Asters

Twilight of summer is the season of the purple asters, blooming all along Prospect Park South West now, along with puffy white flowers I can't identify but seem to foreshadow frosty weather. A new show was being filmed on 11th and PPSW called "French." Or at least that's what someone there told me. I was surprised and relieved I hadn't come across yet another set of "Law & Order."

On the walk to the circle we passed a man with two dogs I couldn't identify. Their owner told me they were Golden Retrievers, which surprised me because they weren't gold, they were the color of cappuccino foam. I learned they were the English variety of the dogs, you see, light on the cinnamon unlike their American cousins. Easy to imagine they'd been powdered like wigs.

On the subway a red-headed woman in a blue turtle neck was reading a text book open to a page with a diagram of a uterus. In a blow up, an ovum wheeled down the Fallopian tube, splitting and dividing within its orb. It pricked my heart a bit, to think that you and I and everyone else was once so simple and innocent, so elemental.

I had lunch with a woman from Antwerp today. She was eating French Fries, which she reminded me were actually a Belgian delicacy. I knew they wouldn't effect her immaculate figure in the slightest. Grrrr. She mentioned one of her favorite dishes, something called Vol au Vent, her comfort food with a name meaning "flight with the wind." I couldn't help but wonder what was flying with the wind. Then she spoke of the animosity in her country between the French speakers in the South and the Flemish speakers in the North. You have to wonder what makes people so desperate for a sense of superiority. It's some kind of ancient malignancy. As I was reminded on the F train, differentiation is primary to our nature, differentiation in service to the whole, that is.