Selling My Books on the Streets of Brooklyn 7/21

102 degrees. Wow. I'm not sure I've ever been where the temperature was higher. I hitch-hiked to California in the summer of 1971. I guess it may have been higher there or in Vegas, but I was a 21-year-old bull back then. Heat didn't bother me. Cold always has. Whenever I'm tempted to buy an air-conditioner, I remind myself of the electric bills some of my friends have. Meanwhile, Steve, a retired teacher and poet, has some kind of deal in his building where he pays a maximum summer surcharge of only $50 or $60. How does someone with such a generous pension qualify for such a break? Business as usual in New York City.
Since I no longer spend any time on the subway or at the ice-box that is the Exchange trading floor, I have to deal with the heat all day, and it hasn't been easy, which shows how spoiled we are in America. Anyway, as soon as I finished editing Chapter Ten of Bob Rubenstein's The White Bridge, about high noon, I headed for the library, book in hand. The AC was set just right, not maxed. I spent an hour-and-a-half there. I had to laugh as I spotted one of my regular customers, Herbie, looking through the shelves as meticulously as he looks through the books I display. He did not find anything to his liking. He may have gone through the entire catalogs of the authors he prefers.
A heavy-set woman who passes me every day asked: "Aren't you the guy who sells the books?" I said it was too hot to set up shop. She carried on a conversation with a friend and was shushed twice by a middle aged man who had notebooks and text books spread before him. She countered that he had spoken on his cell phone just minutes ago. True, but it had been brief. I believed the guy was in the right. The conversation certainly disrupted my concentration. Cell phone rings were sounding every few minutes. I was surprised at how loud they were. Of course, many elderly need them at maximum volume. No one on the staff said anything to anyone.
To make the day seem productive, I burned an Ultimate Jazz CD (12 tracks, 60 minutes), which together with an Ultimate Sinatra and an oldies disc, I will offer when the floating bookshop reopens, which I hope will be Sunday under the tree at Bay Parkway and 85th Street, when the temperature is expected to reach only 93.
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