A yes

Instead of sitting home, I roused myself and went to the Hackerspace, and instead of driving there, I rode there. On my way, a white pickup slowed right in the spot, sort of analogous to a blind spot, where I can’t see the human figure in the car, is but their fender is keeping pace right next to and behind me and the driver yells something greetingish and then keeps trying to say stuff as I’m calling “What? Who is that? I can’t see you, who is that? What?” I can’t have a backwards conversation at 15mph. I slow so the window will pull alongside so I can see in, but it slows too.

Cut to the end of the story: The guy who used to fix my car is back in Danbury with a new garage and doesn’t know how not to alarm cyclists.

Then around 7pm at the Hackerspace, I look at the weather and it’s 53° and going down to 48°. I rode there in shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt. I guess I’m leaving sooner than later and suffering a little. No hoodie at the Hackerspace, no jacket, no socks. But 2020’s Randowear stuff is still on shelves in the closet. Maybe… And yes, there’s one long-sleeved men’s large that must have been returned at some point, or has something wrong with its transfer. It’s just thin cotton, but it’s twice as much thin cotton as I’d have otherwise, and it pleases me that I’ll be riding home at twilight in a shirt with that very same bike on it, with its headlight beam part of the design, so…

And then around 7:10, Greenwood Ave. is a parking lot, just one long chain of stopped cars. I can’t see over the little ridge of Blackman Ave., but I figure they’re probably all stopped for a train, .4 miles ahead at Library Place. But I’m cold and I’ve got a tailwind, two reasons to go fast—and I’m on a bicycle: three—so up the rise and yes, past the solid jam of stopped cars and their brake lights, blocks ahead, are the bigger red lights of the crossing and the dark gray of the train. Pump, snake, go, speed past the cars, eyes on drivers’ headrests and door cracks, going harder like I’ve been doing again this week, breathing through my back and pedaling from my butt, and then it’s .3 miles ahead, then everything’s still jammed and it’s .2 and I start thinking, could this go like… yeah, maybe, though it would be total random luck.

Nobody doors me, heart rate’s up, inhale in two stages, bring that oxygen in, now .1 miles and the butt of the gray train starts sliding into the gray shadows where it’ll disappear…and the shadows take it…and the barrier arms are still down and the red lights and the clangs still going, .05, is this going to—? But yes. Without slowing or even pulling my effort a little, the bike hits the intersection at exactly, precisely the perfect moment, the arms up, the clangs stopped, the lights not out yet but the first few cars have let up on the brakes – but it’s too late for them. I’m past the tracks, out of the saddle, and up the shallow little rise before the first car is even shifted past second gear. First through, from .4 miles back.

Though not from .4 miles back. That’s a conceit. From farther back, but no, before that, but no, before that. Yes, from 10 to the -43 seconds after the Big Bang.

If a train leaves Redding Station headed North at X mph and a bicycle leaves Danbury at 7:02 going Southeast at 15mph, does God smile?

God does.

Three uses of a shirt

A MAN ON THE PORCH was giving me the staredown. The Cornwall County Market makes great breakfast burritos with tater tots in them and I remembered (incorrectly, it turned out) that it had an ATM. The staring man was older than me by maybe five years, and presented as tough guy, beefy biker subtype, with a tuft of white goat beard, a black shirt with some design on it or other, and a baseball cap. I recall something on his head, anyway; I think it was a baseball cap. But I don’t know what the cap or the shirt said, because where I was looking, as I came up the steps onto the porch, was straight back into his eyes, So they’re the main thing in my memory.

Part of avoiding conflict is breaking eye contact — not just so the other person won’t escalate, but so I won’t. In adulthood, I’ve expended some energy unlearning this habit. So I looked back at him and went in the store.

Then just as part of my brain was asking, “What’s with that guy?” another part shot over the answer: “You’re wearing your Women’s March t-shirt.”

I was pretty scruffy myself that afternoon; I’d ridden the Batsto 200K on totally the wrong bike the day before, and I was sunburned and favoring my left knee. My own beard was an island of darker gray stubble a little longer than the lighter gray stubble on the rest of my face. Old jeans and black t-shirt. If not for what the shirt said, I could have passed for one of the staring man’s people.

But it’s those teeny differences that are the real betrayals. When your own people turn on you, that stings more than the Other doing it. I had just pulled in to get cash, but now with the ding of a magic wand, I was in enemy territory.

