Today in the lobby I was amused when a boy, who was maybe three years old and who was waiting for his mother to finish talking with a neighbor, walked over to the freight elevator and felt a breeze. He looked up at me. "It's cool in there," he said. "You might want to check it out."
The passenger elevator arrived, and I held the door open. An older woman (her hair in rollers) walked out and the neighbor who had been talking to the mother of the boy walked in, followed by me. As the door closed, I heard the older woman scream at someone -- presumably the mother of the boy, but perhaps me, or even the neighbor -- "get your white ass out of my building!" The neighbor, young and dressed in work clothes (and also white but clearly fluent in Spanish, which I guess in census language makes her "white Hispanic") laughed and explained that she had grown up in the building and suspected that the older woman, whom she had known for years, was "off her medication."
I thought about how crazy people sometimes give voice to undercurrents of tension and prejudice, which is why you so often see them yelling about cocksuckers and faggots on the subway trains. They are unhinged but not so unhinged that there is not an element of truth to what they say, at least to the extent that it doesn't arise from nowhere, but reflects what most people are thinking but are trained not to voice. Mostly, I thought, it's been a brutally hot summer and it's not even half over.
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