Shades of Gray

As I get older the past seems to flood in more and more.
We are all wounded and flawed and it helps to admit that. - Tim Juliff, June 2009
 

Scattered pictures,
Of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were. - from "The Way We Were", Marvin Hamlisch

Shades of Gray - View from my Living Room

I am twelve thousand miles away from what I am remembering. My brother Tim.

I saw his smile two days ago. Sitting on a cross-town bus on the northern part of the island of Manhattan. Below 39th Street our New York world's a mess. Flooded. Powerless in all senses of the word, wet, sad, gray.

We had more spirit in the aftermath of nine eleven.

I have my own refugee here. She's camped in the living room. Her apartment still has no power and it's been almost a week since Hurricane Sandy hit.

We went downtown yesterday to check it out. Guards opened the door to the apartment building and showed us where the water level had been. The security card system wasn't working. There was no heat, limited power, some water. A smell of dankness filled the lobby. Outside a tree up-ended by the storm showed its root system - bared to the gray Manhattan sky. The local deli had a few packets of cheese and some salami on its otherwise empty shelves.


Stuyvesant Town, New York

I've been all into New York this past week. The news, the internet, the people waiting for buses, lines of people holding cans for gas. The wreck that is Staten Island. Faraway Rockaways. It is as if a shell of gray surrounds us New Yorkers - living in our own little gray-encased world.

On the phone to OZ, people seen perplexed. "What do you mean, food shortage?" "Why didn't she fill the bathtub up with water?" And on Facebook, "At least you aren't in Haiti!" "At least YOU aren't in Haiti!" I snap back.

And so on the cross-town bus, I sat, immersed in my city, New York. No other place existed. Then I looked across the aisle. And saw my brother's smile.

The woman across from me sat reading. She'd looked up briefly, annoyed at some one's ringing cell phone, and caught my eye. She had my brother's gray hair, my brother's mouth and sixtyish wrinkles. As she caught my eye she smiled. It only lasted a minute, but was enough.

Woman on Crosstown Bus

I was transported back to Melbourne, Australia. To  a thousand different rolling-on-the-floor-laughing nights before emotions were acronyms. To the blue skies and white beaches of Wilson's prom when we were Dylan-listening teenagers. To Tim's sarcasm. To his deep love of his children. To visiting his first-born son in a Melbourne hospital, and picking baby Sime out immediately. Through the hospital nursery glass there were some twenty babies. All in hospital white. And there in the middle was Sime, all dressed up in hippie-purple.

Where was I? The bus jolted me back to reality. It had stopped on Central Park West. A heap of German tourists had ascended with all sorts of high-tech collapsible tubular steel mounted necessities for modern life. "Excuse me!" I had to get out.

I climbed over collapsed strollers, squeezed through the barricades of backpacks. Onto the busy New York street.

My brother's smile was fading. As it blurred into the grayness I remembered where I was.

In New York, New York.

The Empty Fortune Cookie

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say," No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run" - from "Highway 61 Revisited", Bob Dylan

Chocolate Fortune Cookies, Lychees, New York

Sitting in a restaurant on East 55th Street with my American friend Sol. "Lychees" - American Chinese food.

I knew it was American Chinese when, after our "appetizers" (first course), the waiter picked up our dirty knives and put them back on the linen tablecloth, to be re-used for our "mains". Or as they call the main courses in the US,"entrées".

A pleasant evening. And at the end, the obligatory fortune cookies.

"Oooh they are chocolate!" my friend Sal exclaimed. Ho hum, what did I care? After the culinary delights of my home town of Melbourne, chocolate fortune cookies were just SO-uninteristing. 

Still I smiled and started to unwrap mine.

I stared aghast. My cookie was empty. I checked the two halves -  I held one in each hand. Empty shells. No sliver of paper with a trite message. Just darkness. Nothing. Rien.

A void. A complete nothingness.

"Look!" I showed my friend. "I have no fortune! I am no more! I am empty. There's nothing here. I am a blank."

He laughed. "I never saw an empty fortune cookie before - a true abscess!" he said.

Well, as I said, he is an American friend. Still, amidst my horror and despondency I corrected him.

You mean an "abyss," I said.

"Sure," he replied.

I sat there, staring at my message-less fortune cookie. Looking at the blankness, the abyss. The nothingness. Deadness.