I realized, even at the moment, that I really wasn’t. I’ve been in enemy territory, and this wasn’t it; this was just some bigoted asshole sitting with a sandwich, marking my passage. But you never know who else is on an asshole’s side; this was rural Connecticut, not Stamford, and in an instant, I’d become aware I was a limping Jew in a Women’s March shirt.

The kid at the counter told me there was no ATM, but there was a bank over there. So I limped back out (not badly, just some stiffening up during the hour’s drive) and drove over there for some money because last year, the Tri State Mini Maker Faire — where I was headed — had a booth with Mexican food made by Mexicans. For an Angeleno in the land of Irish Catholics, this is a kind of a big deal, and I didn’t recall that they took debit cards.

I don’t feel a need to retell, here, at length, the whole story of my family being terrorized by white supremacists when I was a kid — crosses burned into the lawn, swastikas on the house, my mom crouching under the mail slot with a kitchen knife, the house broken into, me staying up at night to take shifts on guard — but chances are good you don’t see that bigoted asshole on the porch the same way I do. You might even want to teach me that I can’t possibly know he’s a bigoted asshole.

That’s Use of a Shirt #1.

My friend Kelly didn’t run the Mini Maker Faire this year, but I still wanted to support it, since it’s awesome. The blacksmith was out front again, guiding more kids in the forging of iron coathooks, and this year there was a crepe stand in the building lobby.

“I like your shirt,” said the woman spreading batter on a couple of crepe griddles with one of those crepe rakes that looks like a kid’s wooden propellor toy. “Is that from the Hartford march?”

“No, DC,” I said. “The big one, in 2016. I mean 2017. That January, after—”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, and I still had brevet brain, so putting together sentences good was somewhat beyond me, but No longer in enemy territory, my body reported. Thought you’d like to know. Releasing tension now.

Already knew that, my brain retorted, but the body has its own defense readiness system and doesn’t care what the brain knows.

That’s Use of a Shirt #2.

The family from Avocado Cafe was in the parking lot near the Physics Bus again with burritos, guacamole, and hot sauce corresponding to the three standard degrees of the Connecticut hot sauce scale. Reminder to Angeleno: Keep some actual hot sauce in the glove box. It was still good guacamole, though.

This is not a Use of a Shirt; it’s a plug for Avocado Cafe in Millerton. I was not paid for this endorsement.

We were driving back from dropping some kids with their mom after the Faire when we saw a twentysomething guy on the side of the road with his car doors open and a couple of big black manicured poodles lolloping around on the highway. That is to say, I glanced, barely noticed, and would have kept going because nothing seemed wrong to me, but Kelly, being a devout and diligent asker-if-people-are-all-right, slowed, so I rolled down my window and rose to her example.

The guy had black hair and black scruff, red sneakers, and the kind of kippah you wear all the time, not the kind you take out of a box at the front door of the synagogue. “I’m trying to help these dogs,” he said. He’d seen them out on the highway, where they clearly shouldn’t be, and he’d called the number on their tags, but it didn’t work.

She pulled forward and around, and we got out. “When you say it didn’t work—” I said, “Like—”

“Like there’s — like nothing.” He dialed again. “Like it — Oh — ” This time there was a connection. But it was a recorded message saying the call could not be completed.

There was also an address on the tags, but while the dogs were happy about the yogurt container he’d put down for them, there’d been no leap from dogs happy about yogurt to dogs getting into his car so he could take them home.

Kelly opened the back of her car and started talking to the dogs in a calm and friendly way, and I got the sense that where I was standing, just off the rear fender, was making the open hatchback less friendly, so I moved away, and after some more talking to them, patting the car interior, and putting the yogurt in there, she asked one of the dogs if it was OK for her to pick it up and then did so, setting it in the car, and then the other one jumped in.

While Jonathan followed us in his car to the address on the tags, about four miles away by highway, she said she could tell the dogs were used to women. For their part, the dogs just stood with their faces poking forward between us and watched the car ride until we got close to the address, and then they got excited and we got confused, because it was a closed skiing-goods store.

Within a few minutes, though, Jonathan had found a neighbor who knew the dogs and their owner, who was the owner of the store and had recently moved to a new home. I found her on Facebook and messaged her my number, and though she didn’t answer, cops and an animal control guy in a white pickup became involved, and it was clear things were fine.

