day in the life Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

July 29: A Day In The Life

“May I ask you a question?”

A periodic feature: Tuesday, July 29: A Day In The Life.

It was very hot and humid waiting for the bus downtown to the Washington Avenue branch of the Albany Public Library. I met a guy I’d seen for years at a local business. If I think of Pink Floyd, his favorite band, I’ll remember his name, David, and he will remember mine.

2 pm: Stephen Weinberg, PhD, health economist at the NYS Department of Health, reviewed Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. We allocate resources to everything from economic development to public policy. However, not much data takes gender into account.

Men are considered the default, and women are considered atypical. This touches on everything from medical dosing to voice recognition software. Failure to account for the differences can be anything from inconvenient (bathroom queues) to fatal (recognizing heart attacks). The book seemed to be thorough but possibly overwhelming.

Coincidentally, I came across a recent CBS article titled “Can female crash test dummies improve safety? A bipartisan group of senators pushes for equality in testing.” It’s not just a matter of differences in height and weight.

Traffic

I took the bus to the Delaware Avenue branch of the APL, reading until it was time to attend the 4:10 showing of the new Fantastic Four movie. My pet peeve: I always hate it when cars come very close to me when I’m crossing the street legally. They stop about a car length as though you are in their way. I crossed Delaware Avenue at the crosswalk, and a car hovered impatiently.

I am more than halfway across when a motorcycle heading north decides to pass in front of me. Naturally, I stop and scream, “Are you out of your freaking mind?” Meanwhile, the impatient car inches even closer. I finish crossing while the vehicle behind the motorcycle keeps coming, and the two cars almost have a collision right behind me.

I saw the movie and liked it. Then I walked to Holland Ave. to catch the bus to Western and Quail. While waiting for the next bus, I hear this woman yelling at someone. Two cars go through the intersection, stop, and then one of the cars makes a U-turn to park on the other side. The woman continues her diatribe when suddenly, about a dozen people come out of nowhere running to this woman’s “defense.” I was worried that the person in the other car was in trouble, and I was about to call the cops. But then, about three minutes later, the crowd dissipates.

A little more conversation

I took the bus down to Western and Allen to pick up something to eat. I crossed Madison Avenue at the same time this young woman, probably in her twenties, did, and we made some passing pleasantry about not wanting to get killed. Yes, we proceeded in the crosswalk.

The young woman looked thoughtful. “May I ask you a question?” I’ve always said yes, but I’m not required to answer. Often, the question is whether I have 50 cents or five bucks to buy something to eat. Or maybe it’s something irritating.

She asked, “Are you mixed race?” Hmm. This seemed to be a genuine inquiry. I explained in some hopefully brief detail how, as Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots would note, almost all black Americans are mixed race of some sort. I also stated that I had vitiligo and my skin was lighter now than 25 years ago.

I asked her if she was of mixed race, and she noted that she was partly Asian. Although I didn’t ask her specifically, she appeared part white.

This led to a whole conversation about race and genealogy. I told her I wrote about genealogy in my blog, and she said, “Of course, you have a blog.”

I had Emmett Till on my mind (see the 7/28/2025: The photograph of Emmett Till post here). She knew who he was.

Cowboys and…

I mentioned what Heather Cox Richardson said about a person wanting to change the Washington Commanders’ name. The chat lasted about ten minutes, then she had to go, and I needed to pick up my takeout. It was a spontaneously significant human interaction! I guess I’m approachable enough.

So that was my July 29. BTW, what HCR wrote on July 20, which I did not know: “At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of ‘savagery’ in the safe space of a playing field.”

Day in the life: 20240915

lunaversary

Occasionally, I write a day-in-the-life post. This one is for Sunday, September 15th, 2024; I designated it 20240915 in a year/month/day formula, which makes sense to librarians and computer geeks.

My wife stopped at the gas station and I tend to fill up the gas tank because I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I don’t mind it but my wife doesn’t like to get gas on her hands.

While I was doing this, a guy asked me for change. I waved him off and said, “When I’m done.” The thing about the process is that it’s pretty easy, but I need to do it in a methodical order: credit card in and out, type in the ZIP code, pick the grade of gas, and then place it into the tank. Because he continued chatting, I missed a step. “Do you need help?” “No, I need you to stop talking to me.” I didn’t realize that pumping gas was a bit of a zen experience for me until this guy was harshing my mellow. Yes, when I was DONE, I gave him some change.

The thing is, I LIKE helping people when I can. A couple of days earlier, I was sitting at a bus stop. A gregarious young adult male, 20 to 25, came up to me and asked, “Could you tie my shoe for me?” I replied, “Can you put your foot up on the seat?” because my knees and back didn’t want me to bend over. He said OK; I tied his shoes, and he thanked me, by which time the bus was coming.

Food

My wife and I stopped at the co-op to get sandwiches for a luncheon after church, and then we went to church. I got to attend choir rehearsal, the first week the choir sang since the spring. I missed it terribly. Even though we had a couple of rehearsals it’s not the same as singing in front of the congregation.