American-like, my friend called the waiter."My friend has no future," he explained. "Can you get her another cookie?"

The waiter obliged.

Resigned, I accepted. The new cookie had a message. Something unmemorable. I can't remember what it said. My mind was fixated on the prior nothingness fortune.

We paid the bill. Evening over.

As my friend and I parted, each going our different ways on 55th Street, he said, "Text me tomorrow if you are still alive."

"Sure," I said.

And stared into the abyss that is New York.

Coded Bigotry - Romney Shows What He Thinks of Single Mothers, Especially Black Ones

The best time to have a baby is when you're a black teenager. - Sarah Silverman, from "Jesus is Magic"
 

"Romney stood up in front of a television audience of 60 million people and said that gun violence in America happens because poor black single women are bad mothers. He said it as he stood beside the black son of a single mother." - Chloe Angyal, from Republicans tune in to coded racism

First - I think Sarah Silverman is incredibly funny. Second, I was brought up by a single mother. Third, both Romney and his widow-peaked running mate Paul Ryan have a bad dose of the born-to-rule syndrome.

Like Australia's Malcolm Fraser in his bad old days, the feeling that emanates from Romney and Ryan is their attitude that only they and their ilk have a right to be IN POWER. Listening to Romney-Ryan what is obvious - barely below the surface - is  their revulsion that America has a Democratic president and what's even worse - he's black. The real world is awry for them. It just doesn't fit into their narrow understanding of what they would like the world to be.

They remain incredulous. Surely the world should fit into their own narrow imaginings; they'd burrow into a Norman Rockwell painting if they could.

Out of touch with the real world, Romney demonstrated in the second 2012 Presidential debate, his belief that he, Romney, is a member of the ruling class, a born-to-be leader, and that Obama is an aberration and not worthy of the respect normally accorded to his president.

In Australia where politicians can be rude to each other with impunity, it is only the lunatic fringe that taunts the Australian Prime Minister - an unmarried woman who lives with her partner - using sexism bigotry to deride her.

But in the US, the President is normally treated with respect - the role is modelled on the kings of Europe in the 18th century who were the heads of the government executive. The American president is Commander in Chief of the country's armed forces. In June this year there was a huge brouhaha when a reporter merely interupted an Obama speech. "The interruption stunned White House correspondents and television viewers. And it clearly surprised President Obama, too." - Reporter Interrupts Obama During Statement on Immigration.

I've lived here so long that I've come to view the respect shown to the President as normal. And so I cringed when during the second Presidential debate when Romney interrupted President Obama saying in the voice of someone used to being OBEYED, "Hold on, you'll get your turn!"

Who did Romney think he was talking to? And more importantly, who did he think was listening to him? Did he think that his television audience was composed of white males in two parent families? I think he must have.

Certainly when Romney implied in last Tuesday's debate that gun violence is a result of the increasing number of single parent families, he insulted all of us who have been single mothers ourselves or raised by them. And yet there he was, as Australian writer Chloe Angal pointed out, standing next to a man who was raised by a single woman and who became President if the United States. What a nerve.

How can he have the audacity to stand there and insult millions of single-parents and their off-spring? I can only assume he is unware of what he's saying. A case of political and social Asperger's with a healthy dose of intolerance.

Let's hope we only have to put up with a few more weeks of seeing him on the telly. His gleaming shiny white teeth are hurting my eyes.

The Case of the Missing Diamond and the Shaved Organic Radish

If you go down to the woods today,
You're sure of a big surprise.
If you go down to the woods today,
You'd better go in disguise.
For every bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain because
Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic. - The Teddy Bears' Picnic, Jimmy Kennedy 1932

What are these women doing?

Looking for diamonds of course.

And where are they doing it? At no other than one of the many kid-friendly, gluten-free-friendly, politically-correct , gender-equal, deconstructed-themed restaurants that are popping up everywhere in my home town of Melbourne, Australia.

Dining at such restaurants is an experience more akin to participating in performance art, where all the floor's a stage,  the men are gay, and all the women drink lattes while the babies sip babyccinos surrounded by recyclable cradle-to-cradle gender-neutral toys that are communal in a way their hippie generation grandparents would have never conceived.

Toy trucks, balls, cars lie around on the floor, dribble-drenched, crawled over by toddlers who keep getting in the way of the waiters who are skipping gayly between the little ones, carrying endless lattes and babyccinos high above their heads, ballet-like on little round trays. .

