Welcome To New York
With neither pride nor undue shame I too have left parts of myself all over these United States, at times in what is considered the proper fashion and at other times in such fashion to raise eyebrows, and if you have even the merest shred of decency you will start exercising your brow at this moment. Neither would it be out of line if you choose to purse your lips and shake your head slowly back and forth, projecting outward as far as you can reach with it, your indignation.
Folks here in New York City have been real nice about welcoming me and the cat and my multiple aloe vera plants. Jimson Creed had coined me the Reluctant New Yorker on one of my recent trips here from Virginia and North Carolina, three years of going back and forth I think rightly earned me the moniker and although I still have a fair amount of wrap up in Virginia I am now heart and soul embracing the big city life, which ironically is in some ways more country than any country life I've ever lived. By that I mean that not once in the country did I ever turn a corner and run just inches shy of smack dab into a man with a freshly gutted sow slung over each shoulder.
I'm not crazy about the question but as it seems to be the universal ice breaker here I have decided for simplicity sake and to lessen the risk of saying the wrong thing just stick with the same one liner—so far so good—in answer to how am I liking it here.
I have procured a real cherry of an on street parking space as it only requires a thirty minute investment twice a week instead of the more common 90 minute times two investment plus the handful of coins for short timing it at a meter. Bernadette's sister, the Restauranteur, was looking out for me that first week and would call me whenever she moved her car to see if I wanted a better space than the one I was in, until finally the cherry spot came available, in a parking zone of which I was heretofore ignorant, and now I am hesitant to consider ever again moving the Jeep, despite it being under a tree where roosting birds poop on it.
The first Monday in the spot I forgot where I was and by what duties was I dictated and didn't get out to move it to the opposite curb so the street sweeper could pass. I received on my back passenger window one of those nasty orange stickers informing me that civically I was a bad person, although I did not see a ticket on the windshield. Bernadette says people steal parking tickets to use on their own cars for short term illegal parking and that I would be wise to go online and see if I owe the city 65 dollars. To remove the large orange decal requires heavy work with a single edged razor blade and a paint thinner backwash to get the glue off.
Today I was out early though, with a cup of coffee as big as my head and some reading material, and behind the Jeep on the street was a large pile of what I think was human excrement. What I may have been alluding to in the opening was a sympathy for the bowel movement that just won't wait but sympathy is not to be construed as a love of so I was eager for the cleaner to come this morning, although not that happy with the imagery running through my head of the sweeper brushes and what they would do to the fecal matter. Thursday is Thanksgiving and the cleaner won't come on that day. The next cleaning day will be a week from now, which seems a less than ideal amount of time to be parked in front of a pile of human waste. But as is sometimes the case you sit in your car and the street sweeper doesn't come and this was one of those days. Someday I will desire to go somewhere and the passion I feel for the parking space will meet its first real challenge. I can imagine equally the desire for movement and change and the seduction of inertia. But certainly I will be moving it when Bernadette and I make the road trip to New Orleans over the Christmas holidays. And then when we get back I will have to start over with the process of searching out the cherry spot. Probably it is better not to believe that there is only one.
After marching back up to the fifth floor this morning I told Bernadette what I had seen behind the Jeep and she said, welcome to New York, even though she has by now already welcomed me many times over.
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