Two and a Half Weeks

It’s been two and a half weeks.

We now have appliances. A stainless steel refrigerator that fills my glass with precisely 16oz of water with the gentle touch of a blue-lit panel. It is also Jewish. If Scott turns religious we can use the Sabbath mode and become observant at the touch of a button. We also have a “deluxe” top loading high efficiency washer with a glass lid. We spent a good part of Thursday night watching our clothes spin in it.

We won’t have a stove for another couple of weeks. When we need to cook, we grill out at the corner of our building’s parking lot where our neighbor Dave set up a table, an umbrella and a few lawn chairs under a tree. It’s a patch of dirt nestled between a row of shrubbery and the light rail tracks. On many a night you can find Dave, another neighbor Tony, Scott and I and a few neighborhood cats huddled around the grill sipping beers.

The cats are Dave’s. They are wild and hiss when you get close. But Dave feeds them and lets them in through a specially designed hole in the window when it gets cold outside. When he first found them he caught the females and took them to the vet to get them neutered so they wouldn’t get knocked up. But when I asked why he didn’t get Gato – the ailing, toothless male rumored to have fathered many – fixed, his said he saw a little of himself in Gato and thought he’d just let him be.

We can still grill out because thankfully the weather has been beautiful. On a day when we heard that the Northeast was being battered by snow and sleet, we were riding around on our bikes exploring the town and eating lunch on a rooftop patio.

About that lunch. I got an unexpectedly yummy Low Country Boil at Boardwalk Billy's which consisted of two pounds of potatoes, half a pound each of shrimp and sausage and a few corns on the cob. No, the South doesn’t skimp. I also realized in horror that I’m eating some kind of sausage every day.

Charlotte continues to both delight and dismay. This past Saturday, Wells Fargo sponsored a cultural day downtown – which they call “Uptown” – where the main strip was blocked off for a street fair and museums were free. I was giddy to learn that the Mint Museum was not an exhibit of historical U.S. coins but a swanky new museum that reminded me of the MoMA. The special exhibit on Romare Bearden reminded me of his exhibit in Brooklyn, except I didn’t have to line up for two hours this time. Outside the Mint Museum at the main stage, we listened to Branford Marsalis perform jazz tunes with local musicians.

I visited the Y where Scott and I are planning to join. They have a full basketball court, racquet ball courts, two swimming pools, a cycling room, three group exercise rooms and three floors of weights and cardio machines. It’ll cost us $85. TOGETHER. That’s half of what Scott paid in New York.

With all of those pleasant discoveries we also encountered things less pleasant. In the paper today, we read about the two candidates running for Mayor. Their bios listed age, birthplace, family, education,politics, most admired politician, and CHURCH. That pretty much squashes any chance of either of us becoming a mayor of Charlotte. An atheist and a Jewish ticket would never fly in this town.

The next two weeks will be monumental. Scott runs the New York Marathon, and we get our stove, microwave and dishwasher.

Until next time… y’all.