It is a lovely day here in the city, in the sixties apparently, and I'd been hungering for some outdoors since I walked to the subway this morning. Around 3:30 I decided it was finally time (I'd eaten lunch intra-office, after all) so I set off.

I ended up in the park, soaking up the winter sun as it set over DSW and eating a not insignificant portion of an Entenmann's Fudge Iced Golden cake with my bare hands. It was wonderful. It had actually been kind of difficult to find an actual ground-based patch of sunshine--I could see it, up there in the sky, landing on building roofs or even entrances farther down the Avenue, but couldn't seem to actually track the damn thing down. The park was a reliable choice. I put the cake box on the grocery bag next to me and slowly finished off the last little square, the encrusted roofs of frosting extruding over the slightly stale cake maybe a little too far, this particular cake over-iced, I thought, maybe, but then dismissed it. The damn thing was delicious. Even better with your bare hands too, sometimes.

Next to me, there was a gay or gay-ish man talking on his cell phone. "Where was your neice who killed herself?" he said. Later, he said, "Did I tell you I'm going back to school? I'm taking a course at Cooper Union on memoir writing. I got a scholarship." After he hung up the phone, he picked up his book and started reading it again. The book was called Dry. Earlier, he had said, "I guess he didn't really kill himself, but he was fucked up all the time, and he died at forty, so same thing." Earlier, he had said, "If one more person told me you oughta write a book I figured it was time, you know? Not like I'm doing anything else with myself."

Around the corner, a small girl was sitting in one of those strollers-with-sleeping-bag things, napping, bathing in the sun. She woke up and turned her head up and opened one eye. She stretched as much as she was able and the sun embraced her completely, as much as it was able, diffused by the ugly architecture and the barren trees.
posted by Mike B. at 4:36 PM 0 comments