a saturday afternoon here and it’s a perfect day out. <quote-01>i’m wearing my off-white cons<quote-01>, the retro 70s model, with the red stripe along the bottom and the navy blue laces i swapped in--tres americana. i got on paul’s oro del norte snapback and tom’s bright blue pioneer junior high physical education t-shirt--the one you guys gave everyone for my bachelor week. the original i stole decades ago is now so threadbare that the yellow inner layer shows through the gauze-like blue at the shoulders and across the back. i keep that one safely stored away.

due to the morning street cleaning, the usual row of cars alongside the park is absent, so i’m up on the curb under one of the young bradford pears. on the other side of the fence, the orange cone of a left fielder maintains his position. it’s 73 with a gentle breeze. my denim jacket is folded up in the pocket on the back of my beach chair and will remain there for now.

behind me the hawks are at roost on their chosen air-conditioning unit. that’s right, hawks. i’ve seen three of them now: an adult and two fledglings. casey and i passed a young photographer on our walk around the field’s perimeter earlier in the week. looking for the hawk? i asked him. hoping to catch a feeding, he said. although his camouflage-patterned telephoto lens suggested otherwise, i fancied him a sports photographer, presently turning to more natural subjects during this hiatus from his professional work. we stood there for an extended moment--the three of us, staring up at the nest--before casey and i continued on our way.

we have a date set for next friday night, casey and i. the new dylan album is coming out. reviews have been exemplary; <quote-02>however, like most dylan fans, i feel my relationship to his work is too personal to be swayed by the opinions of others<quote-02>. needless to say, i’m looking forward. casey’ll bring us some beers, and i’ll bring us some bourbon and the beach chairs.

rough and rowdy ways, the record is called. good title.

tempest, dylan’s last original full length, dropped in early fall, 2012. the month prior casey and i were mastering our own album with greg calbi, who himself mastered tempest. knowing we were dylan fans, greg offered to play us some of the tempest tracks at the end of our session. you know, come to think of it, casey and i must be among the only people to hear those tracks in the room where they were mastered. such a treat!

mastering sessions are the best; your record never sounded so good. the only thing better than sitting on the couch behind calbi is the moment when he invites you to sit in his chair so you can listen from the sweet spot in the room. actually, greg works from an ergonomic kneeling stool, so kneeling where he kneels would be a truer description of the experience.

early in the day greg complimented the sequence of our record, affirming our choice for track two--<quote-03>beg off<quote-03>--as the undeniable single. hey, let’s hear bob’s track two, i later said as greg skipped through his favorites on tempest. it was called soon after midnight, and it was a perfect gem of a tune. when, in his erratic phrasing, bob delayed the final word of a lyric, casey and i let out <quote-04>simultaneous<quote-04> exclamations of thrill. she was passing.... by. i imagine greg enjoyed sharing in our excitement; i expect casey and i will share many similar moments next friday, our beach chairs for greg’s couch, our monitoring headphones for the sterling sound studio. 

earlier this week the times published an interview with dylan. he spoke to the recent passing of both john prine and little richard. after surviving a stroke and twice beating cancer, prine passed from covid-19 on the 7th of april; bone cancer took richard on may 9th. dylan had the following to say about richard’s gospel phase, and it’s been swirling around in my mind:

gospel music is the music of good news, and in these days there just isn’t any. <quote-05>good news in today’s world is like a fugitive, treated like a hoodlum and put on the run<quote-05>. castigated. all we see is good-for-nothing news... it stirs people up. gossip and dirty laundry. dark news that depresses and horrifies <quote-06>you<quote-06>.

i, for one, have been horrified by the media’s conflation of the protests and the riots. i’m sure you’ve both heard killer mike’s recent speech: strategize, organize, and mobilize. i wonder where we will find the strategies to ensure the diminishment of injustice after our collective rage has served to mobilize us. surely this requires a sense of hope that progress is possible, a belief that there is good news to be heard.

the breeze has died down, and the sun has lowered in the sky. the meager shade from the bradford pear has broadened and retreated onto the street at my back. i can feel the sun’s heat on my arms. <quote-07>the cars are beginning to return to their parking spaces, and the foot traffic is picking up around the park’s perimeter<quote-07>.

we started the week, sarah and i, with a trip into the city for sarah’s glucose challenge. we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. some businesses were opening as the city began to lift the lockdown while others were closing in response to the riots. we knew i wouldn’t be permitted to join sarah at her appointment, so i decided to take our empty seltzer cartridge with me to see if i couldn’t get it replaced.

the midwives are on 6th ave and 13th street, so we took the l train across town to 6th. i dropped sarah off, put on a podcast--seinfeld on marc maron--and headed up to the staples at 19th street. a no-go, they were out. on their recommendation i headed up to the home depot on 23rd street. alas, another no-go.

at home depot they directed me to the bed bath & beyond on 18th, which i’d passed on my way to staples. it looked boarded up, i said. no, they’re open, they assured me. back down 6th ave i went.

maron had always been notoriously <quote-08>bored by seinfeld<quote-08>, and seinfeld needed exactly none of the publicity one stands to gain by appearing on marc’s podcast, so this seemingly obvious interview--on a podcast that has become something of an audible encyclopedia of the history of stand-up comedy--felt unique. marc was audibly raw from the recent passing of his partner, lynn shelton. he muscled through well enough, but when he and jerry began to reminisce about garry shandling, he broke down. they had both been close to shandling.

