Things seen or overheard recently in Los Angeles and while traveling for a short business trip to New York City
A few minutes before five a.m., Tuesday morning, the Delta terminal at Los Angeles International Airport for a very early flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport, I run into a friend at a news kiosk. He’s just purchased two enormous bottles of Evian water, he can barely carry them. I know he flies a lot for work, he’s likely to be upgraded to first class, I ask why he needs so much water.
“Bro,” he says, “this is my commute.”
A week ago, a coffeeshop in Los Angeles, a petite young woman lays out Tarot cards on her table. The shop’s security guard, also a petite young woman, watches for a couple minutes from behind sunglasses, then leans down. “Is that Tarot?”
“Do you want a reading?”
“I’m scared of that stuff.”
She sits down anyway and the woman draws new cards, flips them over slowly, reading their significance to the guard off her phone – I can’t hear what’s being said until she flips over the third or fourth card and smiles, whispering something excitedly, and the guard shouts, “Woah! Woah!”
She sits back in her chair, stunned. “You just made my month.”
On the subway from JFK to Manhattan, a twenty-something man wearing Apple Airpods sticks his finger up his nose, studies what comes out, rolls it between his fingers, and wipes it on his pants. He looks at it for a long moment, staring, as if he might retrieve it. “Yeah, I’m here,” he says loudly to nobody, to whomever he’s speaking to on his phone.
Two weeks ago, midnight, a house party in Los Angeles, a young woman tells me she knows the age of every person in the room. She points discreetly and names numbers: thirty-one, twenty-seven, twenty-nine, forty-six. She guesses my age and she’s only one year off, she tells me she’s twenty-six. I ask why she knows everybody’s age. She smiles indulgently. “I like knowing I’m the youngest person in the room.”
My six-year-old nephew in Connecticut says it’s weird that people think trees don’t poop – how else do you explain number-two pencils?
Three weeks ago, Crenshaw, Los Angeles, a park with public tennis courts, the sprinklers turn at about seven-thirty a.m. The sprinklers are loud, they make ear-piercing whacking sounds. An older woman emerges from a tent nearby, carrying a plastic takeout container. She stands near one of the sprinklers, filling her container with water, which she sips from occasionally, or just sticks her face into the sprinkler’s spray to drink.
I’m so dismayed by this, I can’t focus, I lose my serve and quickly lose the set.
As my friend and I are leaving, a young woman takes the court next to ours. She’s got a baby with her, in a backpack carrier. She’s also brought a portable ball machine, which she sets up and uses to practice forehands and backhands – ball after ball after ball – and all of this with the baby strapped to her back, staring around amiably.
I’m so impressed by this image, I post a picture online, it makes me happy all day.
Lower Manhattan, twilight, a young women and two young men at a cocktail party for my book publisher:
“Do you listen to Ram Dass? It’s a podcast.”
“Ram Dass?”
“They had a great episode recently on ‘somebody training.’”
“What is ‘somebody training?’”
“It’s like where you realize you’ve spent your whole life since birth training to be ‘somebody,’ but at some point you realize it’s all been just a lie.”
“What are you supposed to be, a ‘nobody?’”
“What is Ram Dass the name of?”
“Also his voice sounds just like Woody Allen’s. But from Boston.”
“I miss Woody Allen.”
On the flight home from New York City, a woman sitting in front of me loads a Tic-Tac-Toe game on her seat-back screen.
She loses the first game. She loses the second game. She laughs incredulously, as if she can’t believe she just lost two games of Tic-Tac-Toe. The passenger next to her turns to watch when she plays again, and she’s about to make yet another wrong move when he leans slightly forward, as if to help her, but thinks better of it and sits back instead.
She commits the mistake and loses again, laughs even harder this time, and he laughs, too. She wins the next game, but loses the one after that, then switches to watching Schitt's Creek.
On the same flight, a twenty-something woman across the aisle from me spends a long time looking at photos on an iPad of a wedding reception.
There’s a ballroom with chandeliers, a table of seafood towers. A crowd of young people in suits and dresses, under purplish lights. In her selfies – there are a lot of selfies – the woman wears a black shift dress. We see the bride occasionally in a white gown. The woman lingers on pictures of a young man, presumably the groom, wearing a two-piece white suit, red tie, gelled hair, serenading the bride with a guitar while she sits onstage alone.
The woman looks at these photos for maybe forty-five minutes before she puts away her iPad, stands up in the aisle, and softly farts.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters
A great pair of new books about acquiring things
A website to help shop for interesting cars
Favorite Italo Disco, and the most Philly thing on the web last week
What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency,” published Saturdays by writer Rosecrans Baldwin, is a weekly mini-essay about something he finds beautiful, with a longer piece once a month for paying subscribers, written in the woods.
Also for paying subscribers: a Sunday supplement, three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the bestselling author most recently of Everything Now (2022 California Book Award), now available in paperback from Bookshop, L’Amazon, or your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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