They Have Nice Oranges...

 

I don’t know how to say “Good Morning”.  I don’t think I ever have, nor do I even recall in my lifetime ever even using that phrase to greet someone. Really.  I’ve long come up with various all-purpose greetings to my fellow humans of all sorts, like “Good day”, or “How are ya’..”, or “Howdy”, or anything politely friendly.  But I do not acknowledge the day’s proud launch and the sun’s noble emergence.  There are not too many common habits from which I’m blocked on the basis of sheer principle, but this is affordably one of them.  Perhaps proudly the only one.

There’s this term called “swing shifts”, and many in this world live by them and are put to them. They are the livelihood of a population in which indeed only the strong survive. It’s an adorable little verbal description, like “wintry mix”, which does not nearly depict the near-fatal dangers of black ice, that invisible trap that on a good day can permanently cripple a pedestrian with an injury point blank, with a mere walk to the convenience store.  “Swing Shifts” denote the sometimes extra-long and enduring stretches at work closely held by workers in need, shifts separated by only less than ten hours of downtime between night and daybreak.  The recess does not allow for the proper inclusion of moderate travel, down-time, proper meal, a night’s sleep, a morning’s wake and preparation, and return trip.  And these shifts are a cornerstone of any given portion of someone’s week in the span of their regularized calendar life.

For reasons only my banker and psychologist will be able to spend a few volumes breaking down and explaining, to room-evacuating boredom, that’s been the shape of my life for much of it thus far. An adolescence of drug experimentation, a set of beers in concert parking lots on Friday nights and joy rides is not at all the profile of my own youth, and has gratefully allowed me to maintain much of my founding structure.  The deterioration I’ve incurred has been the result of the swing shifts that have defined my life.  Much like a World War II veteran, it’s a badge I hold with pride.

People who work in the broadcast industry are very often creatures of stealth.  There’s really no reason why they ought to be, and for all kinds of arcane and sometimes viable reasons, they are. It doesn’t lend a great deal of prestige to how they spend their lives, but it fulfills them in ways that self-help pronouncers are always advocating.  It’s been said that if your occupation, that thing you do every day that has you buried in commitment and activity which actually serves to pay your inflating rent to some end, actually provides you with a sense of personal accomplishment and pride almost every day, then you never have to retire.   That’s a pretty good survival arrangement for those of us who will never have the affordability in our lifetimes to do so. 

I’m one of them.  There is also the urban legend regarding the financial stability and income of those who work in anything bearing the connotation held by the title “broadcast industry”, that handsome and alluring phrase that conjures up iconic images of expansive sunny poolsides, Tudor houses or Upper West Side six-room apartment dwellings in classic pre-war residential buildings.  That’s actually one of the reasons for the common stealth.  It’s not the one-percent in hiding. It’s the Shame of the 99-ers.  There are too many positions gratefully, grippingly and very scavengeristically held by industry survivors, that while not by any means lucrative, maybe even loss-incurring, are ones long held, nurtured and long protected by those skilled enough to know how, ones that fulfill beyond bank account, and while definable enough in words, can’t really be conveyed, even sometimes to industrial brethren.  How do you explain the voluntary sacrifice of half a week’s sleep every week over the course of your adult life..?

You don’t.  You just function with it politely in a world innocently apathetic.  That includes paying no mind to those who greet at day’s start under a blazing eastern sun with “Good Morning”.  Like some others, I’ve learned how to contend with phrase intolerances.

Those intolerances include the metabolic challenges of functioning upright at day’s beginning.  Only the held nobility of one’s professional commitments can charge one’s batteries on a Saturday morning at 7:30am.  All those M*A*S*H episodes I watched at 7pm on Channel 5 as a kid each night definitely paid off.  I couldn’t do all this otherwise.  I’d have no template for existence.  At 7:30, after an hour or so of getting a few preparatory chores done on the floor, I’ll head downstairs to the takeout deli, just one oasis of many that still, after more than seventy years powers New York City. 

By that time, they’re usually open and doing business.  They’re probably at it even earlier on weekdays, but gratefully my own weekdays don’t begin until afternoon, so with any luck I won’t need to know. But on this Saturday I ambled outdoors, still bundled in my wool cap and heavy windbreaker.  It’s the first week of a brisk June.  I’ve just emerged from an industrial suite of electronics that’s for various reasons kept at fifty-nine degrees at all times.  The early morning frost of outdoors isn’t exactly a stunning blow.  I walk two doors down into the already-busy deli shop.  Yes, life persists even on a Saturday morning in New York.

While not nearly the “floor of the NYSE” this tiny interior could be on a weekday morning, it’s still pretty busy. The grill and chefs are hard at it in their white uniforms, barking away to one-another in Espanol.  Handsome and trendy-looking early risers are all placing their orders.  They are the people for whom our city stands.  They are the economic structures that wouldn’t be caught dead looking like anything less than that Polo ad on page four of the New York Sunday Times Magazine.

