Things that go

Photo: Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, February 2023

In Montreal, they don’t know what to do with the heat. I hear they just turn off all the lights and sit still. 

We used to do that in public school in the nineties. We didn’t have air-conditioning either. Parents would send in their kids with Poland Spring bottles from the freezer. All day kids would rattle the diminishing block of ice in their plastic bottles. This was before Kleen Kanteen.

Once in the hot asphalt playground, not a tree in sight, our teacher poured water into the cap of her bottle, showed the kids how to throw it back without touching the cap with their lips. A capful of water — a sip — for each child.

I’m out walking. After a week of hot, bright, still days, I am taking advantage of the shift in conditions. It’s still very sticky, but it’s overcast, and there’s some kind of breeze picking up. Which I will follow until it runs out.

On Windsor Place I pick up a bright board book, “Things That Go.” I flip through it as I walk. Coming toward me is an old man I often see on this block, sitting on a beach chair in his garden. Today someone is walking arm-in-arm with him, she looks like his daughter. We smile at each other, pause. 

“I just learned a new truck,” I say, holding up the book. “A combine harvester.” 

“City kid,” he says.

A few days ago, checking in about my Lexapro prescription, my doctor asked me:

“Have you ever thought it would be better if you were not alive?”

“She’s good,” I told Ilya later. “She slipped the question in when I was least expecting it. Stuy grad.”

“Maybe Stuy grads aren’t good,” he said. “Maybe we just expect them to be.”

“I told her I had a few books I needed to write.”

On the treadmill at the YMCA, I make a mental note to look up heart rate zones for my age and weight, so I can actually do something with the data I get from the machine, from my watch.

The moment I’m off the treadmill, I forget all about this.

I could just look it up while I’m stretching. But the gym is full of people frozen on their mats, staring into their little big screens. I want to be different.

I have never seen anyone so awake as our cat, when she is stalking a fly.

This is what I came here to tell you.