When I was raising my children we called such places "playgroups", but we didn't have waiters, we made our own coffee, and the only things that were deconstructed were the jig-saw puzzles.

My favourite kid-friendly Melbourne restaurant is called Miss Marmadukes. It was there that I experienced the case of the missing diamond.

The waiters all wear cute little striped aprons of the type that were all the rage in the 1930s. They clearly enjoyed the many dramas. Pulling little Sebastian who was biting Amelie on her snotty button nose, back to the toybox. Screeching things like, "Oh what a day, a lost diamond, so Agatha Christie!"

The lost diamond really did them in - it was the sugar-free icing on the organic carrot cake. They searched high and low. Everyone joined in. Flashlights were found to explore behind walls - you can see one of the mothers (top left) scrunched up against a wall looking desperately for the diamond.

In the seventies we used to give our children car-key rings to play with when theybecame bored and grizzly. But the resource boom has done wonders for the Australian economy, so now it's diamond rings. Now WHERE could little Noah have put it?

And while all this was going on an Amish family came in and the toddlers started hiding behind their Tonka trucks. The waiters screamed with delight. High drama was had by all.

Such fun.

If you get bored with the gossip and "hide the diamond" antics, you can always read the menu. It's a bit hard though to remember what restaurant you are in because they all have the same buzz words -  shaved radish, window-sill herbs, deconstructed, du puy lentils, sumac labne.

Deconstructed - some menus have so many deconstructed items that it's more like attending a cooking lesson than being served solid fare.

DIY food. Soon we'll need those funny little pieces of paper with assembly instructions translated from Chinese that come with flat-box furniture in order to construct our deconstructed eggs benedict.

I just LOVE going to Melbourne. It's so IN. So cradle-to-cradle. So deconstructed. So latte.

Facebook Falsehoods and Fantasies

Ah, but I was so much older then

Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now. - Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages" 1964

Flying east over the Pacific. Neither day nor night. The only 'time' one could set ones's mechanical watch to is 'now', which doesn't exist  35,000 miles or whatever above sea-level. All smartphones have to be on "airplane" mode". If turned onto "real mode", what time would it be?

We are in the 'Now'. I am hungry but we have to wait till what would be two in the morning  Melbourne time, or noon New York time, to have dinner, so that those alighting in LA will be OK to have lunch 12 hours later. Whatever. It's confusing even to contemplate.

I'd had had a rough time in OZ, 'OZ' as we Aussies call our homeland. It had not been the most pleasant trip and had it not been for my two children, grandson and a couple of very close old friends and family I'd have gotten the hell out of Dodge.

Most people, family, most close friends were wonderful, but this trip I saw the Ugly Australian. I hadn't seen it recently, being too bogged down last year with my  brother's death  and the consequent surrounding of the love, comfort and support of those closest too me.

This time I was raw-er. The cotton wool wasn't there anymore. I was meant to be normal. My brother Tim was (as he is every day) in my head and in  his children's and wive's heads, but there he rests.

So I was meant to be "normal". A normal what? A normal Australian woman in her sixties I suppose. Brotherless, motherless, fatherless. The head of my branch of the family.

My Brother Tim

Grief should have departed by now. However as we all know, it never does. It just fades a little, but in many ways it is more intense in its disconcerting paleness and distance. Pastel memories: we try to grab them but they slip chalk-like, dryly through our expectant and hopeful fingers.

Still 35,000 miles up I was in the future and heading east not west, I was I was in The Now. And without my knowledge, as I neared New York, the years slipped away. One, three five .. By the time I arrived in New York I was ten years younger. Amazing.

A few sleeps and I was capable of venturing out into the streets of New York. All around  there were all people like me. People in their fifties, sixties, on their way to work or the movies. I was one of the crowd. I had transformed into a normal person.

What do they say in OZ if  you are valued? "Yer blood's worth bottling". Well I don't know about blood, but certainly if we could collect it, there is something that happens in the air 35,000 feet up, flying east, that drops years from one's age and whatever THAT is, it's worth bottling.

Of course it is nothing to do with the flight or the miles. But it does have something to do with ageism and cultural differences.

