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Come on, Irene!
Column
Come on, Irene!
Come on, Irene!
Mr. Bootblack is a philosopher with distinct views of his own. He earns a living cleaning shoes. Once every two weeks he writes an article about footwear for GDS – and about the wearers.
Did I use to know an Irene! We would dance, or rather I would dance and she would fly - or whatever you call it, that thing only girls born to this can do. I’m not a bad dancer, nothing I need to be ashamed of, but Irene wasn’t just good she was stunning.
I couldn’t help thinking back while standing at the bar of the little hotel behind Times Square I had voluntarily moved to when my neighbourhood was been evacuated. “Hurricane Irene”, I thought, and had to smile as I could only think back to that Irene of times past. That would have been a good nickname for her.
Young men were playing hockey on the street with a rubber ball. The wind was howling and the rain came pelting down with a force not even New York’s bravest, our fire fighters, could manage using all their hoses to fill a bucket at the same time. The hockey players laughed and thrashed the ball through the curtain of water into the unknown, one team of sopping white shirts, the other without any shirts at all. A lust for life in the face of the storm. Oh yes, I really liked that. I always liked things a bit stormy – also maybe because I’m so calm myself.
Obviously, Irene was dangerous, Irene the hurricane, and it hit many people along the coast with trees and roof tiles that it whirled up in its path. Every single case is tragic. Yet despite all the grief I love the way it brings people together who shrug their shoulders and say “hey, if you think you can scare us then show us the best you’ve got. Life is hard and we’re ready to survive.”
To my mind this is the only attitude to adopt. It has an elegance about it. You fix your tie in the morning, polish your shoes again, stand up straight and say to yourself “So, give me everything you’ve got. I’m here.” And if you are Irene, the girl from long gone, then your shoes are high and they also say: “No-one can stop me from enjoying every minute. It might be stormy but I’m going dancing.”
I stood with another customer in the wobbly porch way. Our hotel had long since seen better days and there was no room for customers to light up a cigar in. But in this weather the NYPD would have better things to do than stop us calming ourselves with a little poison. We stood in the rattling doorway and watched the insane game on the street, the ball game with its sopping wet players, the game between the hurricane and the city and the game between the wonderful inhabitants of this wonderful city and life itself. “Sometimes you have to feel it, don’t you?” said a woman of my age standing there next to me puffing on her cigarette. She was wearing a beige-coloured suit and a gold bracelet. We suited this hotel well, refined if not rich. She pointed to the suit I had already had when I went dancing with Irene. “After all, we dress up to experience something, don’t we?” I knew what she meant. I took another puff on my cigar, nodded to her and opened the door. Wind and rain hit us in the face as we stepped out into life.