And here, wending his path through this cool-kid mob, is this dweeb in a Michael Nesmith wool hat, making his way over to the fruit bin for one of those huge sour apples and one of those king-size navel oranges.  For a place that thrives on grill orders, this little shop’s best kept secret is its navel oranges.  You couldn’t get one of these at Key Food in-season.  But you can get one here in January.  It’s remarkable. 

I’m not a grill-cuisine kind of guy. I’m the more Mediterranean-menu type who can live off fruits, nuts and some carrots for a long day or two, and with any luck not too much of anything else. But surrounding me is a World’s Fair of people about to chow down on some of New York’s best-prepared grease.

I’ve got my orange, apple, dollar sack of assorted nuts and simply turn to face the counter.  The shop is that small.  In front of me is a woman nearly my height, topped by a haystack of platinum-blonde hair, not quite portly in her duck-yellow T-shirt and blue-denim shorts, Timberland moccassins.  The high-end assembly-line ensemble. She’s up at the counter clarifying her order to the minimally-English speaking chef over the roar of the grill.  It’s a classic Jane Curtain-John Belushi “Olympia Diner” bit.  The conversation is a no-win challenge for this woman, trying to ascertain the complex list of selections for her and her accompanying family, her portlier husband near the window, a taller, stouter gray-haired fellow in handsome turtle-shell frames, probably ten years my junior, the vision of an award-winning L.L. Bean ad, the corporate exec on holiday, just a few feet away from his pre-adolescent son and daughter, a pair equally as handsome, all probably shuttled in on the PATH for a fun Saturday in The Big Apple.

Would I ever in theory deny these good folks such pleasure..? Never.  At one time I was in fact one of those blessed youngsters a few feet away.  Even younger.  Living with my mom in my uncle’s home in Bayside, my mom, my aunt and I would on occasion venture out on a Saturday for a city voyage, to the MOMA, and a tour through Brentanoes, a book-and-music emporium that will never hold a candle to the remaining Barnes And Noble structures of today.  Best conjure I can find today is an excursion through the Strand.  Those city visits into that broken-down metropolis of the 1970s remain a treasure.  My mom probably had visions of her son as one of those preppified-looking children in their Saturday Bean-togs and feathered-hair styles.  But I was rather a fat little nine-year-old with an untameable rats’ nest on top and a crew-neck pullover from Murray’s Husky Wholesalers on Northern Blvd.  A visit to Brentanoes often meant a new great Judy Blume paperback and maybe a cassette of a Dylan album I hadn’t yet heard.  Usually, the pick was a full-length winner.

The woman in front of me was getting somewhere with her translative struggle.  She turned to call to her husband, “Did you say bacon…?  You want bacon..??”  I wondered if bacon was quite so important to that fellow who apparently wasn’t about to even sit down to a traditional breakfast with his family in a regulation diner.  Was bacon on his fifteen-dollar egg sandwich quite the critical hinge on the whole day these folks planned, one for which they re-scheduled their lives, hired the dog-sitter, gave up soccer practice and re-scheduled that online Zoom-corporate strategy meeting…? Who am I to question the flowchart of what makes this little restaurant, this small engine powering this superpower island run, the ecosystem that allows this weird kid in the wool hat and polar windbreaker in June the privilege of dining on a luscious navel orange and a dollar-sack of almonds in a frosty industrial office-floor chamber in peaceful solace at eight in the morning on a Saturday..?

It was almost a shame, I thought, for what appeared to be only me appreciating the offering of such prime, natural fruit in a venue of preferred fried and grease-heavy traditional American breakfast numbers.  The fruit was probably a big seller with the runners, the twenty-and-thirtysomething digital designers and web developers, the “weekend warriors” in their designer togs and three-figure running shoes, on their passionate quest to run the length of this great borough, in the hope of one day qualifying for the Marathon.  It just looks and feels good to have those healthy, natural treats in your supply bag along with that bottle of brand-name alkaline water Jennifer Aniston’s holding in that digital subway ad, in her workout gear, looking sharper than ever thirty years after her sitcom fame. 

In my hungry and mostly-conscious state, I arrived with my goods at the counter.  The young, black-hoodie-clad, black-haired Latina, looking something like a figure seen in some NBC News report tape from abroad, was actually at a blockade in trying to tabulate the price of an orange.  Unlike the grill orders, where the chef will shout out the price or scribble it on the wrapper, the fruit is not visibly priced.  The young lady had to mount an investigation amongst her colleagues.  The chef did not know.  The counter assistant did not know.  They called the store manager, who did not readily know.  He went over to the basket of oranges, studied a few, to find no listed price anywhere.  He turned and shouted to the young lady, “Doh-lar-feefty..!”

Two-seventy-five altogether.  An embarrassingly small denomination toward such an important fixture in our town. But I also knew that with enough visits from it’s indigenous and visiting patrons, it would do well today.  I’d be upstairs, doing my part as well.  The lady and I finished our business and she kindly said, “have a good day, sweetie..”  I said back, “You have a blessed one, yourself…”, and I meant it.  No references to the time of day were necessary.  In the course of our discussion, it was irrelevant.

Noah F.