Wednesday, April 29.

My brother has an errand for me.  I must go down to his house when the men come with a trailer to carry his old Range Rover up to his house out on the Eastern end of Long Island.  It's a 2005, with more than 100,000 miles on it, and it wouldn't be good if I'm driving it up and it breaks down in the Greater New York area these days with the Coronavirus.  He tells me about his on Tuesday.  I was sort of expecting to know at some point generally what time the men would be coming by, so I can plan my day.

Do I do yoga outside?  Will I get the call at mid-day, or noon, or the afternoon, or later... I do down and read my book, Dark Nights of the Soul, down on the picnic bench overlooking the river.  It's a bit bright out.  A breeze picks up.

Going anywhere these days, you have to be ready.  For my brother's house, I'll need his house keys, and my key chain that has the key to my Kryptonite bike lock.  I'll need the right clothes.  I'll need a mask of some sort.  I'll bring my bottle of rubbing alcohol to wipe my hands off.  I'll need to bring my phone.  I'll need to bring my wallet, and there a few checks I might deposit at the bank ATM near Wisconsin and M Street.  I'll try to do some grocery shopping too.

Should I just go down there?  I text my brother around 1:30 in the afternoon.  "No, who knows if they're coming today."

Finally around 4:15 I come back to the apartment from the bluff.  I change into shorts for yoga, and am heading across the street when I get the call.  "They will be there in twenty minutes."  Okay, let me get on the road.  So now I go back in, and get ready again, a water bottle for the bike, no time to change, go down to the basement to pull the yellow mountain bike out, and off I go.  I'm halfway to Georgetown when my bandana face covering slips, and it's too windy to adjust it back.  By now the sidewalks have gotten a bit more crowded.  I dismount and walk up the steep cobbled hill to Prospect Street, where I find a road crew paving the street for the surrounding blocks with blacktop.  I get back on the bike, time running shorter now, and ride carefully past the elderly woman who steps out onto the sidewalk now, and get around her finally, and then to my brother's house, feeling a bit sticky by now.  I lock the bike up on the south side of the street, ease the blue courier bag off my shoulders, take my helmet off.

Let's see, he wants the beach floats, and a set of golf clubs put into his truck.  Okay, I'm loading the Range Rover up in the back hatch, and then Mom calls, telling me she needs me to take her back to her other house, and when is that going to happen?  This does not make me pleased, having to hold the phone up while I load up the back of the trunk...  Do I have the right set of golf clubs?

My phone is ringing with another call, so I ask mom if I can call her back...  It's the guy.  They can't get the truck with the sixty foot trailer down the street so I need to drive the truck over to, and he tells me the name of a place that rings no bell with me, so I have to look that up.  So, I guess we're good to go, and I start the old truck up and take her down around N Street, two blocks to Wisconsin Avenue then up a block, and ah, I see the guys with their heavy pick-up truck and the trailer with two cars on it already.  So I turn back onto Dumbarton, and up the next block, then up to O Street, then back left onto Wisconsin and pulling up behind the trailer.  I guess it wasn't that hard after all.  It'll just feels a little bit weird.

So, that's all it takes.  A slender kid comes up to me politely, black tee shirt, black pants, and there's another guy by the trailer.  Okay, so I pick up my cell phone from the console, look around, do I have everything...  I step back, oh, could you sign something, yes, sure, I sign.  I stand by another moment, but that's all it is, and I guess I have things to do, so...  The two men decide they want to switch the Range Rover up to the second spot on the trailer.  It doesn't take long for the kid to back up Mazda off the trailer ramp, and then up goes the Range Rover.  I cross the street, there's Peter Edelman and his wife Marion Wright coming toward me, but I'm not going to bug them.  I take a photo to send to my brother, and I walk away.

Back to my brother's house, in these awkward times, splashing rubbing alcohol on my hands again.   Call mom, but my temper isn't too long.  I walk the blocks over to Stachowski's butcher shop, then back to the big house, and then locking up and off again, the last errand to go the bank machine.  And then to ride the bike back up the hill.

Okay, so I lug myself and my bike up the hill.  Back to my bum life.


The next day I'm up.  It's been a week since I got back from visiting Mom, and time to vacuum and put things back into some order, which has not been done since the last shipment of boxes.  I need to make room for some yoga practice.

It's hard to look directly at the shape of life now.  Opportunities gone, years lost, nothing but a lackey in the restaurant business, having been taken for a ride, and how will I ever get back on course, so that I'll have a roof over my head when I'm old.  The price for my years of irresponsibility.


But my reflection, as I wait anxiously...  No one wants to wait.  And I look back at all the frustrations I must have caused people, girls in college, when I misread messaging and needed to be more forward, pushed myself a bit, pushed my luck, girls, academics, careers...  The frustrations I caused... Just horrible.  And I misread the resultant anger and frustration as well, and things just got worse.

This wasn't so much in the vocabulary of a country boy, I tell you.  I take my time at things.  And the world does not have time.  I might have thought I had time.  But, as it turns out, I don't.  I regressed back into some childhood, instead of pushing on, somehow.