Brooklyn Kink: To Sandy With Love

I live on the fourth floor of an overpriced pre-war building one block from the Atlantic Ocean. I love the sea. On Saturday, as I had done almost every day for the past three months, I went into the ocean at Brighton Beach. The temperature was sixty-three degrees inside and outside on the shore. I gazed with love at my ocean. I feel it even healed the stenosis I had had for the past three months, soothing ng my back with its steady wet loving. If you go with the current, you can learn so much about life. The healing balms massaged my spirit. My soul swam in horizontal delight to the tranquil shore. At sixty-something, I often thought of that 'long slow swim to China.' It does seem like an honorable way to go (better than a bullet or a messy jump off the Verrazano) attached to my trusty goggles while drifting ever southwestward into the welcoming madonna of the sea. One must have an exit strategy, no? But I never thought the sea was not going to give the likes of me any choice after all. It suddenly had come to my safe building past the sandbags and the boardwalk, up the embankment with howling, tempest winds and a flash of lightning, like death; then silence and the flashing emergency light of trapped drivers in autos, and one lady now swimming in the river of water and muck that had suddenly become our street, crying, "Help." We had just boarded up the windows, and my neighbor, Joel said that it wasn't going to help, but 'we really have to do something.' We joked that we were on the Titanic, and when the last woman left the building, we would begin playing our violins. 

Some joke for soon it would be personal. Later we heard the stories of how Ocean Parkway, aptly named, had a seven-foot river floating by the three-lane parkway, uprooting three, four-tall evergreens onto the already flooded ravages of parked cars a mile from MY beautiful ocean. By the way, it is now not hard to know how the world is going to end. The sea had taken its cue from its master above. With cyclones and typhoons commingling, the world will cease to be. Don't believe the biblical promise: we will become food for the fishes once again. You see, I am still slightly mad, a temporary refugee of the storm named Sandy. Two nights ago, I awoke not feeling my legs and smelling the putrid toxic poisons of gas and sewerage escaping from basements down the muck and the mud weary streets that reminded me--indeed, my shoes were like the old muddy boots of soldiers marching through war. No hot water and the cold moving in; electricity is needed for an old man to live. 

And gas in the ovens, in the pipes, not in your nostrils and lungs. I became a nameless character in a Beckett play saying, 'I can't go on. I can't stay here, and I can't go on.' So, I left another nameless refugee of the raging storm, of a sea that didn't really love me at all. And my back is blazing again with its infirmities. I went past the Delaware Memorial Bridge 'till I stopped. I couldn't feel my legs, and my face was flushed. Chilled to the bone, I imagined I was dying. (In retrospect, I was, having a case of hypothermia.) My children thought I was over-dramatizing my bad case of dysentery. I wanted to crash at their lovely homes for a few days, but they were hesitant. I didn't understand the rejection. Would an old man suffering so prevent you from opening your doors to a loved one smelling of toxic waste and fuming with diarrhea? Of course not! But after one night in a lovely motel in Elkton, Maryland, I want to come home. The chill has subsided, and they predict more rain. The toxic waste of my beautiful street called Coleridge is now so reminiscent of that rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.