I'll Pencil You In

"Maybe we can get together for a drink this week, Wednesday or Thursday..." he said, part question, part statement.

"Yeah, I'm free."

"Ok, we will keep in touch," he said motioning with his phone. He hadn't yet put it back in his pocket after we exchanged numbers.

Yeah, I'm free

On my walk to Prospect Park last Friday and got a call and easily scheduled a meeting for this upcoming Friday.

"What day works for you?"

I answer that question any number of ways: "Any day works for me", "I'm free all week", "I can work around your schedule" or the ol' answer-a-question-with-a-question, "Well what day works for you?"

Personal Belongings

I took my usual people-watching stance at the Laundromat this morning, partly because it was way more crowded than I had expected so getting worked up and harried wasn’t worth it, it was pretty early (for me, anyway) and I only had one load of laundry to do.

For those of us who don’t have the luxury of a washing machine at home or a laundry room in the basement of our apartment building, there is the world of the Laundromat. Laundry is a personal thing that we do in a public place. My clothes were in the midst of being churned in soap and water when a Jewish woman dragged a huge black garbage bag into the Laundromat, hoisted it up and plopped it right into one of the wheeled baskets. I’ll admit, I just watched but nothing about what happened jumped out at me until the Jamaican guy dressed in a white T-shirt and paint-splattered “work pants” told her the carts dem fa clean clothes and why she a come up in dey and dutty dem up. She asked why it would be dirty and he told her because she had just dragged the bag along the ground. She nodded in realization, then smirked and shrugged it off. She had no intention of taking her bag out of the cart until other folks started giving her dirty looks over her dirty clothes. The older Hispanic woman who I encountered earlier that was “using” a machine (with nothing in it) that I had asked about was loading two other machines that the Jewish woman inquired about, and didn’t get.