Not ready to dip

“The exchange of ideas is everything.”
“It’s the only thing.”
— two women, overheard at the Brooklyn Book Festival last Sunday

*

Going out for the day with a notebook, but no pen.

Going out for the day with a notebook — at some point realizing you didn’t bring a pen — and not checking the bottom of your bag. Where there is, in fact, a pen.

Going out for the day with a notebook and a pen and never using either one at all.

You switch to a smaller, lighter notebook.

You graft a pen to your finger.

You don’t go anywhere.

*

You prefer the motion of the train to the car, though you wish it went faster. If it went faster, you could live further out and still go to the city.

Still, to save the $8.50 NJ Transit fare plus the $2.90 subway fare, you carpool with your husband as often as you can.

Friday you stayed out longer than you wanted to — waiting for him.

Your brain was cotton as you did the arithmetic: if you left by train and foot, you would get home at the same time as if you waited for him to finish working and drive home together. Is time in motion better than time spent waiting?

You clocked twenty thousand steps that day.

*

In the car, your husband is sometimes his own podcast, and produces gems:

“Do you, New Jersey, take this marshland, for better or for worse, to pave and to toll — ”

He pauses.

You write it down.

“It ain’t nothing,” he says, when you quote him the women from the Book Festival: “The exchange of ideas is everything.” / “It’s the only thing.”

Divinity School goes out every Sunday at sunset • if you’re always looking, after some time you’ll have seen