I was walking Nano in the park last night and I bumped into this guy with a pit bull named Gizmo. Gizmo was going berserk for this stick his owner kept throwing. We talked for a while and then I realized that between the park’s entrance and where we stood, about 20 or 30 feet, I’d somehow lost one of my beloved brown leather gloves. Gizmo’s owner goes, “oh, do you have the other one? Lemme see,” and he taunts the dog with it, and pretend-throws it. What do you know but Gizmo takes off looking for my glove and finds it about 30 seconds later near a lamppost. Gizmo, the Pit Bull Retreiver! It was awesome. Buying a new pair of cashmere-lined leather gloves and then spending four winters lovingly breaking them in would have been depressing.

* * * *

A few weeks ago, I’m waiting to cross Sixth Avenue on my way back to work when I notice that a woman, bent double over her walker, starts meandering into the intersection, grinding traffic to a halt. A police van stops right next to her and the man yells into his megaphone that she needs to get out of the road. When she gets to the other side, some ten feet from the sloped crosswalk entrance, she just stops. She’s stymied by the curb. She’s just folded up on her walker. And it looks like she’s falling asleep.

Another woman and I stop at the curb, staring at her, weighing those options that you weigh when confronted by someone clearly coloring outside the lines. We both decide to go check on her, my companion in arms a middle-aged woman with a fanny pack and a slightly germanic accent.

We manage to discern that she’s headed to the bus stop, which takes ten minutes to reach even though it’s a block away. She’s a mess, this woman, with her hair hanging in her face like that girl from The Ring and tears streaking her splotchy face. She’s got a cast-boot on her left foot and about four different bags piled on and around her walker. She drops her gloves three times on the way to the stop.

Me and the german lady stare over her hunched shoulders as she explains in broken English that she doesn’t have a metro card. She keeps seeming like she’s about to fall asleep. My companion is at this point baffled and I decide to get this woman on the damn bus already because who else will? So I tell her not to worry, I’ll swipe my metrocard, and when the bus pulls up a minute later, I negotiate with the driver to lower the back entrance and help the woman – who by this time has hugged me twice with reedy arms and said her name is Mary – onto the bus. I swipe my card for her with the driver, who looks less annoyed than most of the passengers at the five-minute process we’ve caused.

As I walk away and back to my office, all I can think is about that police van that saw a woman stopped in the middle of the street half-passed-out on her walker and then just kept driving.

* * *

Class last week was a little overwhelming, with all the new terms and the expectations and the assignments. But I buckled down on Thursday, hereto designated as Study Day, and studied all the material for this week, took notes, looked up terminology, researched some of the resources mentioned in the reading, and it came back to me very slowly but surely that I was really good at this once, that I loved learning new things and I adored studying, and I was glad of that, glad to feel that muscle flexing once more.

Class this week, which was delayed a week due to MLK day, was awesomely like stepping into the kiddie pool – far more of an introductory core class than last week’s – and I feel ready to take on my three-class-a-week schedule, ready to learn new stuff, awesomely psyched for all the HIGHLIGHTING I’ll get to do.

Not to mention, you know, being academically required to start spending more time in libraries.