there in Brooklyn?”

“Somewhat. I’m an editor. I work part-time, mostly with freelance writers.”

“Oooh—that sounds like fun. I’d love to do that.”

“Yeah, I enjoy it. Are there any other survey questions? Anything else?”

“Naw. Except there’s… ‘How much money your household makes a year.’ You don’t have to answer, but it goes, ‘0 to $5000—’”

“I’ll pass. But before you sign off, why does the phone ID come up ‘Hoagland, Indiana’?”

“Beats me. Maybe that’s where the guy wrote the survey lives? They have all kinds of numbers depending on what the survey is. They don’t tell us why. We just read.”

She thanked me—heartily, many times—for taking the survey, for not hanging up, for qualifying to answer the questions. For not getting kicked off. “This was fun,” she said. “You’re the only one I had today who stayed for the questions.”

I laughed. “I enjoyed talking with you.”

“God bless you–you have a good day!”

I hung up, wondering if this call was recorded for quality assurance.

April 16, 2021:

I posted that I had finished my Covid vaccination on a Twitter Vaccination Facts site the other day. A fellow tweeter congratulated me: “Enjoy your microchip! Bill Gates is thrilled to have you!!”

I was confused. Why would Bill Gates want me? I’m 73, lame, cranky, and much too opinionated.

And why a microchip?

I Googled “microchip,” and found an FAQ about pet microchips. There it was in black and white: “The procedure…is similar to administering a vaccine.”

Oh, dear.

What is the purpose of my microchip?

The site told me: “They are radio-frequency identification (RFID) implants that provide permanent ID…that cannot fall off, be removed or become impossible to read.”

Microchipping a pet costs about $45, the site added.

Chips are not, the site warned, tracking devices like a GPS. Unlike my iPhone, my microchip will not tell people where I am.

This was a little disappointing. What if I go for a walk and leave my iPhone at home? If I get abducted, my microchip will not tell anybody where I am. But people will know who I am if some savvy investigator thinks to run a chip-scanner over my cold dead body.

Or…will they know? The site says they’ll only find my microchip ID number, not my owner’s name and address, unless I register for a National Pet Recovery Database.

Bill Gates, being my owner now, must run a National People Recovery Database. I found it rather touching, that he would spend $45 to identify my cold dead body, busy as he is. Should I be afraid of that?

I returned to Twitter for the answer. On #BillGatesMicrochip, one tweeter tweeted to Bill himself: “You can cut me off from buying and selling, but you can NOT ever make me go against my LORD Jesus.”

My microchip will keep me out of church? Make me disobey my husband? Make me think that old white guys in the state and national legislatures are not the bosses of me and my body? Make me curse and swear and drink wine and beer and even rum and refuse to buy my yarn at Hobby Lobby?

Oh, dear!

Bill is doing that to me with a microchip that will identify my cold dead body?

For further clarification, I switched to Instagram.

There, a man wrote: “hows does b.gates, patented the ‘VIRUS’,..look it up.” This intriguing declaration was followed by an argument about how my vaccine is not a vaccine, but “a experimental shot (syringe emoji),” and how another Instagrammer who challenged this idea “did absolutely no research on this shot. You just mad becuz you got chipped and probably believe you cant get covid now.”

The discussion frayed into mask issues. One man said: “haven’t worn a mask since this started in New York and this was the worst hit city supposedly in the world besides wuhan. I’m fine I only got sick for a week and it wasn’t crazy. My immune system did that for me. If it did that what do I need the vaccine for.”

I’m pretty sure I met this guy on the subway. I was suffering from Covid brainfog at the time, so I probably forgot to thank him for enriching my immune system.

Somebody else wrote, “You know when Bill involved it’s all about population control.”

Which brought me back to Gates’ microchip. It’s…free birth control?

No, someone else wrote. Mind control.

Aha. That explains why, after I shopped for plant pots on line, I was flooded with un-asked-for ads about plant pots. And how, just now, right after I paid my ATT bill, I got a call on my phone from an electronic voice saying ATT had cancelled my phone (Press “1” to reply).

Bill. You bastard.

I paged farther down the discussion. A “Mystic and Yogi” referred me to a site—the Hal Turner Radio Show—where a man informed me, with a omniscient nod of his bald head, that he’s a scientist who studied thousands of positive samples of Covid and determined they were all “influenza A or B.” There is no Covid. He was very sure of himself.

I Googled his name and found another, hairier, scientist on YouTube who said the bald man’s scientific methods were faulty. The hairy scientist said the bald scientist was very likely lying.

