mermaids singing, each to each

I have never in my life spent so much time alone as I have lately. Once when I was five, my Dad was stationed on the Navy base in Italy and my Mom and baby brother went to live with my grandparents until housing opened up on the base and we could go join my Dad, and that was, I think, a very personality-forming time, as I didn't really see any other kids for seven months. Seven months is a long time to live in adult-land when you're five. My uncle was a teenager at the time, and he taught me algebra, but he didn't really teach me to do algebra; he just let me stare at the problems and try out numbers until I got them right, and then everyone would ooh and ah.

My grandmother has an arcade in her basement, with no fewer than three full-size pinball machines.

These days I'm just working, and working, and sometimes walking to the gym and back, and I find myself doing odd, manual-labor type tasks, carting home-improvement objects across Manhattan, disassembling furniture. I'm pretty happy, but happy in that way that you might be happy in the thick of writing your dissertation on some obscure topic, knowing that no one you know wants to talk about Neural Components of Implicit and Explicit Conditioned Place Preference Behavior, but that this is but a season, and good will come of it, and someday you will be a professor in a tweed jacket with patches at the elbows, and your dinner party repartee will be known across three to four states, and you will take up pipe smoking, and enjoy it.

I sometimes look across East Harlem, eastward, where you can see all the way to the bridge and the water, and the shapes are so foreign to anything I grew up with, and I think how?

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.