Tag: commute

At 6:30am it is already steamy, like in that tropical greenhouse in the garden, and the religious school near the park looks vaguely colonial. There is a jungle of trees near it and some extremely loud birds – I think they are the escapee parrots that settled in the cemetery on a day foraging trip – that make it look, smell and sound positively tropical.
I close my eyes and pretend I’m in São Paulo or San Juan or Santo Domingo or some other warm fragrant place that begins with San…

A man ambles into the train with a walker, not particularly old looking – he might even be in his 30s.
He is wearing an elaborate apparatus with plastic tubes on his back.
He says that he is homeless, has cancer, lost vision … and something else.
I’ve been in this city for some time but it just keeps getting worse.
What kind of fcked up country are we that this needs to happen, while there is Friday night revelry going on at rooftop bars outside?

A young woman waited for us at the subway gate, while we were saying our daily hello to Respect, the man who sells newspapers at subway entrance. He is Jamaican and a marathoner and a father, he knows L since he was even tinier, and they love each other and he taught him to fist bump.

When we reached the woman, she smiled at us sweetly, we smiled back, and then she said, “It’s 2017. Very soon, black people won’t have to coon to you anymore”, swiped her card and disappeared into the gate.