My head hurt from all the deep thinking I was forced to do.

Or…maybe it was the microchip.

I went back to Instagram, to the “Mystic and Yogi” who referred me to the Hal Turner Radio show and the bald man. They had written: “This pandemic is a fraud and fake. Materialism rules over spirituality.”

Then they added something that astonished me because it so perfectly illuminated the whole argument:

“Anyone who takes this vaccine will die. Some quickly, others in time.”

Oh. Dear…

April 9, 2021:

My driver’s license had to be renewed in October, so I did it from home because the DMV was closed for Covid. It was on-line, except for my eye test; I paid a pharmacist ten dollars to watch me read a chart on his wall.

The next month, our DMV announced limited openings. I wanted to upgrade to an “enhanced” license—which you must do in person—so I could travel in the US without a passport. I took the next available appointment, two months away.

I read the DMV checklist. Proof of residence: I gathered bills and statements–check. My present license; my passport: check. Proof of my social security number—

I couldn’t find my SSN card in my paper files. But the checklist said a tax form 1040 would work, so I blocked out the financial information and copied the top, with my name, address, and SSN.

I downloaded and completed my DMV forms. Check!

Two months later, I stood before a DMV clerk with my folder of forms, IDs, and proofs. All went swimmingly until she saw the copy of my 1040. “What’s this?”

“Proof of my social security number.”

“It’s blocked out.”

“The number is there,” I pointed. “With my address and full name.”

 “It has to be the original,” she said.

“Seriously? I should give the DMV my full financial information for a license?”

“That, or your social security card.”

“I couldn’t find my card. I have my passport—it lets me travel all over the world. And a license you guys gave me. All of which, at some stage, probably involved my SSN—“

“Then use your passport to travel.”

I left without my Enhanced license.

The next day, I tried to get a copy of my social security card. On line; the SS office was closed for Covid.

The site had me download my license and passport photos, then take a current picture with my computer for an electronic match. My passport is six years old; my license photo, older still. The facial recognition software didn’t feel I’d aged gracefully, so I flunked.

A further complication: my SSN was issued in my birth name, Kramer. O’Neill is my married name. I sometimes regret taking Paul’s name because so many computers hate the apostrophe. And now…this.

I returned to my files to search for my ancient SSN card. Et voilà—it was stuck to the bottom of the drawer. I made a new DMV appointment—two months away—and assembled IDs and proofs. I added my original Wedding Certificate to show that the name on my SSN, though now different, was still mine.

My Wedding Certificate folds out from a white padded satin cover, and contains my wedding date, signatures of two witnesses and a priest, my birth name, Paul’s name, a declaration that its information comes from my city clerk’s records, and the impressive gold seal of the Catholic Church.

Two months later, I stood before another DMV clerk. All went swimmingly until she questioned my residence. I showed her an insurance letter, a VA medical bill, and a statement from Verizon about my WiFi service.

“You need a utility bill.”

“I pay utility bills on line.”

She frowned, and handed me a form to swear I live in Brooklyn.

Then she saw my Wedding Certificate. “This isn’t a Marriage Certificate. This seal is from the Catholic Church, not the city clerk.”

“See this?” I pointed. “‘…authorized by a license issued by the clerk of the circuit court of Allen County and State of Indiana, dated the 11th day of August, 1970.’ It’s 50 years old, original, and it backs this up—“ I pointed to my social security card—“so you can see that my birth name ‘Kramer’ is now ‘O’Neill.’” I pointed to the name ‘Kramer’ on the Wedding Certificate, then the card—“so it belongs to me in spite of my marriage. I have no Marriage Certificate; this is all I got when I got married. Besides my husband.”

“We only accept a city clerk’s seal, not a church seal.” She asked, not unkindly, “Why do you want the enhanced driver’s license? You have a passport; you can travel anywhere.”

I left without my Enhanced license.

On line, I ordered a Marriage Certificate from the city clerk of Fort Wayne.

I also emailed the “complaints” address on the DMV website. I asked, “Is this upgrade supposed to show I am who I am and I live where I live? Or is it really an exercise to see if I can obey the exact letter of some law that could accomplish the same thing everything I brought does, BUT only with material I, at 73, can’t easily access in the modern world?”

The state DMV sent me a number. I called and explained my complaint to three semi-sympathetic voices. At last, a fourth voice—the three earlier voices’ supervisor—scolded me. “THE. STATE. OF. NEW. YORK. DOES. NOT. ACCEPT. CHURCH. CERTIFICATION!”

