George Takei just said something about real property and trusts – I really thought he was speaking in a foreign language. Dutch. Amharic. Maybe Russian. OMG. OMGWTF.
Another thing I miss about New York: short blocks and difficult-to-maneuver bike routes. My bike ride to Stanford consists of three straight, fast, boring lines. I get up at 8 a.m., nuke a bowl of oatmeal, slice strawberries against my thumb, eat it while checking my email and reading the news, shoo Boo into the backyard, and climb on my bike and roll out. It is one block to the left turn onto N. California Avenue. Two and a half miles straight down N. California and Stanford Avenue. Right turn at Escondido Road, straight for a mile past the elementary school and a sea of dorms. Then I am at the large outdoor Alexander Calder sculpture (!) that tells me I have arrived at F.I.R. Hall, and I go to the law school café, sheepishly beg for a cup of hot water for the teabag I’ve brought from home, thank the friendly patient man in the café who gives it to me every day, and make my way to the third middle row, fourth seat of Room 290, try to say something witty to Pamela, text Oliver and Connie the run-time of today’s DVD, and wait for the lecture to start. The most exciting part of the ride is when I go under Alma and I can hear the Caltrain pulling out of the station over my head. But other than that, it’s just pump, pump, pump. I concentrate on the size and power of my quadriceps, which ache, because there are neither turns to strategize nor cars to negotiate nor traffic lights to give me rest. It takes seventeen minutes to get there and fifteen minutes to get home. No bridges, no Hasidim, no Manhattan drivers, no Domino factory, no view of life from over the East River. I don’t even sing to myself.
Sometimes, to make the ride go by faster, I envision getting creamed by the #35 bus, flying off my bike like a formless sack of flour, my bones already shattered, and landing with a thud on the asphalt and having a gold Prius driven by a distracted thirty-eight year old mother of three on her way to Walgreens for extra-large tampons and Valium – she’s on her cell phone arguing with Bank of America about a late fee she thinks was improperly levied - run over my head, crushing my helmet, closing my casket at the funeral, devastating my parents, reuniting my friends, kindling guilty relationships (how could you say on your wedding website that you met at your mutual friend’s funeral?), laying the groundwork for the memorial sewer cap that will be placed for me in a park in the middle of a traffic island on El Camino Road and will prevent generations of stupid schoolchildren from accidentally dropping into the sewage, and I am glad that my death could provide the public service that my foreshortened life could not. The photograph that will be enlarged and framed at my funeral will be the image of me, taken at the moment I heave a 4-kilogram shotput away from my chin, my face pruning with exertion, my sheer green and white jersey clinging to the outer bounds of my spare tire, that was published in the Palo Alto Weekly’s high school sports section in 1995. You will shake your heads and say, “What a waste!” and “Alas, we hardly knew ye!” and “She is as cheap in death as she was in life and I knew there weren’t going to be spanikopitas at the wake.” I will smile upwards wistfully upon this scene from the lava-surrounded igneous rock from which I will have my everlasting vantage point onto the world and occasionally leave to haunt Stephanie. I don’t think it would be so bad.
I miss New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment