Christian, one-time child actor and retired MTA employee, gazes longingly at all the young kids waiting for the L train. Oh, how youth is wasted on the young, he says to no one in particular. It is Friday night, they’re all probably going to their cool parties to do cool things, things I can’t do anymore.
I tried my best. My kids moved out, found new places to live. Yet here I am, still living in the Big Apple, wondering why I’m doing it. Williamsburg wasn’t always like this, it used to be tougher. Now Duane Reade’s moving in. That park hosts free Flaming Lips and other relevant bands, but I don’t listen to that stuff. Nah, back in my day I listened to progressive rock and hippie freak-out music.
That’s how I met my wife. Man, we have to get out of New York. Move to somewhere warmer, somewhere that won’t tax my city pension. Hold on, I have to scurry underneath the platform, the train’s coming. Look at that, a cute out of town person pointed at me. I feel important, appreciated, terrifying for no obvious reason.
All my kids moved down south. Maybe I need to do that, go to North Carolina; they wouldn’t tax my pension there. Some of our friends, people I worked with at the MTA say North Carolina’s great, especially Asheville. The jerks I worked with went to Florida, so I can’t go there. I don’t want to be an old New York mouse going down to Florida’s, that’s like where New York mice go to die. Either that way or freaked out people throwing shoes at them, shrieking hysterically.
We have to get the rat hole in order, get it on the market. Yeah, the housing market isn’t doing that well, but we have an ideal location. That counts for a lot, perhaps some young yuppie couple into yoga or Whole Foods might like it. I don’t know, I eat most garbage people drop on the ground, but that’s not for all mice. Some prefer eating only organic food found on the ground. Each Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review section, looking for books about mice, but there are usually gross misrepresentations of what we’re all about. I mean, we’re not monsters. If anything, humans are monsters. They are bigger, louder, and much more intoxicated, at least around these parts.
Bummer, I have to help move all this stuff into storage. We got a sweet spot to store our stuff to make the rat hole appear bigger. I spent the past week repainting it to an inoffensive shade of white and beige. Neither one of us knows what’s trendy right now, so we went with a full wood look. Sadly we don’t have brick exposures or hardwood floors, those things are hot right now.
Guess I’ll steal some of the leftover bits of pizza the kids dropped. It is time to get some sleep, watch repeats of stand-up routines on Comedy Central and dream of the warm pure North Carolina sun. A rat can dream, a rat can dream.