Looking at dogs with a stranger on a cracked phone (Part I)

Reflections on the last year, facing challenges previously kept at bay, and being reminded of life's preciousness by strangers, a big Bull Mastiff, and a few beers in a small bar in NYC. (Part 2 of 2)

December 2022

I walked the streets of lower Manhattan feeling lost in a familiar place. Rain landed cold on my hands and splashed on the bare space on my neck my scarf didn’t cover. I dodged puddles along Spring Street, seeking a place where I could sit alone but not be by myself. Somewhere I could have a few beers and scribble little notes of nighttime wisdom I’d forget in the morning.

My feet stepped along Sullivan Street when I stopped across from my old address. I looked at the doors I’d come in and out of thousands of times and the numbers above them, remembering how I loved being twenty-five and boasting I lived in SoHo.

Memories of this past time and place catalyzed feelings in the present. It had been a strange year. I turned forty. Had a health scare with my heart that sent me to the ER but turned out to just be a strained muscle from pulling a big dog away from a small skunk while on a lazy morning walk.

I spent time with my own mental health challenges, the ones I’d always kept at bay with self-deprecation and unneeded busyness masking as hard work. I thought on my obsession with pleasing people and the paralysis that came from needing to be perfect, always building impossible to meet expectations before crashing down.

I’d felt stuck - somewhere between reflective and melancholy - most of the year, trapped in a cycle of constant comparison, churning in a mixer of remorse, regret, resentment, and resignation. For forty years, I’d tried to be all things for all people all the time. Now, wherever I turned, I saw only mistakes, only the moments I wasn’t good enough.

All my practice comparing myself to anything had left me feeling like I had failed at everything. I still smiled and still laughed, but only because I’d gotten good practicing those, too.

I looked down at my hands, red from the rain beating on them, and I stuffed them into my pockets. A young couple bounded up the stairs of the sushi restaurant next door, laughing and running through raindrops to their next stop, December in New York playing the backdrop to their night’s story.

I loved living in Manhattan—the pace feet hit the sidewalks and how people raced across the streets when they shouldn’t. The buzz of human voices. The pints found on every corner. I loved how in Manhattan, more than any place I’d been, I could be alone while still surrounded by people and their stories.

When I left New York I was twenty-five and arrogant, convinced I’d find the thing that belonged to me, the answer to the perhaps ill-guided passion quest of someone who actually spent their teens reading Thoreau and watching Dead Poets Society. In the fifteen years since, I’d gotten close (hint- it’s connecting authentic human moments we might otherwise forget through story).

But - in this moment and in this city - I felt as far from it now as I did then, still trapped in my own head trying to be perfect, trying to be something else for someone else.

The rain had soaked my knit cap, and I laughed some at myself–cold and wet, standing in the rain, letting New York happen around me. It had been a strange year and a weird night.

I walked north, hoping to find a warm place with cold beer. As I did, I pictured the arrogant kid leaving the city and the sensitive adult walking through the rain in it.

At 25, I was cool and confident.

At 40, just a messy work-in-progress.

I found a small bar where I could hide away. I opened the door and stepped inside.

And that’s when I met Lucifer.

Part II of Looking at dogs with a stranger on a cracked phone available here.