Back in town, waiting for the hurricane to show us what it can do, I’m haunted by the image of the crepuscular party boat that I captured the other night at dinner, out on Fire Island.  Was it a party boat? It seemed to be a ferry boat that had been fitted out with an upper-deck awning and a few colored lights. It drifted by in no particular hurry and seemed to be heading nowhere, although it could easily have pulled up to a dock at Ocean Beach, behind me. It passed in silence, either too far away or too subdued to pour forth noise. Perhaps it was on its way to pick up more partiers! Perhaps I have an over-active imagination.

When my imagination steps in for information that I don’t have, the result is usually uncomfortable. I’m very familiar with the twists and kinks of my imagination, but that doesn’t weaken its grip.It doesn’t stop, for example, the flood of pseudo-foreshadowing irony. Below almost any peaceful, everyday scene, it can paste the caption, “This is what it looked like before the unforeseen disaster struck. Stay tuned.” Little does this old fellow over here in the corner, reading the Times as he sips his morning tea, know that he is about to be gobbled up by Godzilla — or, in this case, Irene. Strike that. The old fellow knows that he is being stalked by Irene. But what does that mean? Cue my imagination.

I’m hoping that, by now, Megan, Ryan, Will and Astor are tootling along in their Zip Car to Pennsylvania, where they’re going to weather out the storm with Ryan’s family. Aside from normal worries about highway driving, I’m glad that they’re not stuck in their flat in flood-zoned Alphabet City. (Nor will they be marooned uptown with us, where there are no extra beds of any kind, in case the power goes out — up eighteen flights of stairs and with no running water.) Once I hear that they’ve arrived in Easton, I’ll stop worrying about them. Meanwhile, there is plenty to do here, including the evacuation of the balcony. I’m saving that exercise for the later part of the afternoon. This morning, I’m going to do a few things in the kitchen that will probably be helpful later, and then I’m going to straighten up the bedroom and the blue room, which have gone untended for nearly a month.

Are we prepared? Prepared for what? Who knows. The MTA shutdown means that everyday commerce is going to be severely constrained until the storm has passed through and the grosser damage has been sorted out. Maybe, here in Yorkville, the hurricane will amount to nothing worse than high winds and pouring rain, but most parts of the metropolitan area are going to be far more sorely tested — I think. (Maybe the winds will blow our apartment building down. That would confirm the opinion that long-time tenants hold of its construction.) When will life “get back to normal”? I put it in quotes because we seem to be living in a time when normality is elusive. (When the chairman of the Federal Reserve calls the nation’s policy-making system “broken,” things are not normal.) And, beyond the storm and its aftermath, what will remain of Kathleen’s dearly longed-for Labor Day break on Fire Island? What will remain of Fire Island?

Maybe what draws me to the photograph is that it’s a bit out of focus.

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 27th, 2011 at 8:00 am.