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Friday, August 31, 2001

Have you forgotten? Have you forgiven? Tell me, are you living just a little in your past, every day?

I pass by this lady every day on my way to work. She's always walking west on 9th Street, I'm always walking east. When I started walking that way, four years ago (God, four years), she was this fiesty older woman, head in a headscarf, huge gold earrings, Hermes bag from who-knows-what-season-decades-ago, charging about town with a granny-cart full of groceries or rolled up rugs or art supplies. Too much makeup, headstrong, walking quickly, but sort of frail, and always by herself. Now she wears a battered overcoat (once stylish, still kind of interesting but dirty and moth-holed) and walks with a metal cane, favoring her right leg. Her makeup is horrifying, like Baby Jane, and her headscarf is always crooked and twisted to one side. She walks impossibly slowly. Her dyed hair has grown out 5 or 6 inches of roots. She makes me sadder than anyone I've ever seen. I want to ask her if she needs help, but this is New York and you just can't do that here. When does the self-sufficient independent become the lonely loner? When's it going to happen to me?

In possibly cheerier news, I am uploading a slight redesign today (whee, CSS) and resurrecting this site from the dead.

Posted at 02:58 PM

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