Labor Daze

Boom, boom, boom, it feels as if I’m sitting on a frantic heart, whose rapid palpitations seem to beat a jack-hammer rhythm on the collective ribcage, threatening to burst forth at any given moment.

Like a finger on a stage-frightened pulse, the violent vibrations turn the parkway into a trembling trampoline. Long flatbeds, stacked with enough watts of speaker to furnish a thousand Escalades, crawl at a snail’s pace and a hyena’s volume; MCs with mike in hand, intone popular dancehall mixes, while shouting for the people from Trinidad to “jump-jump-jump” and the people from Tobago to “shake dat ting;” DJs, the woof-woof of the sub-woofers keeping them “a-float,” cut and dice their way through the sea of rippling humanity; all the while, barrel grills – barbecuing the likes of jerk-chicken and some non-Kosher looking stuff – spew a West-Indies smoke, blanketing the air in a curry fog and the nostrils in a Cajun quilt.

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It never ceases to amaze me how things flesh with physicality remind us of things flush with spirituality; and, as I watch an older man with an even older machete expertly remove the shell of sugarcane, so that one can access the sweetness within, I wonder if he knows that the king is in the field, and that – without the walls of a palace pulling rank – one does not need a machete to access the sweetness within.

“I am to my beloved, and my beloved is to me.” There is a relationship going on here, I reach for my beloved (Issarusa D’l’sata), and my beloved reaches for me (Issarusa D’l’eyla); yet, most people think that it is some Beatle lyric.

A float has just passed, the tingling of steel-drums (the bumpy bowl you see the guy playing in the subway) pierces through the many bodies. But, this month, there is another tingling sound, one that pierces the soul.

I am in a daze: it is Elul – the past year in review, the coming year in plain view – but the world doesn’t know it. They think it is September, with the baseball season coming to a close and the U.S. coming to an Open. How can they not know of Elul?

Is it because they haven’t been taught?

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Now the garbage crews and cleanup trucks (those beasts, with the rotating bristles, that pull us out of bed for alternate-side parking), with their flashing yellow lights and reflector vests, have begun cleaning up the parade’s residue. Block by block they methodically remove any trace of mess. Within a few diligent hours, the parkway has resumed its normal traffic.

Will it take a good cleanup to remove the laboring daze?