Tax Day got bumped from April 15 to May 17 this year, the IRS threw us a bone for the pandemic. Of course, everyone was still waiting until the last minute to do their taxes, and this allowed us to have a good turnout. We had someone Zooming from a car and someone from a walk out and about. We talked about a Zoom bar mitzvah that someone attended. Some of us had gone to see exhibits at the nearly fully opened Sotheby’s and Christie’s galleries where at one there were artifacts from the physicist Richard Feynman, including his bongo drums as well as his papers and oil painting, and there was an Enigma machine, which helped us interpret the spy talk during WWII. Then we talked about spies, and about martinis and whether we drank them shaken or stirred. We talked about dating during the COVID times and how so much of it involved old school walks in the park, and how this might be changing back to normal dates at restaurants as we opened. There were online “virtual trips” someone was still enjoying, mini documentaries about various locations we still aren’t allowed to visit. We talked about the perils of eating outside, people passing, animals, bugs. I had an experience that week where I had been outside with friends at one of the now ubiquitous sidewalk tables when an egg from an upstairs apartment was thrown out a window at the restaurant below, barely missing us. We talked about the blooming flowering trees, the gorgeous cherry blossoms and magnolias, and how we may be appreciating them more now than we had in the past. Most people were on their second shots, with only a few complaints other than sore arms and how this has opened us to even more experience. Someone talked about having people over to her home for the first time in a long time.
Our French friend helped with the pronunciation of some words which I needed to say on an upcoming Zoom wedding I had volunteered to “MC,” now with my new Zoom monitoring experience. We talked about marriage and found the surprising statistics that the highest divorce rate was among gay women at 30%, and the lowest among gay men at 16%. Heterosexual marriages had a pretty low divorce rate too, in between at 19%. I can’t say where these stats were found, but they were interesting and we discussed why these statistics might be true.
We worried about the opening, how some of us are still hesitant to return to our gyms, and how we learned over the pandemic that “all the world’s a gym.” We talked about our anxiety about going back to the office, and how we’re worried about whether it might be more dangerous in the streets. A new threat was happening “the knock out game” where hoodlums randomly punch people, maybe because there were fewer people in the street still. And we remembered the Guardian Angels fondly. We discussed New York real estate and how some people had some luck renegotiating their leases. We talked about how commercial leases may be terminated, lowered, but maybe not right away, maybe after they ran out and companies veered to hybrid situations. We talked about the hassle of moving and how hard it is to get rid of stuff, and where we could do that. Do you give it away? Look to sell it? We heard about how there is a whole industry of people who take advantage of people after their parents die, offering to cart off their stuff for a low amount of money while it’s worth a lot. We talked about objects of value, one person regretted losing track of a meteor that had fallen in his yard, and I bemoaned an Adam Ant t-shirt my mother threw out, from the first rock show I ever saw.
