judypatricia

Because not all pretty girls have places to go on Friday nights, I tucked myself into bed around 10pm last night, lamp on the nightstand beside me aglow, new book in hand. I'm reading Breakfast at Tiffany's, reading a paragraph that says,

She scooped up the cat and swung him onto her shoulder. He perched there with the balance of a bird, his paws tangled in her hair as if it were knitting yarn; and yet, despite these amiable antics, it was a grim cat with a pirate's cutthroat face; one eye was gluey-blind, the other sparkled with dark deeds....

and then it's almost 11, and my phone rings. My aunt Kathy, youngest sibling out of my mother's herd, one of New York's Finest, had called to tell me she's parked about two blocks away from my house and is bored and has hours to kill and wants to get coffee and drive me around in an unmarked cop-car. I say, "Uh...yeah. Yeah! okay...clothes. 15 minutes. Bye."

A thing to know about me is that I'm not close at all with anyone I happen to be related to. Close in the sense that I consider family to be almost like friends, or when I need to talk I pick up the phone and dial someone I share facial features and characteristics with; it just never was like that. But if I had to pick which aunt, uncle, cousin I felt some sort of wacky attachment to the most, it would be her. When I was little, she'd come over my house and bring me M&M's, which she called W's&W's. She and I always talked nonsense and got it, and things like that drove my mother up walls. Everything my aunt Kathy said and says, did or does, pisses off my mother to varying degrees. When I used to live with her in the small house, she'd gawk at me as I'd habitually stir my ice cream in its bowl, making it turn to mush before I'd eat it; she never failed to bark about how my doing that irritated her because it was exactly what My Stupid Little Sister used to do, and why did I carry you for nine months just so you'd come out like her? As if I can help it. Now that I'm older her irritation at my and aunt Kathy's similarities serve no other purpose but to egg me on in the Battle of Daughter-hood, knowing full well I have an allyI can tell aunt Kathy her sister, my mother, is criminally insane and she says, "I know."

So on our late-night galavanting, there was laughing, dessert, Brooklyn, trash-talking, and near-crying.
A typical night of femininity.
If we had picked up guys at a bar, stole their wallets and left them with pants around their ankles, it would have been a Lifetime Channel movie.

She said a lot of things to me that helped, and I blabbed more than I'd anticipated. When she dropped me off at my doorstep at four in the morning, I had the feeling I'd spent a night on a therapists' couch minus the bill...and the couch.

The night was not without a small event which bothered me to the core, however. There always has to be something. And this something constituted a one-legged man in a wheelchair and being stopped by a red light at an intersection. While the car's motor idles, I see this unhappy, seemingly homeless, dullish old man, slowly wheel his way into the stopped traffic, and aunt Kathy nods in his direction. I give that guy a dollar when I see him, she told me, and says how she's seen him around this spot for at least a year, doing this same routine. Once, she tells me, he appeared to wait to cross the street when the light meant Go and could have been hit; startled, she rolled down her window and jokingly, motheringly, asked if he meant to be killed. He said that anything was probably better than this life.

It's a Kodak moment indeed, when upon hearing things like that, I can honestly shut the fuck up for a moment and be at a loss for words.

As if I had needed one more glaring example of the importance of being happy that night, that was it; that old, unhappy guy. It was another bookmark smack in the chapter of Now. And I can't wait to see what happens next.