Helping a Little Old Lady Across the Street

           

            When I got up on Wednesday I looked out my living room window on the way to the bathroom and perused the aftermath of the storm of the night before. It was white and silent at 5:15 but the street didn’t look like it was too snowy for traffic. I was glad though that I didn’t have to take my bike anyplace on it that day. Later, after the sun had been up for a while and it started to melt, I was even gladder that I wouldn’t be slapping around in that cold sploshy mess. I would have the whole day inside to write and read and to occasionally look out the window and appreciate the fact that I was not where I was looking. I wouldn’t have to bundle up like everyone I was looking down upon from the second floor.

            At around 10:30 there was a knock on my door. It was Sundar come to collect the rent. Suddenly I realized that I would have to bundle up and go out after all, because I’d forgotten to take the rent money out of the bank. I got a few things done first and then headed out.

            I was standing with my bike at the corner, waiting for the light. There was a little mound of snow as there often is, pushed up to the corner by passing snowplows, slightly blocking the way for crossers, but fairly easy for able bodied people to step through. An elderly woman came down the street with a cane. She stopped because she was obviously intending to cross, but when she looked at the snowy obstacle she exclaimed, “Oh my goodness!” I asked her if she would like a hand getting across. She answered, “I would be so grateful!” So with my bike between her and myself, I held out my arm and she took my hand. Once we were over the blockage, I continued to hold her hand as we walked across the cleared street. It was awkward to push my bike and to support her at the same time, but I managed. The other side had the same kind of little snow bank and that was why I kept holding her hand. I helped her over that and she said, “Thank you so much sweetheart!” before I got onto my bike.

            I rode down Cowan, past the food bank, where I saw the Second Harvest truck unloading, and then turned left on King to go to the money bank. Another thing that I’d forgotten was to pay for my phone service for March, and so I took some extra money out and went to Wind Mobile before going home. I walked my bike home from there. I saw the woman I call “the shouting bag lady” but she was neither shouting nor pushing her tower of possessions in her usual shopping cart. She was just quietly going down the street with her walker and stopping to rest from time to time. I had been thinking about her during the cold spell and was glad now to see that she hadn’t died. On my block, the sidewalk had been narrowed by the snow and so where I could normally get past slow walking people, I had to just slow down until I got to my door.

            I spent most of the rest of the day writing.

            I moved some music files to my external hard drive and ended up making the same mistake with my music folder as I did with the video folder a few days before. I had moved a King Crimson concert into the G-drive and then tried to delete the file from my C-drive. There was a message telling me that the folder had names too big for the recycle bin and so did I just want to delete the folder. I clicked “ok” and my Music folder was gone. Even though I had highlighted the folder in my C-drive, the one in my G-drive was also apparently highlighted and so that’s the one that was deleted. I’m fairly sure that nothing important was in the folder because I think I’d just moved stuff into it from the G-drive, and that would be stuff that I still have on my C-drive, I think.

            That night I watched the first half hour of the film adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Mangler”. They’d changed it a bit and compressed the events. Plus they added this demoniacal disabled laundry owner who seems to have something to do with the demonically possessed folding machine.