Dreaming in Orange

Walking downtown from Harlem today I saw a disabled city sanitation truck being hitched up for towing. It was kind of spectacular-- these are heavy pieces of equipment, filled with stinking tons of garbage in various states of compression and processing-- organic and inorganic.  I couldn't help thinking back to the days when my son's early boyhood obsession was observing and naming all the trucks and service vehicles on the streets.  It was like an all-day movie-- endless spontaneous entertainment-- and a scene like this would have provoked much pointing and shouting and the inevitable slew of toddler speculations and questions.

So there I was, across the street with my eyebrows raised, mouth open-- and no one was there.  I thought of my grown son downtown, with his expensive watch and his designer boots and his iPhone--- how we went to a little playgroup at the Presbyterian church two mornings a week.  There were wooden blocks there-- and little cars the children rode around on.  There were puppets and some books and puzzles.  Things seemed innocent.  My childhood toys from the 1950's were even simpler-- a tin house with a few pieces of doll furniture-- books, crayons, puzzles.  Mostly we dug with spoons in the garden and filled cups with water from the outside hose.  We chalked up the sidewalk and played hopscotch, made costumes and pretended to be pirates or gypsies or gangsters.

I used to wheel my baby back and forth to my job with his little things-- a reindeer made out of a sock, a few small cars.  Later-- a tiny garbage truck and a digger, a firetruck and an ambulance.  These days most babies I see holding their mother's phones, or with plastic replicas.   No one seems to be pointing things out-- few kids standing around construction sites all day watching these massive excavations-- steam shovels and dump trucks.  We read some simple books over and over; we sang songs and clapped hands.  Today technology seems to have replaced so many of these activities.

There were times, raising my son alone, when I lived on a bag of stale doughnuts.  One fall I collected discarded pumpkins from our garbage area and we ate these until my dreams turned orange.
A phone message one day that same season ordered me to report to an address on Fifth Avenue; it turned out to be F.A.O. Schwartz where I was informed some anonymous man had paid for a shopping spree.  We were overcome; my little boy asked for play-dough and we were sent home with a lovely set of wooden trains that made me feel ashamed.

I'm getting old now; I stop on the street and exclaim at funny dogs-- or children when they are fretting or sad.  They are eating complicated food products and drinking sophisticated drinks from
places like Starbucks with well-designed containers.  I feel like an alien from another century, and I suppose I am.  I gasp open-mouthed at the sunset when I look toward the park at the end of the day-- or up at the moon as I leave my apartment at night.  These things seem new and wonderful.   On the Saturday train there are still break-dancers who risk their limbs on the poles and straps to entertain riders.  They leave me breathless and gaping; my fellow riders simply hold their phones up.

Recently I read in the Times that an enormous percentage of adults sleep with a stuffed animal.  I found this a little shocking, although I do know many people who share a bed with their dogs and cats.  Surely these same people have their cellphones on the night-table and consult their Instagram or Facebook.  I used to sleep with a land-phone by my bed when my first husband was touring, hoping he'd call at some ungodly hour from a far-away hotel room.  When he didn't, I'd stare at the ceiling and wonder.

Somewhere between the monied rush of well-heeled pedestrians in my neighborhood and the homeless street population there should be a place for me.  I go to the library and take home books...
I feel both fortunate and passed-over.  I am no longer a player and yet I am just that-- not a brilliant but a decent musician who manages to find a place for myself between a song and a kind of spiritual vehicle.  I am both lost and found, misplaced yet contented.  Like everyone, I am stuck here between past and future, but somehow more committed to the present than ever.  There is nothing I really need, beyond the barest necessities-- and yet I live in a complex nest of cultural insulation.  I have banked many things of value, although none of them are monetary.

Riding up in the elevator with my neighbors, I am the shabby tenant.  Then again, no one suspects my groceries were purchased with foodstamps, or that there is a poem brewing in my head.  It occurred to me-- phone-less and vaguely out of synch with sidewalk traffic, watching that garbage truck through the eyes of a boy who no longer exists,  I have regained a kind of old innocence and it feels fine.