Spring Day
Waited in line at the passport agency this morning behind a family of four— baby sleeping in stroller and three year old tugging at fathers pant leg, opening and closing his mouth like a koi fish, patiently waiting in the soup of bureaucracy. The mother ushers me forward to the window marked English, she’s waiting for the window marked English/Spanish. I am sent upstairs. In the elevator the number 10 button blinks blue letters PASSPORT AGENCY like I am in a Julio Torres skit. In the waiting room (gray) I read a poem and stand when my number is called - window 10. I pass my application and my birth certificate and my drivers license through the metal slit under the glass. At window 11, a young mother and two kids strapped into a double stroller. The boy, 5 or 6, plays a game on a blue tablet. The girl, just shy of two, has stuck her pink tablet under her feet and is stepping on a purple animated princess, singing loudly. The girl is pulling at her seatbelt straightjacket and shouting “BA BA,” presumably to drown out the princess underfoot. I stick my tongue out. She copies. I make wide eyes, she makes wide eyes. I cover my face with spread fingers and reveal myself. She screeches, giggles. Amazing, how distracted one can get from a goal with driving force. Amazing, this mimicking thing we do.
The woman hands me a slip of receipt paper, “on this paper it says you come pick up your passport on Wednesday between 2:30 and 3:45. I’m telling you you can come pick it up Thursday or Friday as well - 8am-3:45. Don’t lose this paper.” I don’t ask what is happening on Wednesday between 8am and 2:30pm, but I wonder. I put the receipt paper in my wallet next to a single dollar bill. It’s an awful lot of important things I have on my person and I keep checking my folder, patting my pockets, going back to the bathroom stall because I thought I left my stapled papers on the back of my toilet before remembering that they took my papers at window 10. And when I walk to the park the music and the pigeons curl their heads into the crooks of wings and ruffle their backs, shoulders arched toward the sun, warming hollow bones, roosted in the sycamore above the bench where I sit and beneath my feet, at the edge of a tulip bed a worn playing card, the Two of Clubs. The two of clubs is the first card played in Hearts. And also Bullshit.
I pick the card up and slip it into the back of my notebook. A little further into the blooms peeks the Three of Hearts. I pocket that one as well and leave the rest of the lucky deck scattered for the next person. I want to put my single dollar in the white bucket in front of the band. Imagine if I put my special receipt paper right beside my dollar bill in the bucket instead? Then the pigeons and the jazz band and the cards and the babies and this spring day would have a real plot line to follow. It could be a Pixar short. The paper being slipped into pockets. I, in my red overcoat, frantic. The cards would come back. Hearts. There would be a shot where the paper drifts down into the subway, catches in the train car doors, and flutters, pasting against the train as it pulls away from the platform. And at some point a pigeon has to carry it. In Hearts you can win by having the least points against you (least Hearts) at the end of the game, or you can win by shooting the moon — getting the Queen of Spades, Jack of Diamonds and all 13 Hearts. My mother taught me how to play Hearts. It’s about the only card game she knows, aside from solitaire. She played with her brother, six years her senior, and his friends. “One time I shot the moon. I was the youngest and they weren’t paying attention so I shot the moon.”
The Day I Shot the Moon. It’s a long title and perhaps the title should be saved for a poem, or a play, or a song. I like to keep a collection of titles, unwritten, phrases in a treasure, sparks of ideas. Purgatory of my words. But wow! What potential! Today I was merely dealt the Two of Clubs and the pigeons are still searching for sun and I drop the dollar bill in the bucket — the receipt paper safe in my wallet. I hope I don’t lose it before Friday.