During a brief lull while we waited for other people, Jonathan told me he’d been on the way to a social justice seder — and then there was the awkward moment where you say a word and don’t know if the other person knows what it means, so you’re like, Um, do you— but I smiled a little and he said “Member of the tribe?” and I said “Yeah,” and we both knew exactly what the awkwardness had been. His decision to stop had been based on a judgment: Social justice is good, but there are these two dogs right here. So he missed his seder to help them. I told him that was mitzvahs for like a month, plus now he could do something bad.

On our way to pick up Indian food from Great Barrington, Kelly told me again that she could tell those dogs were used to women, and had no use for men, something I could never have discerned. I told her I saw Jonathan look at my shirt when I got out of the car, and it might have made him more comfortable about the random strangers that chance had delivered to him on a rural highway.

That’s not Use of a Shirt #3. It’s still Use #2: Identifying Friendlies.

That morning, the shirt had been the next clean one on the stack in my dresser. Use of a Shirt #3 is it’s a shirt.

The first chord on a Steinway baby grand at an open mic night in Middletown

The first chord of “Kluane Lake” is a drop cap. It’s the start of the piece, but it’s also an announcement that the piece is starting, so listen, and a promise that where it goes next will be a place worth going.

This chord has no time. It just rings. Time doesn’t start until the rest of the phrase, having listened, now takes its own traveling steps. It’s also a chord I love, but which, until Monday night, I had never played on a good piano.

I’ve been threatening to play at an open mic night since separation, when I got the upright piano with the broken leg. I bought the sheet music for the Gymnopedies and learned my favorite one—which I’d always imagined being able to play—by penciling in the note names, and relearned “On the Rebound,” a Floyd Cramer piece that I learned the first time when I took piano lessons as a kid. I practiced when the boys went to bed. I hope they remember it when they hear the Gymnopedie in a movie or something after I’m gone.

•••

I also started writing songs at the piano. I thought I’d have a set of three post-divorce songs soon enough, and I’d go play them at an open mic night somewhere.

I no longer remember the details of the first one I finished. I think it was good, but I’ll have to refer to a recording to remind myself.

The second one I finished was much better. I think it works. It’s the first song I played and sang Monday night, slightly flummoxed by the microphone boom arm between me and the keyboard, the way I couldn’t tell how loud my voice was in the speakers, and the way the orientation of the piano put most of the audience behind me.

The third one I finished writing wasn’t a new song; it was “Kluane Lake,” a piano piece I’d started when I was much younger and never found a way to finish. One day in my three-boy home in my new life, my hand went to a chord that was down a whole step instead of up, and that unlocked its completion. I still have things I want to improve in the B section, but good enough: That and the second song could be a two-song open mic set.

•••

I’d looked, on and off since landing in Connecticut, for open mic nights 1) with pianos 2) that weren’t at bars 3) and didn’t feature session musicians jamming. I didn’t find any for a long time. Now, with two new pieces burning a hole in my pocket, wanting to be spent, I searched again and found one. 40 miles away, Monday nights. I’d already visited half a dozen open mics a year or two earlier; now I drove out to this one, just to scope it out, not to play.

I didn’t hear the piano that night—no one had signed up to play it—but it was the place. Coffeehouse vibe, even though it was a performance space, and I was told they kept the piano tuned. A few weeks later, I psyched myself up and then chickened out. Monday night, I went back and signed up.

All I really wanted to tell you, though, was what it was like to play this one declarative, declamatory chord. What came out of this Steinway baby grand was a sound my beaten Krakauer upright with the broken leg could only point at. It was truer to the music in my head than even my head could be. The clarity and flat-out power of the chord . . . I don’t have words. It contained more of the divine than I’ve ever heard in it, and I’ve heard it maybe a thousand times.

My old Krakauer with the broken leg makes digital pianos—even the ones with expensive samples and the latest algorithms—sound like toys. This Steinway baby grand did not make my Krakauer sound like a toy; it sounded like what the Krakauer meant but could never fully express. It sounded like how a lake in the Yukon should sound when put to music.

My playing . . . was all right. My nerves in the strangeness of that performance space will improve, and more of the music will be unhindered by them. The B section will improve, too, in small compositional decisions that, when enough accumulate, will nudge it in the right direction on the pedestrian-to-sublime spectrum.

