Hanging out with Ron 12/06/23 (catching up #18)

If I posted this two weeks ago it would've been timely. Now nearly three weeks after I took the photos, I'm still catching up. More on them later.

I recently took to regularly checking and emptying my spam folders - yes, that's plural because I use a few email addresses for different things, photography, writing, personal and more. It occurs to me there are whole warehouses full of the the packages waiting for my approval, my signature, for me to correct the address or whatever else these undelivered/undeliverable packages require. They are being held up by quite a variety of freight forwarders, not one of who has a return email address that looks at all like the official domain of the supposed outfit holding up the package.

And yet, I think about the warehouse full of the things I never ordered, the things nobody ever sent me, filled to the brim with the unfulfilled dreams and wishes of people and organizations that want to steal from me, whether it's money, property or my hopefully still good name. On this day of gift giving among many people around me, a day during which I will go to the movies, I think of them and wish them nothing. I could wish them ill but nothing is better because that's all they will ever get from me.

It's almost a shame they aren't paying for the warehouse to store those illusory packages. Then I could wish them more returns.

Anyway, the photos.

I like to spend a few hours hanging with my friend Ron Kolm. Ron's a writer of fiction and poetry, an editor and an all but retired bookseller. He'd retire but the last store he worked for full-time gets him to be man the book table at readings where some recently published writer is regaling a paying audience with either words from their newest book or fielding questions from the eager audience.

Ron is a very good writer and an even better reader of his own works. I've been photographing him for well over a decade so if you search back through this blog you'll find him in more than a handful of entries. He also one of the nicest people I know. He's a good listener and a good storyteller. If he has a flaw, he can be overly self-deprecating.

Since we've become friends we've had an evolving group of locations where we meet a couple of times a month for conversation, a beer or cup of coffee. It was former The Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A in the East Village. For a few years, when the weather was good, we'd meet at Flatiron Plaza on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Recently, it's been Urban Space on Vanderbilt Ave. near Grand Central. We became friendly with the bartenders at the midtown outpost of The Redhook Lobster Pound, now sadly replaced. That friendliness made the place feel more like a local hangout than the large, often noisy food court it is.

It seems that whenever we meet there we draw some of the people around us into a wide ranging conversation. This last time there were a pair of German women friends in their twenties visiting the city who seemed thrilled that I was taking their photo, and two women from Connecticut on an outing with some of the kids from a youth group they helped with. One of these, a former book editor worked with someone I was friends with many years ago. Sheesh. Encounters like that make me feel old.

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