friday

today is the sort of day small shops keep their street doors open. breeze. sun. all that is good. today, walking down a street with the sort of shops that keep their doors open on days like this i passed a barber shop. the real kind. pole and everything. old guys with glasses you see in yearbooks from 1953. those same hairstyles, too, but thinning. dyed coal black. i don't know what i expected to hear when i walked by but it certainly wasn't lynyrd skynyrd yelling "gimme three steps". not even a little. now, let's spend a minute on the song first, then go on about the story. skynyrd is one of those bands you can't always talk about in mixed company. you know, hillbilly folks and the rest of the world. long before hip hop and the battles between the coasts, skynyrd and neil young duked it out in song, with skynyrd proudly defending some embarrassing positions the south might want to let rest. but this song turns its back on all that and focuses on a rather spectacular story about a man who is caught spending his time where he shouldn't, dancing with another man's woman. this other man, you ought to know, arrives on the scene with a gun. and this is where i like the song. no bravado. no chest puffing or talk of winning the woman. none of the crap ninth graders believe about how they're invincible and will survive a gunshot by force of will or take down a gun wielding maniac with their bare hands. just a lowdown weasel begging for a few seconds head start running from a man thinking about shooting him. in fact, said weasel gets his moment when the gun toting man turns and yells at his woman. weasel splits. i have always found the honesty of this particular song refreshing. i know every word of plenty of skynyrd songs because i lived where i lived when i lived there. so i sang along, the only person in park slope, brooklyn, most likely, strolling down the street on a friday afternoon belting out a tone deaf version of poor linda lou's least fine hour.

i kept walking, leaving writhing folks clutching damaged ears in my wake, my cruel singing growing softer as my distance from the music stretched, until another song intruded. i don't know what it is called. i've never heard it before, at least not that i know. across the street and old guy sat on a stool playing an ivory accordion. years ago a friend gave me a busted old accordion and although i never learned to play it, i liked looking at it, pressing the buttons and hearing geese fly out. there is a smaller accordion here now, on the bottom of a stack that includes an ancient manual typewriter and a dented mellophone from a now defunct nyc school band. i like accordion players. i like them when they're accompanying spanish singing on the train, when they're playing wild polkas or when they're playing cajun music, which is like a polka wrapped up in a square dance. i want accordion players, who are mostly old guys wearing fedoras, to like me, to think i'm nice. it seems very important that they know i appreciate the glory of the accordion. i would never fail to smile at an accordion player. it would be like forgetting to hold your breath going past a cemetery. sure, it's not something you have to do, but what kind of idiot doesn't? i was across the street from this particular guy but i smiled over at him anyway. just in case.

i wasn't paying attention from all the listening and smiling and almost ran into a man standing right in the middle of the sidewalk. i looked at him, saw that he was in some sort of line, then looked up and rested my eyes on an ice cream truck. but not a normal one. a butter yellow one. it was parked in front of the bank and wasn't even playing music. it wasn't garish and there weren't any screaming children shoving each other out of the way. now, the sweetie likes the occasional ice cream truck treat but there are few things that depress me more than fake ice cream, plasticky, in colors i've never seen. but this truck didn't have giant multicolor clowns on the side. it had a pale vanilla flower and bean. then there was a ginger flower and root. lovely pistachios on a leafy stem. coffee beans on a flowering stem. soft, fuzzy hazelnut leaves so pretty i could smell them shading hazelnuts. there were words printed on the buttery side of the truck promising root beer floats and hot fudge sundaes. i wanted to cry. someone had clearly crawled right inside my head and designed a special ice cream truck just for me. just for me. a scruffy guy, the kind i spent my time with in college, wearing a hat my grandpa would wear, asked what i'd like. he seemed as happy to be handing out pretty ice cream as i was about getting pretty ice cream. i got a small ginger cone. i know. i was afraid i'd get out of control and i've already learned my lesson about walking around town with a hot fudge sundae, several bags and no napkins. it was perfect. it was the ice cream we made in a wooden crank ice cream bucket when i was a child. it didn't taste like it had ever been in a store. it didn't taste like ice cream that had been waiting around for a while. it tasted like they started making it when i started thinking about it. like ginger and cream and summer and no paved streets and maybe even a late afternoon storm. all right there in that small cone. i'm not kidding even a little bit.

my grandma (and plenty of other folks of her generation and before) would have you believe that bad things happen in threes. plane crashes. deaths. fires. this comes, maybe, from a time when folks didn't know so much about the world and wanted to reassure themselves that awfulness wouldn't go on forever, that it was finite. when two terrifying things come close together, the promise of one more is the promise of only one more, instead of the possibility of endless awfulness. and three is a manageable number. a brain can remember three of anything. we don't need this sort of thinking so much anymore because we tend to know so much more about why. but when three things happen all in the space of a few minutes and each thing makes you feel like you've been given a small gift you didn't even know you needed, you want to make them be connected. you want to think you've been singled out for something special. you can't ask for days like this. it would be rude. but you have to take them when they come along.