R-e-s-p-e-c-t. Find out What it Means To Me

Welcome to day three of the newly employed me. I wish I could tell you about my job, because there is lots to tell, but I'm not willing to get fired on the off chance one of my many employers and associates reads such things. We're in a new world where after school talk is done more and more in public. So some things will have to be left, as they say, sacred.

I will tell you this: I am rediscovering that I am a morning person. I love getting up early. Don't get me wrong, it's HARD to get up when it is still dark out, but once I am up, I love it. I make coffee and watch the light come up and then I write. I did this a lot when Graham was still 3000 miles away, but let it go, because well, my boyfriend was back in my loving arms and then there's moving and life changes and who can be bothered to get up at 5 or 6 when all that is going on?

I have an hour commute, which I thought would drive me crazy, but so far it isn't a drag. I'm reading Grace Paley's short stories, and I am finding that they are PERFECT for the train rides. They are not that long, so interruptions aren't distracting, and they are set in New York, which sews me to both Paley's world, and my own. The other thing that I am realizing is that the subway can be a sort of theater for whatever wants to occur.

On my first morning, a couple boarded the L train and gave a very loud, bilingual, poetic and heartfelt plea for everyone on the train to come to Jesus Christ. Everyone around them was silent for a few stops. Towards the end of there sermon, people started shouting "Amen!" Then a young man started yelling at them that he didn't want to hear it and that it was illegal. The woman who had been prothelitizing called out to him, "I bless you, sir!" Which didn't go over well with young man, who started yelling louder. Then a man started yelling at him to "RESPECT, man! Why can't you just have respect!" So the young man started yelling back at him, "It's illegal!" The man yelled back at him, "What's the matter with you, man? Respect! You won't respect this Puerto Rican?" Then the Jamaican woman next to me started rolling in a loud voice: "RESPECT! RESPECT FOR WOMEN!"

It was quite a spectacle. Graham told me I should have just started yelling: "RECYLCLE! WE MUST ALL RECYCLE!" just to throw in some other form of indignation.

Maybe on the way home I'll see the acrobats I sometimes see, who do flips inside the moving train and who dedicate their performances each time to their landlord. Or maybe I'll just stick my nose in my book, and be transported by Grace's words.