Daydream and dead end

100 Centre Street. Seventh floor. A security guard, an older Asian man of few words. An easy assignment: checking IDs, mostly District Attorney staff. Not like downstairs, with its metal detectors, the public in drabs and hordes. Easy, and also tedious.

“How are you,” I asked this man, flashing my ID. He held up an index finger, crooked it.

“Hanging on by one finger,” he said.

This moment has stayed with me some fifteen years.

I thought of it again when I was out for a run this week, looked up and saw the flag.

*

The yellows are out — daffodils and forsythia — and the pinks — magnolia and cherry blossom. There are more varieties than I knew.

Slowly I’m learning the names of the streets that dead end in Brookdale Park. Gordonhurst. Wildwood. Hawthorne. The park’s pedestrian entrances/exits aren’t marked, which is charming and also inefficient. I daydream about planting little hand-lettered flags.

I’m trying hard to slow down. I’m trying to get used to lifting a hand to thank any driver that slows down enough to let me cross.

When we first moved out here, I complained to a friend back home about this — that I resent deferring to the car — and he said, “Why does it have to be a bad thing? Can’t it just be two people acknowledging each other?”

It’s true, the drivers do lift a hand back to me.

“Back home.” But this is home, now! Some days I still can’t believe we made the leap. Made a choice.

*

We haven’t seen Rabbit in a couple weeks.

We do see Groundhog daily. He startles at the sound of his name. He can run! He dives into a pile of leaves next to the fence, and emerges in our neighbor’s yard.

Every night now, Bobina naps on my outstretched legs while I read. She hops up on the bed as soon as I turn on the bedside lamp. She skips kneading, curls up right away, settles. Buries her nose in her front paws.

Back in Brooklyn she’d be out like a light by ten or eleven in the morning. Here, there is so much activity in the garden, she’s awake all day, watching. By nightfall she’s tuckered out.

She doesn’t watch so much as she regards.

When she does nap, she does so near the window, so she won’t miss any action.

I love to see how sleep overtakes her.

I can’t take my eyes off her. She is like the waves, she comes in and out, and in and out, and never resolves.

I google “I love my cat so much” and land in a Reddit full of people besotted, enchanted.

Divinity School goes out every Sunday at sunset.