After church, we partook in the aforementioned luncheon. I was talking to one of the pastors who is particularly good at remembering names. There were a couple of congregants I could not identify. She said, “Tell me where they were sitting, and I could probably tell you their names. So, I noted that along with a general physical description. She knew their names even though they were newcomers to the congregation.

A couple of people around us were fascinated by this, not that the pastor knew their names but that I knew where they sat. If you’re sitting in the choir loft, you tend to notice where people are. Most people sit in the same place so it wasn’t that difficult for me.

We helped clean up, and then we went home for a couple of hours. My wife visited her mother while I was on a Zoom call with my sisters.

We try to have a lunaversary dinner. It often falls by the wayside, but we still attempt to go out to eat on or around the 15th of the month because we got married on the 15th of May. I checked the website of a nice restaurant in Watervliet, and it showed that it was open, so my wife drove us over there, but it was closed.

More food

We went to an Italian restaurant in Albany where we had been before. There was a football game on the TV (Chiefs/Bengals). A short time later, another couple came in and sat down not very far from us. They looked very familiar.

After dinner, we acknowledged seeing them in this restaurant some months ago. I said, “Oh, yes, it was the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys.” The woman said, “How do you know that?” “Because you hate the Cowboys, and our fathers were big Giants fans in the Binghamton area.”

My recollection was partly aided by my writing about it at the time. Still, the details of that meeting were fresh in my mind even though it had been eight months and a day since that earlier game.

My wife and I went home, and soon, my wife went to bed. About an hour later, a police officer in a cop car was in front of the house across the street directing someone to get out of their car. I brushed my teeth, did some reading, and went to bed.

Day in the life: July 30, 2023

complicated

Sunday, July 30, 2023, didn’t track the way either my wife or I expected. She had awakened with a chill. More problematic: a red spot on the back of her leg near her ankle had expanded around her leg. Moreover, it was warm to the touch.

It sounded like the return of the cellulitis she experienced in October 2022, which became so problematic that she was hospitalized for four days as complications ensued.

She asked me to contact the local urgent care place. Alas, there were NO slots open in Albany or Troy. So she decided to drive to the Emergency Department at St. Peter’s Hospital, which seemed sage.

I noted that she was scheduled to count the offering at church. The task involves training, and only about a dozen people were equipped to do so; I’m not one of them.

I sent an email at 7:55 a.m., but the only people who replied were those who could not take on the task; I thought recent knee surgery was a perfect excuse for staying home.

Breaking bread

Meanwhile, I needed to get to church early to help set up for communion before the 9:30 service. This meant catching the 8:48 bus, which only runs every 30 minutes. It takes me three or four minutes to get to the stop. Sometimes it’s running early, so I want to leave about ten minutes early.

The phone rings at 8:39. I’m going out the door. My wife needs the name of the antibiotic she’d been taking for another ailment. I needed to find and spell the container name twice because it had 14 letters.

I walked very fast to the corner. Fortunately, the bus was one minute late, and I just caught it, getting to church by 9:03.

Besides communion prep, I needed to find someone to sub for my wife, which fortunately worked out. A couple of other snags were addressed.

Seems like old times

After communion cleanup, some folks were putting the library back together. The shelves had been removed from the walls and painted. Though there were dropcloths, flakes of dried paint still got onto the carpet.

I vacuumed once I was told where the recessed cord was hiding. It reminded me twice when I was a custodian, in 1974 at a department store in a New Paltz, NY strip mall, and in 1975, at Binghamton (NY) City Hall.

I stopped at the local pizzeria to bring home slices for my daughter and me and took the bus home.

There’s a particular bond among bus patrons. A patron pulled the cord to get out at the downtown SUNY campus. As the driver blew past the stop, the guy told the driver he wanted to debark. The driver said one had to pull the cord, but I saw that he had; I heard the sound and could see the red STOP REQUESTED sign. The driver insisted he hadn’t heard the signal, possibly over the air conditioning. From my seat near the front, I insisted the rider was correct.

The driver then looks at his console and sees that the signal had been initiated. The driver tells the patron, “You were right, and I was wrong.” Twice. The customer said, “It’s cool,” as the driver again restated his mantra. The patron says, “It’s OK. It’s OK. I didn’t want to walk two extra blocks.”

To the hospital

After my weekly ZOOM talk with my sisters, I took a bus to St. Peter’s. My wife had said she was still in the ER area, but by the time I arrived, she had been taken to a room.

It occurred to me that I’ve mastered how to get to several hospital areas because of my wife’s time there last fall. I brought her a change of clothes, toiletries, and reading material.

Having missed the last bus home, I walked, first to Junior’s for takeout, then home. I very seldom have takeout twice in one day. But it was a weird day.

My wife spent two nights at the hospital, getting IV antibiotics, and she’s much better.