Next time, though, I’ll just do “On the Rebound.” It’s upbeat, there’s no singing, and I can do audience hand claps. I want to see if they’ll let me turn the piano around, though. It’s hard to connect with an audience when you’re facing the back wall.

WTF, Willoughby?

WHEN WE’D ONLY been here two months, my new town had its “Trick or Treat Street,” a daytime candy stroll before Halloween arrived. Families strolled, kids ran ahead, shops shoveled candy into bags and little orange buckets, and the local GOP headquarters handed chocolate bars with political stickers on them directly to children.

Next to GOP headquarters is an Irish dance place. I’m not sure which storefront these two revelers were affiliated with:

In case it’s not clear: Picture is of two white people dancing to loud music in front of a store. One is in a gorilla mask topped by a rasta hat and dreadlocks, the other is in a fake mustache and Afro wig. They are being applauded by the other white people around them. (I’ve cropped/blurred the photo to avoid showing faces without permission.)

I stood and just looked for long enough that people noticed me.

MY KIDS DON’T go to school in my town. They go where their mom lives. She’s not rich, but it’s where a lot of rich people live. (When I drop the boys at school, there are beautiful women out jogging or waving goodbye to schoolbuses when the rest of us are on our way to work. AHA, I thought. I know where I am! I’m in Upper West Side, Connecticut!) That must be why the schools are so highly ranked, which was one of the reasons we moved to the area when separating.

My kids participated in an afterschool program for a while. The auditorium is right at the school entrance, and when I went to pick them up one day, there was a group of kids practicing a song and dance onstage: Aw, Lawdy, pick a bale of cotton…

THE SCHOOL HAS a DARE program. They had a graduation, where the kids sang a song and presented the cop with the gift that cops always seem to want at these things. (They did repeated collections for their own gift when I attended the NYPD “Citizens’ Police Academy,” too.)

One of the speakers was a selectman. I don’t know what that is, but he had the bearing of someone who thought he mattered. He told the kids to watch out for drugs, and gave them the example of a boy who’d died of overdose only the year before.

“No one would ever have expected it,” the selectman despaired. “He was an all-American kid. Blond hair, blue eyes…”

There were a couple of kids present who weren’t white. I tried to imagine how they’d hear that statement. Then I tried to imagine how the rest would hear it.

I know how I heard it.

I GOT INTO a conversation with a young woman of color when I was riding my bike around the area. I’d just discovered a little trail that let out on a sidewalk by the train station.

She pointed out where she’d encountered a pickup with KKK members in it, over on the main street.

I told her about having “KKK” and swastikas painted on my house growing up.

I work at home a lot, and sit facing the street. Police cars sweep by my house a lot.

THIS IS WHERE my kids will grow up.

We moved here from Inwood, at the top of Manhattan, where the cabbies at the airport all tell you it’s the Bronx. It was a largely Dominican neighborhood; my little white boys were in the minority. I think that’s a healthy state for a little white boy. Now they’re in not only a majority, but a near-unanimity. And I’m just Dad. Their friends are about to be more important.

“They get it at home,” says the standard line about various bad -isms. But in our family, they got it from school. The sexism in our neighborhood in Inwood was blatant. Street harassment was nearly unceasing. The leader of a kids’ group was excoriated by parents (of both sexes) for letting boys cook on a camping trip. (That leader was male.) Local women running a summer day camp at a school had the kids put on a skit in which the main character, a boy, went to college and all the girls sat on stage, admired him, and served him food.

My kids didn’t get it at home; they brought it home from the playground, and I had to tell them their friends were wrong.

They just barely believed me. Sort of. Dad countering their friends’ declarations did fly, somewhat, when they were six, seven, eight, nine. Now they’re ten, and starting middle school in a few months. They’ll be big deals, and their friends will be one big barely-differentiated sheet of white.

And the selectman will probably speak again.

IT’S WHITE, I say, when I’m done saying the things I love about my new town, and start on the things I don’t. Like white. Like white-white-white. There are isolated exceptions, here and there, but it’s white. The main time I see nonwhite people is behind shop counters. Overheard conversations during Baltimore were about why they would do that to their own neighborhoods. Were they stupid?

I haven’t seen any burning crosses. I haven’t heard the N-word.

Still. Willoughby.

WTF?