My Marriage Certificate came three weeks later—a smeary copy of a microfiche copy of the 50-year-old original. The print was tiny; the names unreadable. On back it bore an unimpressive impressed seal from the city clerk’s office. I secured a DMV appointment two months off, gathered new proofs of residency, including a copy of our gas bill (slightly truncated; the bill was not meant to print), paper-clipped my SSN card to the Marriage Certificate, downloaded and completed the forms.

Last week, I stood before another DMV clerk. She okayed my residency, then pulled out the Marriage Certificate. “And you brought this…why?”

“My social security card is in my birth name.”

She squinted. “It looks like one of those old-timey records.”

I laughed. “Have you ever heard of microfiche?”

“I think I heard the term in my college library.” She turned the paper over and tapped the faint raised seal. “This is really the only thing that we look at.”

“So I hear.”

I left with a paper that says “Interim License, Enhanced,” which represents the license, which will come in the mail.

On it—unlike on my present license and passport—the name “O’Neill” has no apostrophe.

I wonder if I should be concerned.

March 31, 2021:

I got three copies of my apartment key today.

When Paul and I bought this apartment 13 years ago, we were given four ordinary-looking keys and this little plastic card. It said “Medeco” on it–the name of the company that had manufactured the keys. I was told to keep the card in a safe place; our keys were “secure” Medeco keys, and we could not copy them without it. So I climbed on a stool and put it on a high shelf in the utility closet.

I gave one key to our daughter Kym, who lives nearby. Paul and I each have one. The fourth became our guest key.

For three years, we never needed to use the little plastic Medeco card. Then our younger son and his wife came to visit, and he lost the guest key.

Now I needed a new guest key. So I climbed on a stool to retrieve the little plastic Medeco card from the high shelf in our utility closet.

It wasn’t there.

Had I mis-remembered where I’d put it? Had I hidden it somewhere else? Somewhere more secure? Somewhere so secure that even I would never find it?

I tore the apartment apart, pulled out drawers full of beads. Drawers full of paper clips, staplers, and rulers. Even the dreaded kitchen junk drawer, where I pawed through loose batteries, screw drivers, twist-ties, rubber bands—so many rubber bands—and rusty padlocks.

Nothing.

I asked Paul if he’d seen it. “What’s it look like?”

“It’s a little plastic card that says ‘Medeco.’”

“I don’t even know what that is,” he said.

Perhaps we didn’t really need it.

I went to our local Ace Hardware. The man shrugged. “I can’t copy this without a Medeco card.”

I checked a hardware-and-locksmith shop two streets away. It was a tiny, dusty storefront hung with rolls of wire and tape, shelves full of wrenches and pipe fittings. A slight, stooped ghost in grizzled beard, yarmulke, and wispy grey payos, sat behind a counter covered with papers, old coffee cups, an ancient cash register, and a dented bowl where female customers could place their money and get their change, so he wouldn’t accidentally touch a woman who was not his wife.

The old man would not look at me. “Pfft. Medeco. You got a card?”

And so it went, intermittently, for ten long years. If I passed a hardware store, I checked. Always no; always the card. I handed the key to locksmiths in Manhattan, without comment. “Medeco?” they inevitably asked. I checked on line, but I needed the little plastic Medeco card’s number for an order. I even tried to copy it at a “Copy Any Key!” kiosk in a Walgreens. It spat my “secure” Medeco key on the floor.

***

Last week, my husband’s wallet slipped out onto our sofa cushion. Some of its contents dropped into that side crease that is the sofa-equivalent of a dryer’s sock Purgatory.

He dug into the crease. Two expired museum cards and— “What’s this for?” He handed me our little plastic Medeco card. He had no idea how, when, or why he had acquired it.

I took it immediately it to Ace Hardware.

The man said they copied Medeco keys, but–he was sorry–not “secure” Medeco keys. No, not even with my little plastic Medeco card. He recommended that I go to that hardware-and-locksmith shop two streets away.

So today, that’s where I went. It had been ten years; the old man was gone, but the place was still tiny and dusty. The shelves sagged under gallon jugs of roach killer, bedbug spray, rat poison, and ant bait.

A skeletal middle-aged man blinked at me from behind a plastic sheet hung over a plank frame. He was gray–his shirt, his pants, and his face. He wore no yarmulke, nor a mask. The counter before him held the ancient cash register, papers, a coffee cup, plus a credit card machine, and an unopened bag of cheery yellow candy peeps.

I gave him my little plastic Medeco card and my key. He ignored the card and ground three keys for me.

I tapped the card. “Don’t you need this?”