I'd flown from one city of immigrants, New York, to another city of immigrants, Melbourne, and back again. Which city is better to its immigrants. I dunno. But what I do know is that in America I am related to as an American. I can vote, I can have medical care, and people are not allowed to be nasty to me because I am 'old'. In fact with the African, East Indian, Indian subculture immigrants, being old is something to be respected. People in the streets, even pushy New Yorkers defer to me.
And in any case, about 30% of the population is older than I. I feel young.

I feel valued here. I felt valued in Australia, but there only by the few.
I tell people about the Ugly Ocker Bogan Man. "I would have given him the finger", they say, "but he might have shot you". I am talking about Australia, I explain. We don't have guns.

I am confused. My heart is in Australia, but except for a couple of old friends and my children and my perfect grandchild, it was cold, both physically and emotionally there.

I WILL return to Australia. But I'll be careful in building my nest. I'll surround it with my true friends and family. I'll rarely venture out alone.

But on the plus side - and there's always a plus side as one of my favourite New Yorkers has told me time and time again - I know now, across two continents, who the people are who truly care for me.

Yes, in the words of the great man, and BTW you must get his new album,

"I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now."

The Ugly Ocker Bogan Man

Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Yeah, I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation) - The Who, "My Generation", 1965

Bourke Street, Melbourne

On 14th Septermber 2012 on the corner of Bourke and Williams Street, Melbourne 3000,  I became old.

I was vacationing there, in Melbourne, my home town. I was ill. It was that cold, damp autumnal Melbourne weather.

A sad thing had just happened and I was on my way back to my accommodation there.

Septermber 14th, round noon. I'd been visiting family and was finding my way back to where I was staying, traveling by tram.

My mind went blank when I got off tram number #1; in which direction should I take tram #2?

Not only sad, I felt ridiculous standing in the tram shelter amongst  normal-looking happy people. I could barely stop the tears welling up.  I could hardly speak. Mental distress on top of laryngitis. Potens Sui, my old school motto. Self control. I braced myself and turned to a woman next to me. "Which way is Swanston Street?"  I asked. Now anyone who  has lived in Melbourne for over forty years will know that only someone NOT from Melbourne would need to ask that question. I knew I was in a bad way. Sad and confused, and now not knowing where the major street in my own home town was, I followed the woman's directions and caught tram #2. But when I got off I started to walk the wrong way for tram #3. I chose the downhill direction. Because of my bronchitis. I hoped it was right.

About all the way down the hill my Melbourne memory came back to me. Wrong way. I turned around and was walking up the hill when I saw the man.

He was 15 feet  away. About forty - paunchy, beer-gutted, sloppily  dressed. Too fat to be a builders' laborer or "in construction" as they say in America. I think he had a badly cut beard. His expression was vacant. His eyes dead. Eyes that can look out but you can't see into.  He was ugly; ugly in looks and I guessed (correctly it turned out), in spirit. As he came nearer to me, his eyes lit up.

He was looking at me. Me, who was thinking about the sad thing, with dried tears on my cheeks, finding it difficult to breath, my hair disheveled from the Melbourne wind, my clothes wrinkled and ill-fitting from traveling. My face never looks the best when I am down. And it certainly no longer looks as it did when I was young and attractive.

"Hello beautiful!" he sneered with a laugh.

Yes on 14th September 2012 at 12:05 pm, I became old.

Of Mice and Men and Yves St Laurent Paris Premieres Roses

"I remember about the rabbits, George."
"The hell with the rabbits. That’s all you can ever remember is them rabbits."  - from Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men"
 

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn't sleep
Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey
But it's really not my home
My fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne  - Joni Mitchell "Carey"
 

I never thought I'd meet John Steinbeck's Lennie Small "Of Mice and Men" anywhere, let alone in Bloomingdale's New York. But there he was, standing near the Yves St Laurent perfume counter, looking lost.

He didn't LOOK like Steinbeck's Lennie as portrayed in any of the various film and stage versions I've seen. He didn't look like the Lennie of my imagination when I first read "Of Mice and Men" at the precocious age of nine.

"Nine?" you look surprised, unconvinced even. But then remember, I was brought up in Australia in the nineteen fifties and was exposed to Literature with a capital "L" - and not to American Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics. The only mouse I knew of as a kid was the mouse that  Steinbeck's  Lennie Small petted to death. Things could only look up. And they did. From the dead Steinbeck mouse and life in a household where consumerism was banned, to shopping for Yves St Laurent Paris Premieres Roses in Bloomingdale's New York.

