Weekday Evenings

Laurence works twelve hours on Monday. When he comes home around 8 pm, we eat a little supper, and call it a day. It’s good to have that behind us at the beginning of the week, so we can move on to more interesting things.

It isn’t that we don’t have any social life during the week, and especially now that the pandemic is behind us, we’re happy to spend time with friends. We did this week on Wednesday after a service at Sugar Hill. Food is the tie that binds, and we enjoyed a snacky supper with three other couples around the table of the missionary’s apartment. Even better than the food was the fellowship – the kind of conversation that feeds the spiritual person.

Tuesday evening, Laurence and I took the Q53 bus to Forest Park. We didn’t have a plan but decided after we arrived there to walk the orange trail. It mostly took us near the perimeter of the woods. We could have been on any woodland path except for the sound of traffic. Birdsong thrilled me as we walked deeper into the hardwood forest. As often happens, we walked further than planned, so Laurence says, “This can be a once a year outing.”

“Once a month,” I replied, because I was having such a good time. Laurence is right though because the list of places to go and things to see stretches from the shore of Rockaway to the East River. (That reminds me, we went to the ocean on Saturday and then ate lagman soup at Umas.)

Last evening, Laurence and I took the G train between Queens and Brooklyn to Greenpoint. Sadly, the G is the only train that doesn’t go through Manhattan. Last evening, it was packed with well-heeled commuters.

It’s been years since I was last in Greenpoint. I remember it as a gritty, Polish neighborhood. It was there, back in 1990, when I first learned the meaning of agnostic. A real estate agent driving Laurence and me around said, “It’s interesting that you are missionaries. I’m an agnostic.”

We came out of the Nassau subway station by a darling little coffee shop. I could hardly believe how gentrified the area has become. We went to check out a couple Japanese stores. I am not going to try and describe them to you. We did buy mochi and ramen soup, but we left the $89 pottery mug.

Gentrifying is ok. Until it’s not. We walked into a plant store with vintage clothes in the back. Music played and the forces of evil felt so strong that we could not leave fast enough. It took a prayer on the sidewalk to be free of that force.

A block over on a street running parallel to the other, were the ordinary, the gritty, the Polish stores. While we could not read the labels, we felt more at home among the beets and borscht. Laurence found his favorite cheese perogies.

Now I need to pack a lunch to take to market tomorrow, and I want to check the MTA site to see what the weekend trains are doing. They’re often not running normal due to track work. I like to have my work done before Laurence comes home, so that our evenings are free to walk and explore.

Thank you for being interested. Have a good weekend! Berniece