“Pfft.” His voice was as thin as he was. “Four percent charge for credit.” I sighed and gave him my Visa card; he slotted it into his machine.

He dropped the keys on my little plastic Medeco card and whispered that I should sign the receipt. As I did, he ripped open the bag of peeps and stuffed one into his mouth.

At home, I told Paul I’d copied our key.

“What, maybe ten bucks?” he asked.

“Sixty-seven dollars for three.”

“You mean the electronic key for downstairs.”

“No, our apartment door.”

“What?? They’re just keys.”

“They’re ‘secure’ Medeco keys.”

“WHAT??? That’s ridiculous. Why didn’t you just go someplace reasonable, like Ace Hardware?”

Pfft.

March 23, 2021:

Today I received an email from Microsoft telling me that I had to update my mailbox. It instructed me to click Update Mailbox.

I clicked Update Mailbox, and opened a page where I had to give my email address and my password.

I quickly closed the page and went back to re-examine the email. It told me I had exactly one day to act: “Notice: Ignoring this message would lead to the termination of your Mailbox without permission.” The email looked quite official, from its Sent address ending in msn.com to its microscopic signoff: “Thank you for using Microsoft 2021.”

So I googled “Microsoft mailbox closing” and I found a site that said its purpose was to Answer all Microsoft-related questions. It looked quite official, from the genuine Microsoft logo to the chat feature at the bottom.

I clicked open the chat feature and told it my problem: was this email I had received from Microsoft real, or was it a quite official-looking phishing scam?

If I ignore it, will I indeed have no email box tomorrow?

I need my email box. Time is short. Please, help me.

The Chat bot listened carefully, then instructed me to click Continue, where I could fill out a form with my name and email address, and for a one-dollar (fully refundable) fee, I would gain access to the Answer service. There, a real support person would analyze what I asked and tell me if the Microsoft email was authentic.

I clicked Continue, and opened a page where I had to give my name and email, and add my Visa number, expiration date, code, and address to launch my (fully refundable) one-dollar Answer service.

I stared at the page and I felt myself sweat.

I closed down my computer and curled up on my couch and, for the first time in more than 70 years, I found myself sucking my thumb.

March 16, 2021:

Every Monday I work a shift as a volunteer screener at a local hospital.

I put on a uniform, an N95 mask, and a pair of safety goggles. I take my place behind a movable barrier and zap visitors with an instant thermometer that, when held near-but-not-touching one’s forehead, reads one’s body temperature.

A year ago, when I suffered three hacking, nauseating, exhausting weeks of Covid19, I never really had a fever. Still, when I began this gig, I thought temperature-screening made sense: fever could be a symptom of Covid, right? I might catch somebody with a fever, and save the lives of people who might otherwise interact with them.

I’ve been doing this for several months now. I’ve never gotten a temperature above 98.2—the norm being 98.6. Usually, if I get a reasonable human body temperature, it hovers around 97.

If I get a reasonable human body temperature. Which might happen once in five to ten attempts.

In actual fact, according to our thermometers, the average visitor to our hospital is officially Walking Dead. So I often lie about my findings.

Still, I make the effort to measure, maybe because I used to be an RN. Or maybe because I grew up Catholic.

I work with two to four paid staff members; they become annoyed with me because I take too long. Most of them just wave the thermometer in the direction of the visitor, and then they lie. Same result; less effort.  

Yesterday I worked with a new young paid staff member who was supposed to jot down the temperatures I told her on those papers we give visitors to show they’ve been screened. No matter what I told her, true or false, she wrote “96.5,” which seemed to confuse some of the visitors who heard me announce their readings. In her defense, the new young paid staff member probably didn’t hear me through the earbuds plugged to her phone.

You might say the problem is the thermometer. That’s true. But since I started this gig, I’ve become interested in the efforts of screeners in other places. When they try three or four times with a hand-held thermometer, then write something down, I tell them I do the same thing, and it’s never right.

They always smile and nod.

There is more advanced technology out there. Two nights ago, we went to a restaurant where we had to face a smartphone on a flexible arm. It couldn’t get a reasonable human body temperature on either of us.

Last month, when we went to the VA for our vaccines, we were directed to a free-standing electronic pillar where you line up your face just so, and it clicks and spits out a ticket with the reading. Both of our readouts were Walking Dead.

I suppose this temperature-taking is a way to avoid getting sued for negligence. We tried, it says.

These days, at my volunteer hospital assignment, I spend as much of my shift as possible guiding people who don’t know where they’re supposed to go. It’s good exercise for me, and actually seems helpful.

It makes the paid staff happier, too, because the screening goes much more smoothly.