It just started to rain. All day, the air has been thick. They say we will have a stretch of 90 degree weather, and already it feels heavy, humid. I went for a walk, a couple loops around the old park. I like the smell of rain in the air. The energy stirs with the coming storm. Back home, I have nothing to do since I woke up so crazy early that I got all the important things done by noon, and now I have no idea how to sit still. My attention span is shot, ruined by thirty minute sitcoms and texts and breaking news and fire trucks rushing off to someone’s calamity, very strong weed from the dispensary, a work week packed with mini disasters, the fast crash of the twenty-first century, the rain. I’m lucky if I can read a short story, or a chapter. I’ll try, anyway. The rest of the weekend is here. 

 

I had to go to the bank today. After the sale of mom’s house, we got a check that needs to be deposited into a special account. The check is embossed and engraved. Very intimidating. I’m afraid to touch it with my plebian hands. I keep it in a folder, along with documents, if they need them. The tellers these days are down in the basement, behind four inches of glass. Cameras from every angle, red lights blinking, I regret I didn’t brush my teeth and am conscious of my slouch. A woman is trying to withdraw a significant sum, which seems to require three employees. The guy ahead of me just needs a couple rolls of quarters, he keeps saying, for god’s sake already, and we both wait. The woman is on her cell phone yelling at someone in what sounds like Slovakian, a man on the other end is also yelling while everyone stands there and waits for the drama to wrap up. She finds a receipt at the bottom of her huge leather handbag. It doesn’t help. She yells on the phone some more. Eventually, she gets her money. The guy ahead of me gets his quarters. I stand before Christopher Lee, a young kid sharp eyed behind round tortoise shell frames. His blue suit looks like he left the hanger in it. He takes the check. Carefully examines it. Runs a kind of pen light over it, nods. Hmmm, says Mr. Lee. He turns it, carefully, peruses the back, the signature. Again the pen light scans over the blue paper. Hmm he says again. He has me my swipe my card. Do I have documentation? Just so happens, I do, Mr. Lee. I pass the death certificate and the letter from probate attesting that I am executor, I slip it through the slit in the transparent wall between us, watch him as he delicately touches the raised seal. He calls the other teller over. They both look at the papers. Hmm they say. The new one, the same suit and the same glasses, the same close crop haircut and the same smooth face, he turns the check over, to have a gander at the signature. He pulls a deposit slip from a stack. A black ink pen poises. Mr. Lee nods. New guy spells out my name, each letter inhabits a square cell on the form. I want to say how neat his handwriting is, but worry that will sound racist, and don’t want to blow it. We’ll just need to check it with the manager, they seem to say in unison. She comes over. Her eyebrows are painted in a severe slant that makes her look serious. She glances at me, then the check, then the back of the check. Hmm she says. She checks the death certificate, fingers the raised seal. She checks the letter from probate. She glances at me again. The three of them are now looking at me. I smile, even if they can’t see my face. Maybe my eyes are kind and sincere. Under my mask, I again think I should have brushed my teeth. The manager’s fingernails are long, shellacked, business beige like her skirt and tailored jacket. She turns the check over once more. She takes the deposit slip, checks it against the check. One last glance my way. One more eye smile from me. The line behind me is restless. Someone coughs. The manager grabs the pen, slashes her initials across the top of the slip, and “OK.” Mr. Lee seems relieved. He slides me back my documents through the glass.  A little machine at his left prints up a receipt. Another to his right prints up a piece of paper. And another piece of paper. He stamps one, then the other. The third apparently doesn’t need a stamp. This one is for your records, the manager says with the full weight of authority. They all are looking at me. Thank you, I say. It seems the least I could do. I almost drop a curtsey, genuflect, but instead I step out of line to let the next person enjoy Mr. Lee. My documents are back in their folder, along with the paper for my records, slipped in with great stealth. Take the money and run.

 

It's no wonder I’m exhausted when I get back from the bank. 

 

Saturday. Morning. Coffee. 

My groceries have just been delivered to my door by Instacart. Yesterday I got a delivery from the dispensary. In the afternoon I had a video session with my therapist while someone else cleaned my house and made my bed. Packages come from amazon with regularity. Are we living the Jetson’s life? Why am I still so tired? Some of these innovations are a response to COVID—why go to the doctor’s office to sit in a waiting room if you don’t have to—or at least COVID has accelerated these things from being part of daily life. Some people will be working from home for the foreseeable future. When we have staff meetings at work, usually an uncomfortable affair in the clinic with all of us crammed into chairs and no one wanting to be there, now we are all on screens, and 80% of the folks are at home with kids and dogs and cats and their whole lives in the background. My writing group now meets weekly on zoom. My writing classes are on zoom. I just started back taking yoga classes, and these are on zoom too, which is a blessing because I can shut my camera off so they don’t have to see my fat carcass huffing and puffing through poses. Is this the Big Brother world? It is chilling to me how very accurate that simple little science fiction novel has proven to be, 1984 may have taken a bit longer, but it is here—the truth is an elastic thing subject to “alternate facts”, whole populations are herded into testing and vaccinations, our lives are spent largely on camera (mostly voluntary) as we take selfies and have our phones track us with GPS. This is too much for 8am. I’m going to have coffee and maybe go for a walk. 

