Adelaide

1.

My friend Gary came over for a dinner that was supposed to include the planning of our long-awaited Prospect Park Autumn Olympics, but no one else could be coaxed into joining us, until the last minute, when Sean and his friend Mark showed up. I make a bunch of bruschetta, and we pack everything carefully into plastic bags and begin the precarious climb up the rickety rung ladder to my roof. The moon is bright, but not bright enough, and there is loud clattering as we (mostly I) collided with various rusted chairs, metal grates, pipes and old beer bottles. The neighbors have a roof deck and the roof deck has a table; we make our way over to it, and in the dark, more wine is poured and bruschetta is unpacked and placed on lids and plates and tupperware trays, until the whole table is covered with little glorified pieces of toast. John Cale is in the cd player. I put it in there as a favor to Gary, and he knows it. On some buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan, there are little houses built right onto the roof, mysterious little one room cottages with their own windows and roofs, perched high above the city, out of view unless you're right next to them. There is one down the block from my building, and we can see into it now, a woman in a blue shirt, laughing on the phone. Gary and I climb up to the overhang of the building, lying flat on our stomachs and leaning over the edge, our chins resting on the back of our hands. It's an excellent view of the sidewalk below, and a little scary. "Look," I tell Gary, pointing down, "it's way too hot to be dressed like that." Below, a man about our age but with a completely different life is sweating his way toward a cab in a three piece suit. We laugh. Neighbors are returning from the gym, and from movies, and evening walks with dogs. The skyline of Manhattan stretches across our view, and the Statue of Liberty glows faintly in the distance. From my roof, tonight, I can see more stars than I ever have before in New York. In two hours, it will be Gary's birthday.

2.

At the afterschool program on Mondays, I take the kindergartners and first graders outisde to play in the schoolyard. Today they invent a game called "turtle fish", in which pieces of chalk are dropped off a little stairwell onto the ground and collected by children waiting below. They rig up a complicated system of jump ropes tied to buckets for this purpose, and scamper around the steps with great purpose and concentration, whispering things about fish and turtles and boats as they work. A tiny girl, sliding around in too-big shoes passed down by an older sister grins up at me with a smile filled with more spaces than teeth. "Do you got a hamster?" she asks. The new hamster in my room has become legendary in a week. "Yes," I tell her. "Do you want to visit him sometime?" She does. What's your name, I ask her. Her mouth is covered with Oreo crumbs. Her name is Frances, and she likes the color pink and her birthday is April 16th. She sputters all this out in one breath. The playground is an enclosed courtyard, but a little sunlight filters down onto the chalk drawings that cover the ground. I sit down to tie an endless procession of little shoelaces. "I don't want you to fall," I tell them all cheerfully. They study me carefully. Their hair is damp from running so long, and their eyes are wide. They are not exactly sure who I am, and they're not pleased that I've interrupted their play with something as practical as shoelaces. Frances, who has been tossing a pen up in the air and catching it, sits down next to me and writes something on my forearm. I don't see it until later, when I'm at home, making an apple pie for Monday night football, with my sleeves rolled up. In perfect first grade block letters, it says FRANCES BOYLAN APRIL 16.

3.

We're at the park on Sunday afternoon, lying on a bamboo picnic mat. It's a section of Prospect Park I've been reading in for years, situated in a valley of sorts,with trees rising up around the edges. Ridiculously pretty. Exactly the sort of thing Frederick Olmstead was aiming for when he designed the park. Today, inexplicably, the area is full of giant dragonflies, hovering and careening around crazily. They are flying so close we can hear the clicks and hum of their wings. "Why are they all here?" my companion demands. I like bugs, but I don't know. It's too far along in the summer for them to be mating, and there's nothing here for dragonflies to eat; maybe, like me, they're just desparately loving the last days of summer, before it's too late.


*This update typed while watching Die Hard With a Vengeance and getting ready to leave for St. Marks.