Rainy days and Sundays May 6, 2024
The heavy rain came later yesterday, even though we had a
steady drizzle all day, making laundry a little longer as the dryers struggle
to make up for the moist air.
I did not travel far from my car, except for the Sunday ritual
coffee at the Dunkin in Secaucus, watching instead the parade of people making
their way to and from the bar across the street, the eye-opener crowd that
pretend they are looking for the meal that comes with the discounted drinks.
This part of the world is largely unchanged – the name of
the bar, the new Arab restaurant where the Chinese take-out had been, the Bollywood
kids’ academy in place a jewelry store. Yet if I don’t look too closely, I
might think I’m back in 1992 when I first started at a reporter here, or even 1990
when I worked as a baker briefly at the Dunkin, or even 1983, when I worked in
the Fotomat in the Acme Supermarket (now a CVS) parking lot.
Indeed, I have a long history with this place, having passed
through here many times on the bus from Paterson to New York during the late
1960s – though all the “clubs” are gone, as are the slaughter houses and the
green houses.
A half block from the laundr-o-mat is where I bought my
first IBM PC (upgrading from Atari which I had since 1982), the box of a
building having changed colors several times from the pale green back then
through a stage when someone chose to paint it cream, and these days a bright
red icon nobody can miss.
I talked to my former colleague from the Bloomfield
newspaper office who I once got a job with the weekly newspaper here when their
reporter quit. He has been undergoing all of the nasty medical issues I
suffered two or so years ago, but remains his same grumpy self, working as a
bus driver. I last saw him here going not the bar for the free brunch a few
years ago. He still lives only a few blocks from where I live up the hill in
North Hudson.
Although most Sundays when I do laundry here, I run into
people I know or knew, such as one of the councilmen a few weeks ago, another
reporter last week, and often, the mayor in his jeep with The Beatles logo on
its back.
I saw no one familiar yesterday, and came home, trying to
keep my laundry dry long enough to get I from the car into the house.
When the rain came more heavily, the baseball game I was listening
to ceased, and never resumed. Later, Tuck, the cat who we released back onto
the street earlier in the week, decided he wanted to come in and sleep in a dry
place. It took a while to convince him to relinquish our bed when we decided we
needed use of it, and with a few bribes of really good food, he got down long
enough for us to get in.
In the morning, he insisted on leaving the house again, and
once outside, resumed terrorizing the other neighborhood cats. I had to pull
him out of the cat house in our yard so that another male cat could flee.
This is, of course, the nature of the world, where the tough
survive as long as they can retain their strength, and Tuck, as wounded as he’s
been, insists on maintaining his role outside, even when at times, he’ll climb
on my chest when I am sleeping to insist on pets.
I had hoped to convince him into becoming an inside cat, the
way I have several of his adversaries (who still live with us in other rooms),
but he is too much settled in his ways, and I fear at the end of the day, he
will cease existence by pushing himself into one too many frays with cats much tougher
than he is.
If he survives, we’ll take him back in, fix him, and hope maybe he’ll have learned his lesson and remain inside. But he’s too much like me in that regard, and clings to what he is and must be until the very end.
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