 

By 11 I am back from my three loops around the park. It is hot, but I am not complaining. The sun feels good. Lots of people in the park, drowsing under trees, chatting on benches, kids play soccer, an ice cream truck drives by, a perfect day. We seem to be in a transition phase for mask wearing. About 50/50. I decide on a compromise; I wear mine like a chin strap, and if the people approaching are wearing, I’ll slip mine over my face, if not, then not. It seems odd when I’m not covered. This will be another legacy of COVID, this sense of unease. 

 

Soon I’ll drag myself up to shower and shave and put on a clean shirt to meet David at the Abbey for lunch. But for a few blissful minutes, nothing. 

 

Lunch at the Abbey, the old neighborhood standby, where everyone knows us too well. Always good. The place was half dead. It’s too hot to eat, someone said, or people are maybe at the beach. It is hot, but beautiful, with a good breeze. Later on Mass Ave, we sit on a park bench while David eats an ice cream, his friend Candy walks by and we end up chatting. Candy, as you will find out within five minutes of talking to her, and every five minutes after that, wrote a book about ten years ago on how the Beatles impacted her generation (of mostly white, very middle class, liberal education, etc), but to her, their music cut deeper than surface level, it became, as she says, her epistemology, the very lens through which she views all things, again her words, and it all started a couple years before, in 1962, when she was 9, when she lost a baton down a sewer grate and took it as a sign that she was not meant for a life like her friend Michelle Kermit, who aspired to be what her mother wanted her to be, a good girl who could sing and do a little ballet and hopefully be attractive and get married to a good boy with a future and move out of Queens and settle in suburban New Jersey to raise a few kids and maybe a dog. No, Not for Candy. Candy knew at age 9, as she studied the sun glinting off her baton down in the muck of the sewer, that life would be bigger for her. Enter the Boys. High on the heady mix of estrogen and Clearasil, Candy’s world would be blown to smithereens one night when she watched the Ed Sullivan show… and well the rest is in her book…

 

She looks a little like Larraine Newman of the original SNL, the same kind of wavy, parted in the middle, longish hair, and very skinny, angular body, but she gives off more of a Diane Keaton vibe, if that makes sense. We talked about Diane Keaton, in the conversation we had about the documentary of Woody Allen, and whether or not his movies will stand the scrutiny of current sexual allegations, if in time he will be a genius or a footnote or both, and Mia Farrow, who was so good as Rosemary (Candy remembered her from the TV series Peyton Place, said she was good in that, too) but kind of insufferable in every thing else, and how could she have ever had sex with either Frank Sinatra or Woody Allen, André Previn gets a pass, and what would a 19 year old girl ever see in a 62 year old man? Candy talks fast, and a lot. It all comes out. She got her hips done last spring, never felt better. Her ex is a schmuck. She is working on a website about the Beatles, both to promote the book, and to be a forum for other like-minded people, and to, as she says, promote higher consciousness and overall sustain evolution of the race to its more refined essence. The flower children still have so much to give the world, a truer sense of self that is more authentic in its rejection of the big lie, the American Dream. Consumerism, which her generation defied, which corrupts, which gives people a false sense of self that will never be satisfied because there will always be another shade of lipstick, a new model car, the next best thing that you will be a loser if you don’t own, is the devil. Candy lives in a two bedroom condo worth easily 850K with a cat on a tree lined side street in Cambridge, sustained by alimony payments from the shmuck, and some good investments in her portfolio. 

 

Anyway we talked for some time, until David had to pee and my phone was about to die and Candy remembered that she forgot an eye appointment because she’s started to notice a floater in her left eye that is definitely not like the aura when she’s about to get a migraine, definitely more of like a shadow in her vision, and she really should not have forgotten this appointment but the day just got away from her, she really needs to go so she can call the office to reschedule. She tells me it was nice to meet me, though this is in fact the fourth time we’ve chatted. And so we part. 

 

I think that Sleeper is still one of the funniest movies I ever saw. One of the first I remember making me laugh. 

 

Sunday. I get up early to get stuff done before it gets too hot. Coffee. Then an hour groaning and sweating on my yoga mat. Now a quick walk before I hunker in with my pile of reading. I’ll sign off here, always leave them wanting more, as they say--