Best wishes to two dear friends / Census Poem

Mark Bittman wears bright colors and works w/bright-colored foods like Mr. Arty Choke

Mr Arty Choke has been gutted, braised in butter, cooked in broth and seasoned with lemon. Y E S !!!
I always watch Bill Cunningham's fashion videos on the Times, wishing I were a fashion plate

You know what the worst malady on earth is? A mental illness. I know. I had manic-depression or bipolar disorder one for nearly 20 years. My friends aren't as lucky as I am. "Lori" was admitted to the hospital for severe depression just as I called her on her cellphone. Her sister answered and said they were going thru intake.

It's deplorable I can't use Lori's real name but stigma reigns.

And Anna just got bit by the depression bug. She can't eat, she can't think, she can't cook for her husband. Her psychiatrist, the head of a department at one of the university clinics, didn't call her back for four days, so Anna called her family doctor for a prescription.

She and I loathe medication but we take it.

Anna's family doctor signed her up to get Meals on Wheels but when the food arrived Anna said it was 'so disgusting looking' she couldn't eat it.

We laffed hysterically. I call Anna every day to say hello and encourage her. I'll pay a visit - with food - this week.

HOUSES ON A BLUE-CHECKERED TABLECLOTH

Even now I find myself driving back to that block of houses, in the midst of my evening reading. climbing up the steep metal stairway where a man I call ‘the golfer’ lives and whose information I must gather quickly, before I fall off the stairs, with my number two pencil on a form resembling a blue checkered tablecloth. Why is the golfer never home? And then the woman with the newly tarred driveway. I glimpsed her once. She said, I don’t have time for you. I work three jobs, can’t it wait?

Imagine my joy when I tracked down the Mexicans in the one ramshackle house on the block, the landlord, I suppose, grinning in secret about money he was saving, a window fixed with cardboard, no grass grew in front, a mattress moaned leaning on the house, but I found them inside and ready to talk. They were afraid at first, but I told them I’d taken an oath and showed them my badge and with nods gained their trust as I sat in a white folding chair on the drive. They worked all the time and I had woken them up but yawning they told me their birthdates to write on my tablecloth and their middle initials. How I loved these people, fellow dwellers in the land of supermarkets and hide-a-beds and cable TV with Spanish stations and Korean news, and then in the middle of once all-white suburbia so many black families, they liked to be marked “African-Americans” by an X on the blue tablecloth. I saw the richness of their dark skin so unlike my own, and wished the thin woman whose husband made the dining room table would invite me to stay for barbeque in the yard or the man who owned two bars in Roslyn really meant it when he offered me a vodka on the patio.

They became mine, all of them, even the peg-legged man who hated our president. How I wished I could read to him the book I just bought, the early life of the selfsame president he so reviles, if only he could read that the president has no patience for people like him and calls them names, motherfuckers he calls them, just like the angry man does. And of course you know that when I fall asleep the houses bobble in the air like juggled balls and I wonder how can I catch the golfer at home before my time runs out tomorrow.