Avigayil

A hundred years ago (i.e., three weeks ago) I went to London for a long weekend. I somehow still haven’t recovered.

Brighton Beach boardwalk, New Year’s Day.

I’m a terrible person. A bunch of friends did the Coney Island Polar Bear Club’s annual New Year’s Day swim (global warming edition) today and after snapping a few shots, I pretty much abandoned them and ran off to take pictures of all the other people.

The Wish Tree

(W. 88th, I think, between Broadway and Amsterdam)

This morning I came across an old video of a PECS lesson with one of my all-time favorite kids. He’s learning to ask for things, and the thing he’s asking for today is a Buzz Lightyear toy. He loves Buzz Lightyear. Every time he hands me the picture of the toy, I say, in that super-chipper, super-therapisty voice that I have since worked very hard to obliterate, “You want Buzz!” And then I give him Buzz. It’s slow going, and he can’t tolerate that I’m sticking out my right hand for the picture instead of my left, or maybe it was the left hand instead of the right, who knows. I’d say who cares, but he did—greatly and a little violently. But he needed to learn to put the picture in both hands because in life, sometimes you get the right hand and sometimes you get the left. After 10 mutually frustrating minutes of this, after he has adjusted to the “new” hand to the extent that he is now merely whimpering instead of trying to hit me, he hands me the picture and says, in exactly my words and exactly my intonation, “You want Buzz!” Over and over. “You want Buzz! You want Buzz!” And now he is happy. I cannot help but dissolve in laughter. 

This is the same child I once watched re-walk a hallway, over and over, in order to get it just right. Each time he reached the end he howled and went back and started again, and I couldn’t help him because I didn’t know what was missing and he couldn’t tell me. How was this trip different from the countless other times we’d walked down the hallway together? Was one of the light bulbs out? Was it taking 36 steps instead of 37? Was the runner not straight? He was inconsolable, but he couldn’t stop. He cried and started again and cried and started again and it was one of the few times that I cried a little, too—his distress was so real. I don’t remember how we finally left the hallway, but he spent the rest of the session in my lap, crying and then hitting me, crying and then hitting me.

I stumbled on the ASPCA’s annual Blessing of the Animals on my way home from Bloomingdale’s today…