WORKS ON DIGITAL PAPER

The Usual Spot, Spring Street Manhattan

On my way back from lunch, a lunch that consisted of grilled cubes of salmon meat clinging to wood skewers more like they had grown there, become comfortably familiar with the surroundings and felt quite abused at being pried away, I thought about St. Patrick's day and my unthinkingly applied green shoes and sweater and wondered if green was, in fact, my color. I recalled that first time, long ago, I felt that I looked "grown up" I was wearing a very deeply bright forest green button-up woolish, heavy cottonish, feltish L.L. Bean, R.E.I, J.Crew collared shirt. It was a perception my father actually laid on me over dinner at a restaurant upon my return from some year in college, probably a seafood restaurant. My mother was there and I think I had the faint glow of chin stubble and longish college hair. My father, and I quote not verbatim, said, "You look grown up." In the middle of this memory the puffy-limbed homeless lady whom I had passed earlier sleeping serenely in the sun outside the corner magazine shop on my way to lunch, asked the remarkably tall trio of purposefully tossle-haired Englishmen for a cigarette. Being that they were so far up there I couldn't hear their reply, but apparently she did and she wasn't happy about it, letting them know so in a rambling string of incomprehensible morning-jargon.