I woke thinking about what I miss most about pre-Covid life. Every week it’s different but today I miss my old summer practice of slipping into movie theaters on Monday mornings to see the newest releases in delicious cool quiet surrounded only by other (cheap) cinephiles. I’d pay for one show, then sneak into another and then another and another before finally emerging into the still-sweltering early evening. Falling into step with all the other New Yorkers making their way to dinner and drinks and drama and doldrums–first by foot across town and then by ferry across the river and then again by foot up the Williamsburg hill. Floating in a blur of the films I’d just seen and the film of all the strangers with whom I was moving, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, all of us beautiful in our sweaty sullen noisy throng, framed by the rising steam and NYC skyline. O my god I miss the ordinary-extraordinary physical intimacy of anonymous city life.
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Hard Times Are Just Across the Street
Bread line, 1932.
I live across the street from an elementary school.
Over the last 20 years, this has proven interesting for any number of reasons. When I was deciding whether I wanted children, the building loomed as a daily litmus test. Was I more charmed or irritated at the hours of 8am and 3pm, when I couldn’t walk a single step outside my door without tripping over a throng of grade schoolers? Did I find their neon-and-sparkle gear, their high-pitched cries and laughter, grating or poignant?
(From my child-free state, you may draw your own conclusion about my conclusion.)
On election days, sign-bearing advocates and impatient voters flock the block, adding an extra frisson to the air. And three-quarters of our neighborhood street parking usually is claimed by teachers—not that I’m complaining, of course. (Or I am, but don’t have a pot to piss in on this point.)
But now that school has been out of session since March, the building across the street has been repurposed as a food pantry, and most weekdays our neighborhood is colonized by long lines.
I’ve come to know the pantry’s administrators, have even helped out a bit, and what I’ve been learning about the “food-insecure” is that most of us have absolutely no idea who among us is really, really struggling. Especially now.
After three decades of living in this city, I recognize many of the pantry’s recipients, if only by face.
There are people whose struggles are visible, whether because they are mumbling the same phrase over and over or carrying their life’s possessions in garbage bags or flat-out wearing those bags. Then there are the baby-boomers with neatly pressed clothes and averted eyes, the old ladies wearing flowered house dresses and been-there-done-that jutting jaws. The green-haired punks who ride up on souped-up bikes, the hipsters sporting hemp backpacks, the young mothers with too-bright smiles and too-quiet children in strollers.
People of all ages, races, walks of life line up across the street, united only by the fact that they do not have enough food. By the fact that the other social services that should have been in place for a national disaster—the financial relief, the rent freezes, the affordable health care—are nowhere to be found.
So these people stand in downpours and in terrible heat, waiting for what by all rights should already be in their larder.
Upon returning from the Catskills last month, I realized that in my hasty departure I’d left behind my groceries. And that, for the first time in my life, I was so broke I myself might need to cross the street.
I wouldn’t have been ashamed to do it, but would have felt ridiculously guilty. That, with my excellent education and personal resources, I should not have reached that point. Which is to say: I would have felt as every other struggling American is made to feel. That my deficits stemmed from personal failures rather than public ones.
Black Panther Free Food Program recipients, 1968
Between kind donations and a new insurgence of clients, I circumvented the need for the pantry that week. But I know it’s there, and am both relieved that it is and sad that it has to be.
It’s 7:44 am as I write this, and mawing on oatmeal at my front window, I can see that across the street people are already stationing outside the pantry door. From my heart I send each and every one the hug I no longer can physically bestow.
These are not necessarily end times, but these are very hard times. The bad old days are here again, and the new dystopia is now.
Pray–and protest!–for us all.
Donate here to the NYC food bank. And if you like what you’re reading, donations are gratefully received on behalf of this blog as well.
A funny thing happened under that full moon….
Boy o boy o boy o boy. We got the brilliant idea to do our full moon ritual by the river tonight and assumed the light rain would soon enough subside since the tropical storm wasn’t due til tomorrow. But you know: two witches + full moon= insane sudden downpour that cleared out the area before we noticed what was happening (it being a full moon ritual and all) and next thing we knew we were locked in the river park in the pitch black with the rain coming down like it was a vertical pool and to exit we had to wade into the river trailing crystals and sage to climb out over the rocks on the other side of the fence and only when we got back home did we realize we’d dropped our keys in the park and had to climb back back in over the rocks–soaked in city rain and city river, laughing hysterically with our clothes basically quotation marks rather than actual coverups as people under awnings gaped at the two wild-eyed amazons essentially bare-breasted in an empty, unmanicured field in what once upon a time was new york city. Which is to say: if THIS magical ritual in THIS magical dystopia doesn’t clear out all the UNmagical garbage accumulated over the last lunar cycle well then NOTHING ever will. I think we’re good, though.