“Thank You For Listening to Me”

As I was ascending Riverdale Avenue this morning, I noticed an elderly black woman in the distance. She was standing in the street at a bus stop, peering down the steep hill and looking, I surmised, for her bus, which wasn’t on the way up. By the time I approached her, she had moved onto the sidewalk, still, by the looks of things, waiting for a bus. Her face mask was pulled down and, as a matter of fact, so was mine as I passed the lady in clear violation of the six-feet social-distancing decree. There was no good morning or any such salutation forthcoming, just unsolicited commentary on the mad, mad, mad, mad world of 2020 that we both called home.

Being extra-polite in these troubled times, I lent her my ear, expecting it to be brief. As I slowly inched away—my not-so-subtle cue that I wanted to move on—the lady inched along with me. We then walked up the very big hill together—the bus be damned! The woman had a mouthful to say and spoke with a heavy island accent of some sort—maybe Jamaican—so I had difficulty comprehending fifty percent of what she said. I got the gist of it, though.

We found mutual agreement on the horror of what happened to George Flake and, too, the state of our president’s mental health. He was pouring gasoline on the fire, she said, and I concurred. The woman seconded former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s opinion of our fearless leader when she dubbed him a “moron.” I couldn’t argue with that. So, I listened and listened some more until we parted near the hill’s apex. She was off to a doctor’s appointment a few blocks away, I learned, and would have taken that bus one stop if she hadn’t found an ear instead. The good lady thanked me for listening to her and, as we parted, I advised her to watch that blood pressure.

And this is 2020. Just a few ancillary observations from this past week: School and neighborhood reunions are nearing extinction, I fear. Actually, I don’t really fear that. When so many people from our pasts sound off without restraint—from the far reaches of both sides of the political spectrum—it’s impossible to let it all pass unnoticed. You gotta love these armchair anarchists supporting looting, rioting, and arson safely away from the looting, rioting, and arson. They vegetate at home—smartphones in hand—justifying the destruction of other people’s neighborhoods, businesses, and livelihoods. By and large these are folks who obviously have never built a business—and likely couldn’t if they tried—and whose sources of income remain uninterrupted.

I saw this quote in a news story this morning from a Manhattan small business owner calling himself “Harri,” whose smoke shop was ransacked last night: “We worked hard to build up a business and within a second, someone does this.” Funny, but many of the armchair anarchists have been hyperventilating about mass gatherings for the last couple of months, equating them to bacterial wars on grandmas and grandpas everywhere.

What passes for clever social commentary—via memes—has also taken a turn for the worse, which I wouldn’t have imagined possible. Criminals setting fires and breaking into stores and walking away with Rolex watches, 70” flat-screen TVs, and bottles of Jack Daniel’s have been ludicrously compared to the soldiers storming France’s Normandy Beach to liberate Europe from the Nazis. Go figure: There were more than 200,000 Allied casualties there, by the way. 

As I type these words, I hear police sirens and emergency vehicles racing past my front door. One of the vehicles had a cracked window—from a recently thrown hard object, I’d wager. I go outside to see if the commotion is too close to home. Fortunately, it isn’t. A female passerby says to me: “It’s crazy.” And so it is. I say: Justice for George and for Harri, too.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)