Of course the Yves St Laurent Paris Premieres Roses wasn't for me. I don't wear perfume. Some of the lessons of my childhood have stuck. "It is for a friend," I apologised silently to my father who has  long ago "gone to god" as my mother would have put it, though of course, he didn't believe in her - god that is - my mother he accepted as real.

There I was in Bloomies. And there HE was - Lennie Small. I recognized him instantly, even though he was black, gay, and gainfully employed and not poor white and hetro. I'd just paid for the perfume and stood back from the counter, waiting for one of shop assistants who we now call "associates", to gift-wrap my purchase.

"Hello," smiled Lennie. "What are you doing today?" "It's OK," I told him. "I have already bought some perfume." He was so innocent looking. So engaging. The Bloomingdale's staff employed to hang out in the perfume sections usually annoy the hell out of me. But this Lennie guy was just too sweet. I smiled back.

"Are you getting it gift-wrapped?" he asked and I told him yes, that is what I  am waiting around for. "I want to wrap it! I want to wrap it!  I love wrapping things. Can I PLEASE wrap it?" I heard the words but in my head they translated to, "I want to tend those rabbits George, please can I tend them rabbits?" What else could I do? I found the associate,  who was holding the wrapping paper and ribbons in one hand, and the box with the perfume in the other. "Can this man please wrap it for me?" I asked. She scowled. "Why? What's the matter with him?"

Sensing he might lose the opportunity, Lennie-like he whined, "But I want to wrap it. I like wrapping things". Did he call her George? Where was I? Centuries slipped back and I was nine again. George just HAD to buy that farm so that Lennie could tend them rabbits.

"Please," I begged. "Let him wrap it."  The associate relented with a sigh and handed him the paper, ribbons, scissors and box.

My god. What had I let myself in for? He took forever. He measured the box against the paper. "She cut it too big," he said. He measured the scarlet and white ribbons. He centered the box. With perfect precision he folded the paper.

He TENDED that present. The ends of the paper wrapping were perfect equilateral triangles. Oops, one end was shorter. He started again.  Un-Kate-like I waited patiently. I was nine years old again and this was Lennie Small.

An hour later it was all done. I thanked him and left, giving a nod to my childhood self of a hundred years ago.

I'd done the right thing. Them rabbits were well and truly tended.

Don't You Just Hate It When ...

Hi Kathleen,
I'm very sorry to see how upsetting this is to you. - Email from a Princeton "Researcher"

Don't know much about geography
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra
Don't know what a slide rule is for -   Sam Cooke, "Wonderful World"

Graduation - When Degrees Meant Something

Women of this world - don't you just hate it when certain men - especially the younger ones who were raised post political-incorrectness - tell you that you are "upset" when you complain about some service, or lack thereof.

When you are in the right, and are pointing out an error in their customer service, be it commercial, governmental or horror of horrors, educational.

What's "upset" got to do with it? It immediately implies that you are somehow not emotionally capable of dealing the blows that some inept service unprovider has dealt.

It takes focus from THE PROBLEM to one's own private mental state. Quelle nerve!!!

Some of you might know that I have, for the past 14 years, run a website for Australian expatriates. It's a relatively low hitting-site - Australia has a population of around 22 million, and even with the Australian Diaspora of 5%,  the Aussie expat community is small. Still Australians Abroad has a loyal following, and is important to those of us who go there for information or a vent.

Recently I noticed what seemed to be a DDoS attack. A websiteDistributed Denial of Service attack is when is an attempt to makewebsite unavailable to its intended users. This is usually done bymaking multiple hits or site requests so that the site is unable to cope with the traffic.

Have a look at this graph. Itshows the rate of hits before the attack, with the sharp drop indicating when the attack ceased.


This slice cover just a few hours. The "attacks" went on for days, having the effect of putting my site over quota and therefore unavailable for two hour every day.

Anyway, enough of this techie stuff! The reason I went into it is that after much researching and posting to Google website forums, I  discoverered the offenders who were not out to be malicious but were merely inept "researchers" affiliated with Princeton University and operating out of a group called planet-lab.org.

They said so very sorry we didn't mean it the dog ate my homework blah blah. I was not amused, and now having a name to put to the source of my outrage, emailed back, "Dear Mr Wzyz, ...", explaining that these tens of thousands of automated hits were unsolicited and unwelcome.

