1. Every morning at 7:42 a.m., I watch “In the Papers” on NY1, a brief summary of the dailies’ more notable stories, properly thoughtful about the news, dry-witted about the features. Nothing should surprise me anymore, and yet the story on the front page of the Daily News is enough to bring a sick start to my day: Find Marie’s Killer, shouts the front page, and I know I should look away, leave the room, be anywhere but here, but of course I don’t. I stay long enough to hear the terrible details, and even though I know that the odds of dying by rock flung from an overpass through my windshield are pretty low, I can’t help but project to a hundred different scenarios. Here I am, riding in my mom’s car, on the way into Philadelphia to get our hair cut. Here I am with Lloyd on the day we moved from Philadelphia to New York, Lloyd behind the wheel of a Ryder truck with no rear view mirror, riding on the Blue Route the week after it reopens. Here I am on my first day trip out of the city in years, on a day off from work no less, chatting merrily to the friend who has rescued me from a summer day in the box factory. How easy it would have been to lose my mother, my love, my friend, darlings all, gone in an instant. I have to force myself to stop thinking about this.
2. At 9:00 a.m., I am standing at the corner of Park Avenue and East 49th Street, outside the Waldorf Astoria, waiting to cross the street, my office building waiting on the other side. This corner is always terrible for traffic because there is a delivery dock to our office building, there are always idling trucks that forget that the Waldorf’s delivery area is on 50th Street, there are people generally in a hurry to get to the East Side for whatever reason. As it is every morning, eastbound traffic on 49th Street is blocking the box; the 49th Street traffic has the right of way, but nothing is moving. Pedestrians take advantage of this by crossing against the light, through the maze of idling cars. I stay put, as I always do, because you never know when traffic will start moving, and once it starts moving, those cars don’t stay idle for long. A taxi waits behind a laundry truck. The truck moves up, the line changes, we start to cross. The truck, past the crosswalk, stops and idles. As I am about to cross in front of the taxi, the driver pulls up to the truck’s bumper, leaving no room to cross. I look through the driver’s window, wondering if he did that on purpose. I raise my eyebrows. He gives me the finger. Fine, then, I will just join my fellow peds, crossing behind the taxi, into moving traffic on Park Avenue. The traffic slows and stops to let us pass. As I get to the front of the line, a taxi pulls from its standing stop in front of the office building, fast. The driver is looking at the green light ahead of her. It takes me a nanosecond to realize that she doesn’t see the gridlock, or the pedestrian traffic. She is still looking at the light, still accelerating. I realize that there is no way for me to dodge, no point in going left or right, she’s going too fast, I can’t get out of the way. I should be moving, but there is no point in moving, so I freeze. I don’t know what brings her eyes back to the road, but she sees me, goes white, hits the brake hard. When she stops, there is less than six inches between us.
3. At lunchtime I cross Park Avenue and head to the deli. I pick up some indistinguishable lunch and curse myself for not packing a lunch instead. As I head back to the office, a guy with an empty handtruck steps into the street, crossing in the middle of the street, not watching for traffic. He is crossing against the light. There is a crosstown bus headed right for him. Once again, my own body fails me. I should be running to pull him out of the way, or yelling for him to look out, or anything, but the bus is flying through the intersection, no traffic to impede it. The guy pulls the handtruck onto the sidewalk the instant before it would have been crushed under the wheels of the bus. He doesn’t even look up. The driver pounds on the horn. I am rooted to the same spot. A guy in a suit, youngish guy, power suit, suit fulla money, meets my eyes and touches his face. He keeps looking at me and touching the same spot on his face. It takes me a moment to realize that he’s telling me that my lip is bleeding.