1.
A man in a yellow velour suit got onto the train on Friday
morning. The suit was a bit too big for him. He was explaining that he was
Obama’s cousin and that he loved John Denver. He started singing “Come let me
love you!” etc. He was holding a couple of slips of paper with hand writing at
the top, and he kept looking at them, putting one on top of the other. He was
on his way to appear in court, said he wore the suit for just that purpose. He
was Obama’s cousin. At the Belmont stop, a CTA security person came and got him
off the train. It was a bit early for a scene like that especially up north on
the red line. If it were the green line, some commuter would have told him,
constructively, to get ahold of himself. They would have handled the problem
in-house.
2.
Rachel got up early on her Saturday morning to Skype with
me. She sat back in bed after grabbing a twenty ounce tub of yogurt. It was
called Alive! She held the tub close
to the camera to show me. Rachel is tired of all the food in Singapore. She answered
a phone call from a guy who was coming over to take a look at her room. She
wants to sublet it for the summer. She put the yogurt down on the bed next to
her when she was finished eating from it. The doorbell rang and the mattress eased
up as she got up to answer the door. The tub of yogurt tipped over. If it
wasn’t the worst time to have a pile of yogurt on her bed, it was at least up
there. She quickly made her bed to hide it; she pulled her comforter over the
yogurt and smoothed everything out. When she came back to me on Skype, she
said, “Remind me to wash my sheets.”
3.
My Saturday morning, I went out to drive myself to
Indianapolis to see my mom who was there for the weekend. Mitch said he had parked
the car somewhere on Glenwood. Coming up behind the car with my bags, I went to
throw my backpack in the trunk. I set down my cup of coffee, and I saw the
shards of mirror on the asphalt. The driver’s side rearview mirror had been hit
off, again. And this was plus the
fact that the driver’s seat won’t move anymore. I was going to have to drive
the three hours by myself, without a mirror, while pretending to be as tall as
Mitch. I thought maybe this time whoever did it left their cell phone number.
Maybe they’d pay for the replacement mirror. I looked around the front for any
pieces of paper, and I saw that there was a cross hanging from the dashboard. I
have no cross hanging from the dashboard. And now that I was thinking about it
– the ’97 atlas was missing out of the back window. This wasn’t my car. Mine
was across the street, all three mirrors intact. I felt so happy; this small
misfortune suddenly wasn’t mine.
* Or Other People’s
Problems
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