A reflection on summer.

All summer long, I tried to just stay home on my day off on Saturdays, since there could be too much craziness otherwise.

I remember one day I took a short bike trip one early afternoon, and this car swerved around a traffic cone to jet ahead of another one on a street that was supposedly closed off except for residential traffic, and it and the other car got into a race, jetting down the street and jagging back and forth between traffic cones and those big traffic-blocking barrels, like they were in some racing action movie or something.

And that was on an early afternoon!

I find behavior like that scary.

 It's sad that I have to worry like that, and it restricts my movements.

3 instances of inconsiderate people...

 ...on the subway, lately, all on the same trip:

1) Two (young) (black) guys who sit in the middle of a subway car with their masks pulled down and some loud music on, one of them trying to rap very loud in a sing-song voice even though he's tone-deaf, and this goes on and on, and the other passengers just look at each other and shake their heads.

2) A (late middle-aged) (big) (beefy) (black) guy who keeps his mask on while he talks on a cell phone a couple of seats over from me, but later he gets up and looks out the door as if looking for someone, then later he goes off somewhere, then later he comes back with a(n old) (skinny) (light-skinned black) guy, and they stand near me with their masks pulled down, just talking.

2) A (very dark-skinned) (African) guy who has his mask pulled down, just talking into his cell phone endlessly, in a very very very loud voice, very emphatically, so that his voice fills the otherwise pretty much empty car.

Midgets at bars.

The other week, I saw a picture of an old bar in the city on social media, where at least some of the bartenders sometimes were apparently midgets.

So, I showed it to the one (older) (townie) lady who sometimes works the front desk at the resthome, since she and her husband used to run a bar.

"No, I've never heard of that place," she was like, but then she mentioned this other bar in the city where the owner is a midget.

"It's over on [name of a major street]," she was like, and I was like, "Yeah, in [the name of the neighborhood it's in], I've been in there," and since she seemed surprised, I said that I had stopped in there a few times since a friend lives nearby.

She quickly picked up the conversation again, and she said that the midget is actually the owner and she lives upstairs, and that her husband knows her, and that she has a camera system set up and will check in to see how the workers are doing, and she'll actually call down if she thinks that they're spending too much time talking with people instead of doing their job.

"She actually does that," she was like.

A story of my neighbor (2 of 2): Corpses.

That same conversation, me and my neighbors' one (Mexican-American) son who's a musician were talking about the coronavirus, and the serious effects that it can have on people.

"You have any deaths?", he was like, meaning at where I work.

Then, he started talking about his one uncle.

"He's older now, but he's a tough guy, the ladies really like him," he was like, and then he said that he worked at a morgue for a lot of years.

"And corpses, sometimes the gas in them shifts, and they get up and walk around a few days after they die, and one time he was working there late at night when that happened, and he saw that, and he's a tough guy, but he fainted," he was like.

He said that his uncle only told everyone that like once, but then he wouldn't really talk about it so much again, it so got to him.

A story of my neighbor (1 of 2): Cats.

The other week, I was sitting outside on my stoop reading, and my neighbors' one (adult) (Mexican-American) son who's a musician came outside to put some food in some dishes, and we started talking about this that and the other.

He said that he does that for some stray cats, and that the water dish on my stoop near where I'd seen a cat sit late at night recently is what my landlord does for the strays, but it's gotten weird lately because the food dish that he sets out has gotten polished off like every night and that that's never happened with the strays before, and then like a week ago he had seen a possum eating out of it.

"So now I guess I feed the possum, hey," he was like.

He then said that he believes this because he's a Catholic, that his mom and his aunt told him that when you die you get to a big river, and the only way you can get across that river is a cat or a dog who will help you to get across to the other side, but they won't help you if you're mean to animals, so that's why you should be nice to them.

He also said that our other neighbor who lives on the other side of their house found a kitten in a trash can in the back alley the other day.

"He never takes out trash that time of day, but he did, and he found it," he was like.

He said that his mom said that their aunt would take the kitten, she has five cats and loves them, but our other neighbor had already found someone to give it to.

Two (Ethiopian) coworkers on 45.

This past Friday at the resthome, I came into the office towards the end of shift, and my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker and my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker were sitting by the one desktop computer that we have in there.

"Did you see this?", my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker was like, gesturing to some newssite that she had up on screen. "What is 'soccer'?".

"It's football," I was like.

"No," she was like, and she changed her pronunciation of the vowel a few times, trying to convey something, so that I eventually realized that she was saying 'sucker.'

"It's like someone who's stupid," I was like, "Like if you sell a person something expensive and trick them about quality and you get their money."

"Oh," my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker was like, then she was like, "I tell you, this man is stupid, you look, I think there is something wrong with him."

"He only understands money," I was like, "He can't understand the military."

"Stupid," my one (edge) (Ethiopian) coworker was like.

And at that, my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker gave me a look, where she dipped her head and pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, in a look that was kind of like, "Who is this guy."

Then, the two of them began speaking in Amharic.

"What is 'sucker'?", my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker then asked me, and she said "sucker" in a way that the vowels were off again.

Stories from the Resthome (2 of 2): A story of someone's job.

The other week at the resthome, this one resident who's a retired professor started talking about back when she was living in Texas teaching Hebrew.

She was born and bred in upstate New York, and she had gotten some degrees and was a Hebrew teacher, and she had been looking for the best-paying Hebrew teaching job in the U.S. that she could find, it didn't matter where, since she was wanting to save up some money so she could go live in Israel.

And, she ended up at a synagogue in Texas that was more like a country club than a synagogue, she said.

She said that her first day on the job, she walked into her classroom, and there was this (big) (black) woman dressed in all white standing there inside, and the woman introduced herself and welcomed her and was like, "I'm your maid."

And, the retired professor said that she just kind of balked and made some excuse and scurried back to the principal's office, where she saw the principal, this guy named "Pinkus" who everyone called "Pinky."

"Pinky!", she was like, "There's a woman in my classroom, and she says she's made maid!".

"Welcome to Texas," he was like.

She also said that after she met her husband and they had kids and they ended up staying in Texas, she had a (black) babysitter and one day she suggested that she take the kids down to the local McDonald's, only she couldn't, she could only get food to-go through this window they had for black people.

"It felt like another country," she was like, and she said that she didn't like it at all.

She also said that Jack Ruby was a member of that synagogue that she worked at in Dallas, though she didn't really know him, just in passing.