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2021.12.21

2021.12.21


Remembering fondly the Friday nights of January and February in my twenties when I worked Saturdays for the tax firms. Liz would go out with her friends and I’d stay home to watch movies and eat pizza and smoke weed and drink beer. It was a slumber party, alone. I’d watch television shows that Liz had already seen or had no interest in watching. I’d watch movies that I hadn’t seen in years, sometimes one and its sequel back-to-back, or a four-hour film that I’d never before had the patience to watch. And I’d doze on the couch as long as I could and refuse to fall asleep. It was like being a child.


And in the morning, I’d wake and dress casually and head into the hard cold of a Saturday morning. Within that first hour of sunrise, the streets would be silent, the real drinkers still in the deepest of slumbers. The elevated subway in Queens would arrive with a sound like the slice of an ice skate as it bent around the steel tracks. And very few people stood on the platforms. And more people than typical were stretched across seats, and with a deeper surrender in their repose than those that spread across seats during mid-day traffic.


And in the office, the telephones rarely rang. And if one did, it was usually to the partner’s direct line. Our work was stacked in neat piles by a window near the receptionist’s desk. And in the silence, we each approached our pile, and returned with it to our own desk. And when we finished a return, we’d bring it to the respective partner, and they’d point to the special place in their office where we should place it. The most organized partners preferred spaces on the window sill or in a single gigantic stack in the chairs across from their desks. One man had an office that was covered from end to end with different stacks of paper, on the desk, on the windowsills, the shelves and different sections of the floor, but within the spaces between piles, drifting single pieces of paper - either official government documents or scribbles of notes - scattered across the room and burrowed under the desk like some growing mound of wax begging to be scraped away.

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