The Day That I Left My House In An Angry Mood To Go Do Laundry And Found A Parade
I pretty much forgot about St. Patrick's Day this year, and so thought I was imagining the sound of bagpipes as I walked to the laundromat. But I wasn't. As beautiful as the music and the costumes and all of that was, the best part of the whole thing was that behind each dignified, orderly procession of oldish Irish male bagpipers, there was inevitably some dude in jeans and a green sweatshirt drunkenly weaving along, waving an Irish flag and trying to conduct the music, or the applause, or possibly something else.

This is just the latest example of New York's generosity to me. Other things that I've found since my arrival:

1. A rolodex. This was out on the curb during trash day. I haven't looked through it too much yet, but it's a big, sturdy metal rolodex that's filled with places to buy paint and carpentry supplies and tools and all kinds of other things. It seemed depressingly final to me, abandoning a rolodex. It takes so long to build a good one. Maybe all the numbers are in somebody's cell phone now.

2. A oujia board. A really beautiful, heavy one that's intricately painted different colors and drilled so that you can hang it on your wall. Which I did.

3. The statue of liberty. On the F train heading toward Manhattan, on one of the first few completely bewildering days I was here, I happened to glance out of the window in time to see the Statue of Liberty way off in the distance. Just tiny and indistinct, not in a textbook or on a postcard. It was one of the first moments I realized that I was actually in New York.

4. A computer keyboard, from which I pried the keys: control, home, esc, option, and end. With the aid of a brick. Slightly drunk.

5. A stretch of sidewalk where, just about every day, someone draws chalk outlines of the shadows of parking meters and bicycles, so that daylight seems to extend into the night, or until whenever the chalk shadows wear away.