And then it came. A return email with,

Hi Kathleen,
I'm very sorry to see how upsetting this is to you ..."

Kathleen already yet! How sweet. How sharing. How it's so nice to get to know you. How pathetically familiar!

He's still emailing me. He wants ME to try to work out how it happened  on his end. The research was meant to involve one to three hits (which the guys at planet-lab.org name a "probe" because it sounds spacey and more important) every 5 minutes. Now you and me might think that means one hit to my site from planet-lab.org every five minutes. But NoSireeBob.

What we are doing is to perform an active probe from each PL node to aussieclouds.appspot.com every 5 minutes. The burst of traffic is probably because we conduct our measurement on around 150 PL nodes.

In human-speak, that means 150 times 3 every 5 minutes. N'est ce pas?

Anyway, or anyways as they say in the States, it was enough to annoy me,. Though that was a minor annoyance compared to the inept and so non-PC responses I'm getting from Mr. Wzyz. If the unsolicited website probes were not enough, now I have to deal with his emails!

What a week. I'd barely put the mouse down when the phone rang. It was Chase fraud alert asking me did I really make thousands of dollars in purchases from Victoria's Secret and Tiffany's.

At least one place has its act together. Of course I hadn't purchased anything from those places. Tiffany's! I haven't had breakfast there for yonks. And as for Victoria's Secret. ASIF!

A mid-western gentleman once told me that Victoria's Secret is where mid-western women go to buy stuff when they want their men to give them money.

What a hoot!

Stay tuned!

Talking to Strangers

Oh I can't control myself

Oh I can't control myself
Oh I can't control myself
Don't leave me hanging on the telephone - Blondie, "Hanging on the Telephone"

Cool Girl with Umbrella, New York 1996

A hundred years ago when I first came to live in New York it was a very quiet place. You could walk down almost any street and the only sounds of people talking were made by tourists or lunatics, in most cases by the latter.

You could go for a stroll and actually be annoyed by the rumblings of delivery vans, the sirens from ambulances, police cars, fire engines, the New York car horns and the sound of air conditioners emitting whatever air conditioners emit.

Those days have long gone. New York noise has doubled in intensity. Now New Yorkers have had the finial inhibition lifted. They can talk anytime, anywhere, without being hampered by a need for the physical presence of another human.

The cell phone has brought equality to the streets of New York. You can no longer tell the loonies from the so-called normal New Yorkers.

I hadn't thought too much about the increase in New York noise. In fact I hadn't thought about it at all, until the other day when I was walking in Manhattan with one of my noisier New York friends - yes New Yorkers actually do differ in the noise level they emit - when she yelled, "Jesus! New York is so f-cking noisy nowadays!"

To be fair, she HAD to yell or I wouldn't have heard her. "It think it's the cell phones," I replied, but of course she didn't hear me. New Yorkers only listen to themselves.

Some New Yorkers still don't have cell phones, and are forced to talk to whoever is close by. Click on the play button below and you'll hear a typical New York conversation between two complete strangers.

Unfortunately I wasn't quick enough off the mark and missed recording the first bit. The woman, who is doing most of the talking had been sitting in, well overflowing really, her wheelchair, berating everyone who walked by for being New Yorkers and not talking to her. It's a short clip, and well worth the click!

Larry David Talks on Pretend Cell Phone

People talking on cell phones somehow block out all other sounds and enter a bubble of their own making. They'll talk about the most intimate things regardless of who might be listening.

I used to think they were just pretending to call and my reason for thinking that there was no one on the other end of the line was that people on cell phones in New York never pause. It's one non-stop stream of audible consciousness.

If I was pretending I'd have enough sense to pause now and then and "answer with an "Oh really" or two. Of course I was quite wrong in my reasoning. New Yorkers are talkers and not listeners. The cell phone is perfect for them. There are no talker-listener pairs. Just two talkers. And hence the huge increase in noise level.

For every New Yorker on a cell phone there are two simultaneous conversations. I've never been much good at maths but something tells me that this is - to use a favorite word of modern Americans - HUGE! And thinking of "HUGE" it occurs to me that the new use of this word makes maths irrelevant. Numbers are either huge or not huge. I think I'm on to something huge here.

But that's another story.