June 6, 2021 – Summering On

The weather has certainly become summer and we’re enjoying it now as the sun shines and the heat hots. It feels like this week was our first summer week because Memorial Day was a rainy one for most of the East Coast. Lots of our beachy traveling plans were scuttled, which we could conveniently chalk up to Mercury Retrograde beginning, a three week period that astrologically predicts travel plans and electronics snafus. Whether astrologic forces are real or not, it’s fun to have some outside reason to blame for random mess-ups in our own lives.

People are talking about traveling, one of us talked about flying to Miami and wondered whether it was now okay to post about travel plans as during the pandemic people were hesitant to share about their trips for fear of COVID shaming. We determined that now it’s okay, and we agreed that we have all noticed an uptick in people posting their travel adventures which is creating a whole new kind of FOMO. One of us shared that he took his first walk outside his apartment since March, 2020. Granted he was the most extreme among us with regard to personally locking down, so we were all very encouraging and happy that he has emerged, finally, back into the world. He was surprised by some of what was challenging athletically and what wasn’t. He had worked out his upper body quite a bit, but going up and down stairs he found was disturbingly difficult. Even opening heavy doors that NY apartment buildings favor, was challenging. One of us shared that she was knocked down by such a door recently, and got her knee scraped up a bit, and we talked about whether she might have some legal standing to pursue a claim against her building, and whether it was worth the trouble.

Heavy doors and irresponsible landlords led to us talking about the corruption enmeshed in NYC real estate and how we really hope the next Mayor of NY would clear things up. DiBlasio seemed to be embroiled in the corruption and we, among most City dwellers, feel this has led to a demise of NY, including an uptick in aggressive, and large, rats and pigeons. The primaries for Democratic mayor are coming up in two weeks and there are so many candidates running that it is really hard to do voting justice, as we want, especially now when the stakes feel higher post COVID and economic hits. Also there are elections for District Attorney, and Comptroller and Manhattan Borough President, too many candidates to understand, but also we realize it is important to understand. So there was a call to find someone to speak to us about it. I had planned to go into summer schedule of every other week starting this week, but people really wanted to get together to talk about the NYC primaries. So I was charged with spending the next week trying to find someone to do that for us.

We then talked about touristic cemeteries. Someone said she had gone to visit Greenwood Cemetery near New York with a friend and that this turned out to be a very nice day out, and that the grounds were populated with children and picnickers. It seems cemeteries across the world are popular for this kind of thing, though personally, that would not be a top choice of mine as a fun thing to do. Of course, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, the day before Halloween, is celebrated by picnics by relatives’ gravestones. Our French friend talked about the Pere Lachaise Cemetery where some famous people are buried, including Jim Morrison of the Doors. We then talked about music lyrics we remembered growing up and how at the time, with our babyhood innocence, we didn’t realize the double entendres, or even the overt sexuality, that they entailed. But now we can, and it was fun to revisit. Do it to me one more time. Come on Baby Light My Fire.