thursday afternoon

we stayed in town because we intended to go to coney island. this is because ten years ago, our first thanksgiving together as sweeties, we hopped a train and rode until it came to a stop above coney island. home of the cyclone. the wonder wheel. the parachute drop. dollar fudge. we walked on the beach and i dragged shell after shell out of gritty cold sand and shoved them into a plastic bag. near dark we found ourselves right in front of nathan’s coney island and were surprised to see the place lit up and ready for us. my own sand-crusted fingers were stiff from the cold and the warmth inside the building was plenty but there was food on top of that. now the sweetie got a few hot dogs, i’m sure, but i was avoiding that sort of animal at the time and filled myself up on an ear of corn, a basket of fries and most likely a bowl of clam chowder. we sat in the center of the room and around us were drunks scattered singly and a few other unsavory sorts in clumps. and it felt good to be there.

so we planned to go there today and i was pretty happy about it. then somewhere along the way the sweetie and i both faced up to the fact that coney island, once quite breathtaking in its degenerate wildness, has recently fallen upon a new sort of hard times. developers in snits. plans for fancy hotels gone awry. snootifying and the destruction that comes just before snootifying. we risked shattering our recollection of the place by going back even on a day like today. so we puttered around the apartment a bit and then walked the whole half block over to the finest city park in the entire country. we’d managed to get ourselves a pretty swell day. breeze floating through air edging up toward sixty. high, fat clouds leaking sunlight in streams. plenty of trees still clinging to leaves in bright yellows and vivid reds. the kind of day you take pictures of. and we did.

we leashed up the small dog and dragged out a camera and this place carved out of the stink of city eased up around us until the smells and sounds of brooklyn ebbed. the tall buildings began to duck down behind trees. and i would like to tell old calvert and vaux that all the work they did rearranging this small space to look like it isn’t where it is worked out just like they’d hoped, has been working for a very long time. thanks, boys. job well done.

now we forgot to get a turkey and didn’t even eat any of anyone else’s. there was dinner at a rest stop on the thruway when we decided a good walk in the park ought to be followed by our escape from the city entirely. i was sitting in a horrible plastic booth eating food that went from a freezer to a microwave and was still, somehow, fried and every other food vendor in the place was shutting down, pulling down and locking huge rattling gates until we were sitting in the middle of a small island of bright booths, surrounded by silent gray plastic and metal. ugliness and loudness and plastic and food people shouldn’t eat. and the sweetie smiling across from me eating food i won’t touch and drinking soda just like he did ten years ago in that warm room at the edge of the cold, dark ocean in a place i still didn’t really know.

and this is a gift so large and unearned i should be ashamed to have it but i just let it simmer around me instead happy in the knowledge that no matter what santa says, gifts are not at all about what we deserve. belly full of food. tall man walking back to the car with me who thinks some of my jokes are worth laughing at, who will occasionally wear a hat i’ve knit. small dog curled up in the dark of the backseat whose eyes shine at me when i open the door. it seems that if we’re going to be all sorts of thankful, we ought to do that all the time, probably ought to be out there looking around for things to appreciate, to be glad we got to be in the middle of. so that’s what we did.

i have given up on trying to put text and photos together when there's more photo than text. make up your own story. look for the milk crate.