When I Becomes We

4 Snaps Wednesday

1. I had an episode with the water jug. Five gallons might as well be a thousand when you’re trying to turn it upside down and stick it on the thing with the thing. It started to trickle before I got it into the right position to make the turn-over, and then the futility and the weight made me start to laugh and moan, hunched over with my ass tucked under like a human question mark, and I knew that was it. I did get it upside down, finally, but oh god now there was a small pond, and a jug sitting half-crooked kind of like a barrel with 4 well-placed bullet holes.

2. It’s amazing the number of strange experiences you have by yourself… One of the strangest is scrolling, although maybe it is the same as being a modern day flaneur who spends his free time strolling, wandering the streets at a leisurely pace taking it all in, making observations in a detached and curious way. No it’s not that. It’s more solitary and less sensuous, more like walking down a long sterile hall opening doors. Whether someone says: Come in, or: Look at me! or: Get the fuck out, it’s all the same. You are still alone, missing something, trying to “fill the hollow”, a term I learned about while scrolling online.

3. Here’s another: I’m walking through the gym locker-room in my bathing suit down a steamy hall. It’s like I am entering the gates of the type of heaven you see in a 1970s movie with Warren Beattie which it kind of is, both because the pool for me is a type of heaven, and because there was, in fact, such a scene in the movie Heaven Can Wait where Warren Beatty enters the pearly gates with Buck Henry. This is a movie I watched, for some reason more than once, with my Dad who loved Jack Warner, a cranky tough guy with a good heart. That made me think about him, my dad, and then my mom, and then how they both are gone now, and what that means to me, being an orphan of sorts, a structure with some missing scaffolding, and I turned the corner and crashed head on into a woman rounding from the other direction, and we both screamed like old ladies at the sight of a mouse, and then we stopped and stood still, laughing with relief and open mouth joy like we were now connected for life by the smallest experience. It was no longer just a strange one that I was having by myself, now there was someone else sharing it, that most exquisite moment, like birth or death or sex ,when for the briefest amount of time, I becomes we.

4. I’m not trying to pretend I was team Knicks from the start. They had knocked out the Sixers, who are, whether I watch them or not, or still live in Philly or not, my home-team. And not only that, I like the Spurs, loved Coach Pop from the old days, and Wemby, Harper and Castle from the new (despite the “Mom, TF??” text from my daughter in Brooklyn) And I rooted for them, even though after game four it was impossible, because how could I not root for the team that came back from being so far behind; for Jalen with his sad eyes; and Josh Hart with his “I will fuck you up” energy. How could I not root for the coach who looks like a sweet, friendly neighbor who waves from his car as he turns into his driveway, or for a team who has been waiting for 53 years, which is just too long to wait for anything. I could justify myself by telling you I lived in NY for the first year of my life, or for 10 more years much later, but that’s not why I ending up cheering for the Knicks. I cheered because of the fans, because of the New Yorkers who came out in every borough, out in the streets and parks and restaurants and in subway cars, watching on screens, big and little. I wanted to be there, with five hundred strangers, holding our breath and then screaming in that one perfect moment when we forget everything except how good it feels to be us.