February 21
 
 

I may or may not have been enticing my dog (the white thing to the left of my head.  Well, in the photo left, in reality right) with nasty Irish M&Ms.  I think they were called "smarties".  They were not smart.   Some of the other Irish chocolate, though, my lord.  Yom.  Dogs are not fussy and will be your very best friend for a single Smartie.  Would that be an "S"?  I donno.  Carry on.

 
My story shall be long and probably pointless, but I've been thinking about it a lot, so bear with me.   Last night, or sometime early this morning I started falling asleep when I became aware of some background humming.  Ignorable at first, it was the kind of noise where you, happily going down for the count of the night and dismiss it as some in-the-house debbil or dybbuk trying to gain entry into your body.  But it persisted.  I see flashing.  I hear noise.  I am awake.  It's a fire truck.  Not unusual, the fire house is a block away.  We are used to being awakened at midnight by screaming sirens.   This truck, however, is not going anywhere.  It's parked, idling, between my and the neighbor's house.   I get up and sniff the air for smoke.  I feel the walls for heat.  (no, really.  I did.  I am Safety Pup about fire.)  I look for flames shooting from the house next door.  I (sort of hopefully, I must confess) wait for the fully garbed in fireman wear firemen to battering ram the front doors down.  Nothing.  I get back into bed, figuring they must be waiting for a call.  Then, the sirens! An ambulance! Driving the wrong way up the block! They stop in front of the across the street neighbor's house.  (Confession:  I am a terrible neighbor. I do not want to know their names, I do not want to know their business.  I want to wave hello, exchange pleasantries,  and go on my merry way.  This might be the truest sign of my being an Northeastern person over anything else).

I know these neighbors just by hello.  They are older, black, with lots of grand kids who play outside on their big wheels.  I get a kick out of the kids because they're always at once rowdy and well behaved, under some kind of divine understood threat from Grandma.  They, however,  play no part in my pointless story.  Right.  The ambulance screams up to their house, the EMTs grab their stuff and saunter in through the unlocked front door.  This is fascinating to me.  I am, as everyone probably knows, a sucker for medical emergency.  I am a Gore Hound.  I plant myself at the window and watch.

Minutes pass, and another, larger ambulance shows.  Another two EMTs hup hup out, grabbing bags and EKG machines and the heart starting thing with the paddles.  They disappear into the house (leaving the door open, which really pissed me off.  During the blow by blow I was giving to my sleepy and confused dog [Nick was not really awake]  I said "they ought to shut that! it's expensive to heat a house!"  Even when I am being nosy, I am a Conserver of energy!) and remain in there for no less than 20 minutes.  I sit and wait.  I pick at my toenails.  I watch the guy who lives on the corner emerge from his house, and creep towards the House of Medical Emergency.  He'd take 5 steps towards.  Look around.   Talk  to the air.  Gesture as though someone was actually answering.  He'd pause at the 5th step, then scurry back.  He did this for a good couple minutes, eventually working his way to their bottom step.

I can not imagine what he hoped to achieve by being there, but the moment his foot hit the step, he lurched backwards as though it was very hot and fluttered back to his own house, where he hid, peeking out the screen door, jealous of my good view of things.  When I say nothing happened, I do mean nothing happened, for at least 10 minutes.  I sat at the window with my arms folded on the sill, head resting there, watching the open door.  Finally, 6 paramedics came out, holding the stretcher with the bundled old man.  At first, I thought he was dead.  No iv's, no lines, nothing.  I asked my dog "Would they keep his head uncovered if he was dead?"  I took her silence to mean no.

They loaded him into the ambulance, and I wondered about the family.  No sooner did I wonder, than they appeared.  I watched a man, and this part, above everything else, is what stuck with me.  He reached, in the foyer closet, for his coat.  Long, grey, expensive looking, like a rain coat.  He put it on.  Then, he reached for his hat.  A fedora.   He straightened it, reached for his wife (though, honestly, it would have been his daughter), and walked out.  Ready.

The fact that he put a hat on to step out into the world really struck a chord.  A hat.  A real hat.  Not a baseball cap.  Not a knit thing with a pom pom.  A hat.  He is a man, typical of a certain age of older men for whom an outfit is not complete, is not an outfit, without a hat.  It finishes things off and I was left to wonder:  Why are hats so uncommon now?  Why is it that if we see a younger guy wearing a hat, we're all a little thrown off, a little bit inclined to be all "hey, there, Indiana Jones!"  Hats seem archaic.  They are from a time past.  They are not today.  I think that's why I like them.  When I see an older man in a hat he's obviously taken great pride in taking out of (what do men store hats in? I  know there are hat boxes for women, with those cool old huge sharp hat pins in them, but do men's hats come that way, too?) storage and wearing for an occasion, it fills me with this misty heaviness in my chest, the kind that spills up into my burning throat and makes me tear up, until I blink them away.

When I watched the man across the street, in the face of some potential family horror pause to put on his hat, I got that feeling, that bubble of emotion.  More than anything else that was going on at the moment, more than the crying kids or grand kids, more than them slamming the ambulance doors, more than seeing a neighbor, someone I was not on a first name basis with (see above), but cared enough about to wave hello and offer to shovel if the need arose,  his pause for the hat,  made me cry like a baby.  I can not explain why it is that the fallen old man summoned my curiosity, but the hat brought me to tears.  It is almost as though I am mourning for a time that will probably never be again, a time that is frozen in my memory, but only thanks to television and books.  A time that doesn't at all belong to me.  I guess I just feel honored to be able to look in every once in a while and a hat is the portal.
 

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Now the courtroom is quiet, but who will confess.
Is it true you betrayed us? The answer is yes.
Then read me the list of the crimes that are mine,
I will ask for the mercy that you love to decline.
And all the ladies go moist, and the judge has no
choice, a singer must die for the lie in his voice.