i checked the front of bed bath & beyond on 6th ave as well as the sides on both 19th and 18th streets. all boards, no doors. i went along 18th to the north side of union square, then down to another staples on the west side of the park, figuring i could hit up the best buy on the south-east corner should this second staples also be out of cartridges. luckily, they were not.

before heading back over to meet sarah, i walked down to check on the strand.

my heart had skipped a beat when, out of the previous week’s riot footage, we were able to identify the location of a cop car in flames. is that.. / yup, 12th street, broadway and 4th. i confirmed. babe, if the strand goes up, we’re out. an employee at a makeshift desk in the side doorway on 12th <quote-09>informed me that one could order from their collection online and then come by a day or two later to pick up<quote-09>. i didn’t get my regular stroll through the store, but i was pleased by the prospect of doing so in the future.

i paused to read a couple of incoming texts as i made my way westward along 12th. remember lane? the neighborhood pool-player/virtue-signaler from the night before my back pain episode? he sent me an image of a pool table on a roof, then an explanation of how he’d acquired it and set it up, followed by <quote-10>an invitation<quote-10> to come over and get my pool fix on. i didn’t respond. a pool table on the roof? serious? i thought.

i grabbed a decaf for myself and a seltzer for sarah from the bagel shop across the street from the midwives. sarah was cheerful when she got out. we walked up to the five guys on 14th and 6th, then took <quote-11>our cheeseburgers<quote-11> and fries over to union square where we ate them on a shaded stone block amidst assorted rows of suited police.

we got her results the following morning: gestational diabetes? check. so it’s measured meal plans and daily finger pricks for the time being. there is also a forthcoming visit to the hematologist to better judge the possible risk of anemia. sarah has been on an iron supplement for months, but evidently it’s not cutting it. in doing my part, i prepared two large delmonico cuts for dinner this evening. i salted them last night, and they’ve developed a nice crust in the fridge. i’ll use a slow roast to bring them to temp--pulling mine at 120, letting sarah’s get up to around 135--then a blazing hot cast iron with butter, shallots, and garlic to quickly finish them off.

i was making dinner on thursday when tom texted you and me about brutus, murph. not sure if you’ve heard, hoke, but tom put brutus down on thursday afternoon.

he called me yesterday, and we talked for a good long while. the vet making the house call explained how, due to the virus, they would not be coming inside, so tom set up a blanket on the area of the lawn where brutus loved to sunbathe. not knowing what to do with himself afterward, he grabbed brutus’s leash and headed for his family’s cabin in mount baldy. he needed to be alone, but he couldn’t be at home.

the last person to lock up at the cabin was the laborer tom had hired to fix some urgent structural issues with the foundation. absentmindedly leaving his keys inside, the laborer opted for cutting and replacing the padlock. unfortunately, he’d forgotten to tell tom. tom hiked back to his car, and with just twenty minutes until the lowe’s on foothill and benson closed, he hurried back down the mountain.

i like to think he stopped at the lodge for a guinness or two before hiking up to the cabin for the second time that night. then again, i also like to think that he didn’t.

he broke into the cabin and turned on the lights. nothing. the power had gone out, and who knows when. he went around the outside to the circuit breaker, and luckily, that did the trick. poor tom, alone in all that darkness, alone in all that light. everything in the fridge was rotten. in the morning he hauled the garbage down the mountain. i stopped at this natural spring and washed brutus’s leash, gave it a cleansing wash, he told me.

sarah and i spoke of <quote-12>the great dog park in the sky during dinner on thursday night, imagining an energetic mikey, free from heart and lung ailments, pestering a tolerant brutus<quote-12>. with a bit of a whiskey-buzz on, i stepped out afterward for a walk down to the ballpark. tom was locking up his apartment in atwater village. i pulled up some nickcasey roughs on my phone.

as i reached the corner of noll and evergreen, just beyond left field, i got a call from my mother. una, my father’s mother, had just passed away.

a nurse had found her disoriented on the floor of her room a couple mornings prior. the assisted living facility had been fairly tight-lipped about covid cases, but evidently another resident had tested positive a while back. how? we don’t know. they’re not sure how the virus got to una, but with the complications from her dementia, they didn’t expect her to be able to fight it off. rather than move her, it was oxygen for her blood and morphine for her comfort.

after suiting up in the provided protective gear, my father’s brother cliff was permitted to visit her briefly thursday morning. she was unresponsive. my folks spoke to her through a portable phone a nurse held to una’s ear. they gave her their love, as well as mine and my sister’s, without the comfort of any response.

the nurses checked on una intermittently. odds are she died alone. my parents were told the time of death was somewhere between 7 and 7:10pm, mountain time. depending on the traffic, tom was taking either the 2 or the 5 up to the 134 out of los angeles. sarah was doing the dishes. my mother picked the lavender suit una wore to my wedding for her to be buried in. the funeral is next friday, the day the new dylan record comes out.

i’m back curbside after dinner. we finished off a loaf of sourdough with the steaks. there’s an empty white patrol car to my right, and a charcoal honda suv on my left, shading me from the street light above. it’s much cooler now. i substituted the jean jacket in my chair for an olive military zip-up before heading out. casey gave me this jacket; he felt it was too big on him. i have it on now, but the breeze is cutting through. i think i’m ready to head back.

a few neighborhood fireworks go up on the other side of the park. it’s getting to be that time of year in bushwick. one streams purple, one white.