Sugar Bomb

It’s steamy enough out to be August again, sultry and wet. My computer is choking on some half-digested ort of information and needs to re-boot so I head out for a walk while it grinds. Landmines have been going off in my office all week and the staff have been diving to cover. They deserve a happy Friday sugar bomb, so I am going for doughnuts. Not your crappy Dunkin or box-o-Entenmann’s best if eaten by 2025, not your bullshit Sex-and-the-City cupcakanista so-over-it buttercream rosebuds. Nope, this is the good stuff, the cushy Cadillac blonde, the spiky high school tart who would never have looked at you, your older sister’s best friend’s ass wiggling to the Top 40 countdown as they sunbathe in the backyard. Yeah, that good, but totally attainable. I’ve got to let my hair down for this, let it ride over my shoulders, let the light hit me as I push it one step further and go for gritty, spine-popping, do-you-think-I’m-not-serious? coffee.

The street is blocked off so that’s the way I’m going, the flashing lights on the cruiser a beacon. People are hurrying down the street, and as I turn the corner I hear singing. In the space in the road between the Young Israel double crumbling tenements and the Bialystoker Home for the Aged a group of men are dancing, holding torahs to their chests, mazel tov, mazel tov is what I can hear, and I don’t know whether this is an annual take your torah to work day, or that thing they do when you move it from one place to another, or the happy hoo-hah that happens when you get a new one, but people are pulled up all over and watching, spilling out from stoops and bodegas and the illegal underground won-ton rolling outfits that reek of rotting cabbage.

Here comes Knobs, too, rolling a shopping cart down the sidewalk and we head-bob from across the wide avenue. He’s too busy to stop and so am I. We both have our missions to fulfill, but I know, and he knows too, that the next time we meet on this sidewalk, this everyone’s living room, this public church, this graving yard, I will give him a smile like a flash bomb and be so thrilled to do it.