Watch your step

 

The winter wonderland is melting away and there is dog shit everywhere.

Yesterday I slipped on some ice, but wasn’t hurt. Only my sense of well being was damaged. By “sense of well being” I mean, the confidence in my ability to walk without falling down .

Today my toaster oven would not toast. Am I supposed to eat my English muffin raw? Hard times.

I’m an old man.

On the way to work I stop at the Marketplace to get something to eat and the big TV screen says that 33 years ago today the World Trade Center was bombed.

A flash of confusion— How old am I? — No, the first attack. 1993. I lived in Kansas City. I knew my way around KC. I was a delivery driver. Car radio on the highway. Nirvana, Beck, Golden Oldies, NPR. Everywhere I went I could smell barbecue and people had Rush Limbaugh on, stirring up fake scandals. Bill and Hillary. I try to remember what was going on around then. When was the Ruby Ridge incident? And David Koresh at Apocalypse Ranch or whatever it was in Waco. 

I think of my friends in Kansas City. That was over thirty years ago. How old am I?

Don’t worry. I remember. I pass the cognitive test, just like our President.

Every year seems apocalyptic.

Waco was April 19 and the Oklahoma City bombing was April 19 because the Battle of Concord was April 19 and here the embattled farmer stood and fired the shot heard around the world and I began reading about the mythology of the militia movement and the World Trade Center bombing killed six people and the Oklahoma bombing killed how many again? 167. Still the worst domestic terrorist attack unless you believe 9/11 was an inside job then don’t talk to me. Truthers trigger me.

Five years after the 93 bombing I’m working at the World Trade Center and receiving deliveries in the same underground loading dock where the truck bomb was detonated.

Tread carefully on this ice but especially where you don’t see ice because that is the trap set for you. I’m fortunate I’m not sore from the fall and that I didn’t break, didn’t shatter like that mirror I broke on Friday 13.

I get off the J train at Broad Street, same as I did from 1998 to 2001. Now I walk South, very carefully toward the harbor at the center of the world.