Gotham Diary:
Stick To It
13 August 2013

Taking care of those million things, and running a ring of errands that ended in the Museum bookstore, freezing and dripping at the same time, kept me away from the desk for most of the day; the rest was spent glued to The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling’s first post-Potter novel, and every page a book for grownups. It was midnight when I closed the book, and Kathleen walked in from a late night at the office.

Kathleen went straight to bed, but I stayed up for a while, starting Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors.

I should like nothing more than to devote the rest of this damp and rainy day to writing about all the good reading that I’ve been enjoying, but it cannot be. I’ve got to run to Fairway for the fixings for dinner, do a bit of prep, taxi down to Alphabet City to pick up Will and his Granma Fran — for the last haircut. This evening, Will’s parents will dine with us at the apartment for the last time in a long time. Kathleen won’t see them again until Thanksgiving. I’ve got to fetch some things that are coming back to us, on Friday, amidst the movers, but I won’t be hanging around to chat. By Saturday, they’ll all have left New York.

Megan and Ryan are off to what look to be great careers in San Francisco; Ryan is especially pleased with his new job, which is not wanting in the prestige department. Will is enrolled at a very attractive pre-school. Finding a house to rent in the chosen part of town is not expected to take very long, and temporary housing has been made available in the meantime. In their minds, Megan and Ryan are already out there, setting up their new life. It is impossible not to be very happy for them, and proud of them as well.

Will knows that something is afoot, but he’s game.

Kathleen and I aren’t quite sure what’s in store for us, but we’re very glad that we’ve got one another.

***

Fairway was about as empty as it ever gets, this morning. I pushed a shopping cart on the rounds, picking up very little that I shouldn’t be needing for this evening. When I was done, I stood in the shopping-cart line, just as I always do — because I always use a shopping cart, even if I’m going to buy only a few things. I don’t want to carry a basket, much less an armful of items. No matter how few things there are in my shopping cart, however, I know that I have to go through the shopping-cart line, because that’s the Fairway rule. I don’t mind, because the shopping-cart line is usually much shorter and sometimes even faster than the shopping-basket line.

It is also true that I avoid the store at rush hour. Running over to Fairway for a bunch of parsley last night at 6:30 was the sort of aberration that would occur only on the first day back from a trip. I was going to make spaghetti alla carbonara for myself while Kathleen worked late, and I had everything but the parsley. Simple, I thought. I ran into the very crowded store, grabbed a produce bag, and stuffed a bunch of flat-leaf parsley into it. Done! Then I went to stand at the end of the shopping-basket line. Only it wasn’t. Wasn’t the end. This was pointed out to be the lady who, I now saw, was next on line. standing where it stretched round a corner. So headed down to the end of the line and — wrong again. This time, I was politely alerted to my gaffe by a Fairway staffer. Sure enough, I had mistake a bend in the line for the end of the line. When I found the actual end, it was so far from the head that I thought I’d take my chances on the shopping-cart line. I had never seen anyone with a shopping-basket asked to leave the shopping-cart line, although suddenly, now that I was standing at the end of it, it seemed that this ought to be so, because I would probably be out of the store before the woman who rightly complained about my cutting in. (My inadvertent cutting in, I want to protest; but, let’s be honest: I wasn’t paying attention.) Already mortified by having risked assholery not once but twice, I felt that I was getting away with something anyway, and therefore being an asshole, by standing in the shopping-cart line, especially as it moved even faster than I expected it to do. Indeed, I was out of the store in minutes.

A lot of good it did me, because I felt ashamed of myself — I hate giving the impression of oafishness — and angry about having been put it (read: having put myself in) a mortifying position. At the time, I wondered if my sensitivity to the gaffe had been heightened by my complicity in the awful but mundane vanities that bloom in JK Rowling’s characters, in The Casual Vacancy, like acne on the teenagers’ cheeks. Just reading the book made me feel a low-grade, free-floating guilt. It took quite a while, home from the store, to settle into complacency — or at any rate the uneasy comfort of losing myself in Rowling’s novel.

This morning, I drew a different moral: if you have an everyday routine that works for you, stick to it. I ought to have used a shopping-cart to by the effing parsley.