I Fall Off My Bicycle
I was making a sharp turn. When I was seventeen I started a fanzine devoted to women anthropologists. I have been carbon neutral since 2007. Today I boiled fourteen ladies’ fingers for lunch that I ate with a tin of mackerel, boneless and skinless, responsibly farmed, in olive oil and a slice of seven-nut whole wheat bread.
Yesterday on our walk to our favourite restaurant in Elmhurst, Queens, for dinner, it started, for the first time this year, to snow. A light powdering at first, it turned wet and blustery. Sideways sometimes. It was just above freezing and too warm for the snow to stick so it melted and everything got wet. Including my shoes. My toes were going numb with the cold. We had to abandon our walk at Bushwick and hop on a J train to Fulton and transfer to a 2 train to Grand Army Plaza.
They say all good things must come to an end. But I guess I didn’t see it coming. You can only know what you know and act in good faith. You can’t know what you don’t. No one sets out to do the wrong thing. Everyone sets out to do what’s right and they can’t know if their frames of reference are all bent out of shape. Anger can be a source of great power. Tears are for the weak. I thought you were happy. While I have always suspected that my thoughts and actions are circumscribed by my own limits of understanding, for you, I say with all the certainty I can muster, I have always done my best.
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