Ladies of the Barrelhouse

“Would you rather be able to fly or sing?”

Dateline: Last Saturday in the park on a bench, still a safe distance from Monday morning. The age-old question that each of us must answer comes to me. This is my reckoning. I ask Melanie as well. Her reckoning.

“Would you rather be able to fly or sing?”

We are in the not-so-quite-as-pretty of our two neighborhood parks, but the one closest to the bookstore. It is 127° on the Brooklyn Heat Index. Someone’s untended little bruiser keeps kicking sports balloons at me. I have now retrieved an inflatable baseball the size of a mascot’s head seven times for the little brat.

I have resolved the answer to flight or song in advance before asking Melanie, mostly because I want to share my choice. I’m snubbing flight, hoping to surprise her with my answer. I’m going with the heart over the body.

The street pigeons strafing us were not making a great case for flight. They were not soaring over warm thermals, or Cape Town to Vökelsbergen without a twitch, or hummingbirds at the feeder — or owls under full moons.