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Rhythms of Gotham

There’s a certain miracle about just getting up in the morning.  And its better when it’s before anyone else.  It was that way in the City, when the rhythms were soft, the streets empty, and people slowly gathered themselves for coffee.  And I saw them and I was one of them. Some days.  I saw the cops in the cars, sitting and sipping, girl boy.  So new age.  It was only later (in the day?) that all was lost.  The bullets began to fly.

True.

So, this morning I was up early, rolled out the garbage and recycled containers and drove to town, arriving before the boys in Hatfield, to buy the Times.  The boys.  Seven or eight regulars, average age fifty or sixty, who talk it up.  And once in a while a brave or brazen woman joins them. But this morning, the white plastic chairs were empty.  I imagined them at home, bailing out the basements.

And as I often do,  I tucked the Times under my arm and I looked at the front pages of the other papers.  The Globe,  the Harford Something.  Mostly about the great,  freaky New England flood,  the rain that refused to quit,  and continues to drizzle as I write.  You have to run it,  my editors.  People are drowning.  Funny,  how fashionable the pages really are.  And hopelessly local.  The Times never did report on the seventy-five million dollars worth of drugs that were taken from a Hartford warehouse,  at night.  Record drug heist.  A hole in the roof.  That kind of wonderful stuff keeps happening,  and I see little more than the front pages,  hanging by habit with my lovely old lady The Times.

So.  I’ve taken my two pain pills, (OTC, for my elbow) and will play a little racquetball at the Y with Jon, such a good partner, at nine, the only open time, and later we’ll both go down and look at the basement to be sure that the sump pump is working. There are pools on the fields all around, and the water table, the best evidence of our river valley, would float the house if it could, and yet we’re so much,  much better off than all those people in boats,  see your local paper,  saving their asses.

Edwin Lynch 3/31/10