ManicDDaily

Full Moon in City

It was a great relief, at first, to step into the warm summer evening.  Not only was it Friday evening—the air conditioning in my New York City office is cold enough to leave one, after a long day or week, chilled through.

In the embrace of the sultry air, I decided, on a lark, to walk all the way from mid-town on the East Side down to the West Village where I was meeting someone for dinner.  How wonderful, I thought, to live in a  city I could walk, a city with sidewalks, avoidable tunnels and throughways, a city that allowed for random exercise.

A few blocks later and I began to wonder  if the good effect of the exercise  was not counterbalanced by the negative effect of the pollution.  Plus my eyes were grainy with soot.

But I had told myself I was going to walk, and, as followers of this daily blog may sense, once I make a commitment, I am not readily shaken from it.

Soon, I was thinking of Horatio Hornblower, and how, in one of the novels, his feet become so blistered he can hardly hobble.

Still I kept a steady pace, even in places where the crowd was thick enough to warrant the regular dodge, and a hand clamped hard on my purse.   I kept it up through hoards of shoppers, cafe-gazers, people pushing into and out of subway entrances.  I kept it up even when my slightly rapid, attempting-a-light-heart pace, felt very out of place.  Although, truthfully, there is nothing like a walk in the streets of New York City to make almost anything odd about yourself  seem as run of the mill as an annual 5K at a Gold Medal Flour factory

“Characters” abound.  Some of them fill you with wonder; some pity; some dread.  Most you just don’t want to stare at too long.

Around mid-town, for example, there was the seemingly elegant woman wearing a fur-lined mad bomber hat.  Her walk stately walk was burdened by bags from such high-end stores that, at first, I wondered whether she was someone traveling from a Northern place, or, perhaps, in the midst of moving, someone, who, despite the 90 degree day, simply felt like wearing her mad bomber hat instead of packing it.  Then I saw her face.

Then there was the guy sitting on sidewalk, propped up against a mailbox, on an extremely crowded 34^th Street.  It took me a moment to understand that a large black dog was lying (on its back) between his legs, its wandering muzzle seeking out the large slice of pizza he balanced on his chest.

After supper in the village, I felt so stuffed with Ethiopian food – there’s something about those spongey pancakes – I felt the need to walk some more.  It was cooler now that it was dark, less gritty though the wind had picked up.   A huge, beautiful, orangish, full moon hovered just above the shorter buildings, blocked by most others.  I pointed it out to one trio who waited with me at a stop light (they thanked me), did not point it out to the guy in the small park who, for no reason except perhaps to show off for his friends, called me a very nasty epithet (I figured that he wouldn’t thank me),  did not even think about it when I dashed across one street in Tribeca to avoid the darting dark shadow near my footsteps (yes, I know what it was and they terrify me!), and, finally, as the street corners became a little more open at the bottom of the Island, found it again.

Fell into a doze almost immediately when I finally got home, shoes off.  The cooling summer night that now wafted through my open windows felt somehow softer from the other side of a screen, from inside four walls, and I tried not to think too much about that man, that woman, that curse, that dog.