New York Nights
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Beer drinkers sit out in the driveway, their conversation carrying in the windless night. Some faces and bodies can be seen in the faint light from the small fire burning at the center of their encircled camp chairs. They aim to get a little drunk and share some conversation, but also to take advantage of an evening with no bugs and temperatures that at only 10 degrees cooler than the afternoon high, still feel somewhat relieving.
Breezes haven’t blown since last Sunday. From the plain states to Michigan, the center of the continent has been hit with warm fronts and the wind has gone too, as if the earth simply forgot to rotate once it reached mid-July.
One voice – a sharp, female voice – rises above the humid night. What she’s saying is too far away to be heard, but from the timing and the tone, I’ve inferred that she doesn’t have anything important to say. She’s not drunk – merely maximizing her turn to talk with volume so the others can’t help but listen.
At 11:30, it’s still sweltering and though this town couldn’t be more opposite than New York, I imagine that it feels like Manhattan in the summer. The streets are bare and windsept, there’s no traffic, certainly no taxis or lit skyscrapers, just darkened porches and lonely mailboxes, and yet I still can envision grimy New York fire excapes running like scaffolding up the sides of these beighe suburban grasses, hanging out above peonies and looking glasses.
Overnight, rains came and swept over the grass rutted by lawn mowers, beginning to crack in deep lighting blots broken into the dirt. Sidewalks and driveways turned the same color as a brown paper bag. I wore a coat to the car and the bag I was carrying to work was pockmarked with big rain drops. Big, brown lakes formed in the intersections and bypassed a steady flow of water down the gutters and into the sewers.
The landscape I see now couldn’t be more opposite. There is no evidence that it’s rained all summer. Only yellow grass and wilted plants.
Conversations die down as the hour moves past 11:30. Now it’s just the sound of the locusts in the bushes and this miserable heat that has taken all the hope from the streets, and made them a surprisingly hard place, but even so, the silly New York/Kansas amalgam passes as quickly as an early morning rain shower.
