Waking up to the rude sun poking through the blinds instead of an alarm clock is nice, just to see what that’s like now.
The apartment’s only a one-bedroom basement and living room on the edge of East Flatbush and Crown Heights. Not a lot of real estate to sanitize, but I’ve always taken to wiping down the countertops, stove, dishes and bathroom, then sweeping the floors to keep mice and other vermin at bay. They jump around in the neighbor’s backyard jungle and have yet to get the memo that the coronavirus has trapped us too.
At this hour it’s still quiet. The floors don’t creak with weight. The radiators don’t scream with heat. The family upstairs hasn’t stirred yet. My three sisters haven’t bulldozed into the kitchen. Before the outbreak, their living situation at the shelter with their mother was stressful at best. It’s a wonder that not having high school as an escape is the thing that lets me see them every day. The youngest one is eight. She mostly concerns herself with staving off boredom and snacks, a blithe unawareness of how much we do without. That invisible percentage of the city’s residents the Mayor’s always harping on, that don’t have internet, cable and stability it seems.
This house, though, has been a sturdy titan for our family for generations. It’s brick and stone steadfast through whatever calamity that claims the city. My pops, ever the stubborn mule, usually crashes on a couch or the floor to give the girls space.
Or at least that’s where I thought he was as I rounded the corner to the kitchen. Popping into my view like a damn brown panther from the shadows, he enthusiastically starts shaking me to go outside.
He’s as tall as the door frame, and in his green boots and black jacket, he looks more like an aging soldier rather than the semi-disabled man recovering from double-cataract surgery that he is.
He wants to go to Wingate Park, right behind the kids’ high school. A short walk past Kings County Hospital, where his mother worked for decades. He’s probably done that walk his entire life in this neighborhood, and Mr. ‘I’ve lived through crack and AIDS in Brooklyn’ is not about to be told he can’t go to his park. I could waste more breath explaining how a virus can crumple the strongest of men in the right circumstances. Tell him that from Brownsville to Bedstuy, just mean-mugging a lung-killing bug isn’t going to be enough right now. No matter how fast your fists are or guns were.
He hates being told he can’t do something, even more than I hate parenting my parent. So I tell him to stay away from people and wrap up. No sense in surviving ‘rona only for him to drop dead of pneumonia because climate change has us all thinking it’s nice out when it isn’t really.
A great smile breaks onto his face, as bright as the sun that warms the small part of me that is cold and depressed and tired. I may have lost two out of my several jobs, but work still has to be done. News doesn’t make itself. The one job I actually love and trained for, not the three others I do to make rent in the city I grew up in. And with people stuck in limbo, it feels more important than ever to try and tell them what’s going on. Dozens are dying in the city. Hundreds, and in some cases, thousands have died in other countries. Our city has millions and millions of people living on top of each other in cramped corners already. We’re hiding in cubby holes, trying to outlast the spread that’s reached thousands and continues to climb every day.
Pops grabs his prescribed glasses with blockers on all sides, eyes still too sensitive for sunlight. He looks at the sky often as we walk away from the safety of the house. “Even when there was nothing else, the sky was still there,” he says. “It was just blue. A giant block of blue, but it was still there.”
The park’s familiar and the track’s sparsely covered with people. It seems safe.
Once upon a time my dad was a running back for Tilden High School. Fast as wind, and cocky as hell. As we kick a slightly deflated basketball between the soccer goals set up on the dead sandy patch of the field, I try to pretend it’s his athletic muscle memory that makes him a better kicker than me. Soccer was never really my game, but the basketball courts are still half torn up. The large machines paused, massive mammoths frozen in time as if abandoned in their work while the city tried to halt itself.
Running, however, running makes me feel free.
So we ran together.
And after an hour or so we retreated back to the house to warm and wash our hands. Just in case.
