Today is Thursday and feels like a Wednesday sort of. It actually has hints of a Thursday-ness to it. Tomorrow is Friday and that is the prize I have my eyes on.

I am back to typing on my desktop keyboard rather than dictating like I have done the past 2 days. I do dictate notes, and ideas into the phone but that’s it. Granted I can spew forth over 500 words in about 15 minutes, but hunting and pecking takes time and there are the distractions of TV and life in the apartment with the man I love, Bill. And he’s a lovely distraction.

Things have cooled down temperature-wise. I guess that is something worthwhile with regard to the so-called end of summer. I’m a stickler for the proper date for the autumn equinox on September 22 and not a moment too soon.

Leaving the apartment this morning and being close to 2 grammar schools it looked like a parade of parents marching off to drop their children off at the schools. No children crying, screaming and clinging to their mother like I used to do up until senior year of high school. I went the other way as I always do unless the bagel shop is closed for vacation.

3 years ago it was nice. It was during the pandemic and there were a lot of days where I was the only one in the train car headed into Manhattan or back to Hoboken. Now it gets crowded again and the youngsters have no problem letting their bags take a seat next to them. Then I show up and say excuse me which gets them to move their bags.

Sometimes it’s accompanied by a heavy sigh and a dirty look. Sometimes there is muttering under their breath. It’s mostly women that do this but every now and then it’s a man. The other day there was a heavy set man on the way back to the mainland.

I sat next to him and on the other side there was an empty seat. The heavy-set man could have easily moved an inch or two in the direction of the empty seat but he decided not to, in order to make me uncomfortable, which I wasn’t. Some slight discomfort which faded as the train left the station.

His attempt amounted to nothing and made him look a bit stupid with emptiness beside him and trying to squeeze me on the other side. I didn’t care, I was finishing ‘Happy Go Lucky’ by David Sedaris.

All summer long I opted for humorous books and so it fell to David Sedaris. When I was picking up ‘Happy Go Lucky’, I noticed a book by Edna O’Brien, ‘Girl’. I had read about Edna O’Brien as she had passed away a week or so before. Impulsively I added that to my books I was taking out.

And tonight I started reading it, knowing nothing about the book. I was hoping for more lighthearted fare. This was not that. It’s a book about the kidnapping of young girls in Nigeria by Boko Haram. Hair-raising, not light-hearted. In for a penny, in for a pound.

We’ll see how long I can last with that.