Trees Cast Their Spell

The other day I cleaned my room up and decided that loud rock n’ roll was required.  A call with a friend led me to The Who and though “Amazing Journey” sounded amazing, as always, the air drumming and windmilling was a flat because, even at full volume, with my desktop speakers, it wasn’t anywhere near, loud enough.  Today I hooked up the birthday present I’d gotten myself, a faux-vintage Marshall head that has some proper heft.  I had on the preferred version of "Driving South" that I knew from twenty five years ago on the Hendrix BBC sessions where you can feel the lead, as he turns his own toggle up to ten. 

We drove down to Brooklyn today.  We had it in our mind to visit my sister and see an old friend and eat some “real” food from Japan and China.  I stopped toward the end of the New York State throughway and grabbed an espresso. Walking in, I was notably groggy.  It was only yesterday that I got the second vaccine and the espresso rather than dispelling the malaise just brought me to a more agitated sense of awareness.  Palisades Parkway, the George Washington Bridge, the West Side Highway, “yes honey, it’s the same Route 9 that goes all the way up to Poughkeepsie,” the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which doesn’t seem to be called that anymore and soon we’re cutting up into Sunset Park.

 

Chinese, certainly neither my wife nor my daughters like the idea of plodding through Greenwood Cemetery en route to Industry City where we are to have lunch.  Reluctantly we enter the hallowed ground and slowly the radiant day and the three-and-four-hundred-year-old trees cast their spell.  My sister has a surprise for me at a turn, down by a pond I confront my full name on a tomb stone.  Poor John perished in 1918.  Unclear if he fell in Verdun or if he ended up a victim of the Spanish Flu.  Perhaps he was kicked in the head by a horse.  I pose for a photo and make light of the somber sight but it draws unwanted attention to the fact that I am sick and feeling sicker. 

 

By the time we reached Industry City, standing in one line for Okonomiyaki and another for Ramen, I seemed to be sinking.  The food will help, I suggest to myself.  Delicious, it was enjoyable to eat and it succeeded in making me even more tired that I had been before.  Now it was clear that I was neither interested nor capable of joining the girls on a shopping run.  My sister got me a Uber and I went back to her place to crash.  Out like a light on my nephew’s bed, I was awakened when he returned and asked “are you OK?”  I grunted.  Then my wife downstairs yelled my name four or five times and then called me on wechat.  “Are you OK?”  I asked myself the same question.  I was not OK.  I took a shower in a strange shower, which went from scalding to freezing and back again, over and over.  Slowly I got dressed and considered whether we should cancel the dinner we were now late for.  But the water, once it had been properly adjusted helped and, sipping a glass of sparkling water, I reckoned that was good enough to drive the hour required to go from Sunset Park to Flushing, where we were to meet our old friend and enjoy some proper hotpot.  I’d heard that the second shot of the vaccine packed-a-punch, and now I believe it.

 

 

 

Saturday, 4/24/21