I went to the cash machine Friday, the one in town that charges me three extra dollars to withdrawn my cash from it because it is not my cash machine, and do you know what? I’m glad it’s not my cash machine, because I hate it. At the last bank where I used to stand regularly in line to deal with a teller, more than a decade ago, one of the tellers was a very beautiful woman, tall and slender and with a noticeable patch of hair on her chin, long dark hairs which she did not pluck or shave. This little beard ennobled her. I think of her, pretty and bearded, particularly as I grow hairier with age. Anyway, there was a line at the cash machine I hate, and I saw this and went and left the groceries in my car, but when I came back the line was exactly the same as it was when I passed by the first time. I took my place at the end of the line. There was only one machine in the room, and the woman at the machine was speaking loudly while she banked. She was saying, “One small container of creamed spinach. One small container of orzo salad. One small container of roasted potatoes.” And so on. Eventually, and slightly before completing her order—she went over to the little banking table and stood there, fitting her money into her wallet while she continued to order, then brushed past me holding the phone to her mouth—she left us. I was hoping that at this moment the woman in front of me, a stranger to me, and I would cross the line that separated us entirely from each other, and share an eye roll. In fact I expected this, and waited for the woman to shift a little and initiate the eye roll with me, but she did not, she stared straight ahead, and waited her turn at the machine. The woman ahead of her went, then she went, then I went. The reason, by the way, that I hate this bank machine is that the machine never allows you to chose Yes or No for your answers. You can only chose Sure, or No Thanks. Would you like to see your balance? Sure! Do you need a receipt? No Thanks!

I would never say Thanks to a machine. The machine can say Thanks to me, if it has to, but that is where the politesse should end. Another thing I think about this machine, and I do think about this stupid machine, is that if someone were going to program a bank machine to speak, so to speak, in the vernacular, why stop with Sure? Why not go all the way to Hell Yeah? This bank will charge you three dollars in addition to whatever your bank is going to charge you for this transaction. Do you want to continue? Fuck No should be a choice. Oh, I know that it was a person, somewhere, who programmed this irritating machine, and so in the end, it’s not the machine I have issues with, it’s people. Yes. It is. Machines are empty, binary, useful things. People wear beards, or should.

While courting, my love and I used to drive to the top of a mountain whose name I have somehow forgotten. You could hike up it, at least partway, but we didn’t have time for that. At the top we lay in the sunshine on the flat rocks and looked down on the brown and yellow shapes of the fields, and the shine of the river that cut through them. Breezes blew over us. We moved, without moving closer to each other, closer to consummation.

There is a certain peaceful feeling that accompanies the attainment of great heights, even if they are reached by car, or elevator, or are not particularly great. The first two apartments we shared were graced by communal roof decks to which we clumsily transported drinks, and dinners, and once a poorly timed party, which then had to be moved, quickly, back down. On the first roof deck there were periods when the building’s air conditioning blew hard, and we had to stop talking and wait for it to be done.

On vacation we are perpetually climbing things, and we are not alone. A few weeks ago, in Mexico, we climbed to the very top of the house and could see, in one direction, a blue and gentle ocean, calmed by the white breakers about a mile out, and in the other, a white, female tourist, who liked to read in her bathing suit and shorts in the shade of a palapa. We climbed also the ancient palace of Ek’Balam, a Mayan city built three thousand years ago in the Yucatán jungle, and only recently excavated, and rebuilt. Originally, the city was paved entirely with a white stucco, and was probably, from the top of the palace, blinding. Now the ground between the buildings is covered with grass, and populated by hot, black dogs. Our guide was loyal to this place, and jealous of the special attention given to Chichen Itza, where the steps were narrower, he said, than the steps at Ek’Balam, and where the people had polluted the pure Mayan with the Aztec by introducing the practice of human sacrifice. Also, he said, the souvenir vendors at Chichen Itza were impossible.

We got there early, but as the day grew hotter, and the dogs sleepier, groups of people arrived to climb the palace steps after us. It is possible to define all this climbing as an hysterical response to the rigors of vacation, in which nothing must be done, except to create a new purpose for one’s existence out of this nothing. On the other hand, and this is what I believe, what is a better, higher use of this empty time than the attempt to attain the peaceful feeling, accompanied by breezes, that one only gets, for some reason, at the top of one thing or another?

Spring is for waiting, and watching. Here in New York, our magnolia tree, which bloomed only the month the gardeners planted it two years ago, and last summer stood as an extravagant stick in our front yard, is showing fuzzy green buds. In Seattle, our friend sits in the hospital, after a bone-marrow transplant, watching his white counts go down to zero and back up again.

His wife has been my best friend for the last twenty-five years. We are usually physically distant; we don’t always talk; each has parts of her life the other can't comprehend. It doesn’t matter: We see the other as she would be seen, as she sees herself.

My parents offer to buy me a plane ticket to Seattle with their miles, so my father and I are now, together, on hold. When the woman comes back on he encourages her to help us. I know you can do it, he says. You can do this. She puts us back on hold while she transfers us.

In Seattle it must be spring, too, cold spring, damp spring, spring before anything has happened, spring that might as well be winter, except for a few small signs. The secret of early spring is not that warmth is here, or growth, or ease, but that it’s possible to imagine these things again, and to want them very badly.

Last year my mother needed me to pick her up at her medical group, because she had had a routine procedure that they wouldn’t allow her to drive home from. I found her in the bed, pink and healthy-looking in her gown, as surprised to see me as I was to see her. I still imagine myself to be young, no more than eighteen, with all my life ahead of me; what’s more, I know she imagines herself the same way. This is why, even though we know and love each other, we sometimes find the other incongruous, and out of place.

When we lived on East 96th Street, our neighbor had a form of dementia, and cats. When I brought Henry home from daycare she often came to the door, and invited us in. Now let’s see, she said, every time, Where have they all gone? Here’s Snowball, and here’s Smokey, and I think that Fire has hidden under the bed again. And she called Fire, and asked us to follow us back to her bedroom, and peered under the bed for Fire, and we spent most of our visit calling to Fire and looking for Fire under things.

But Fire did not come, and even though I got down on the ground, sometimes, and looked under the bed, where there were bowls of cat food, I did not see Fire, and I suppose I imagined that Fire was dead, and that this fact had been forgotten. Sometimes, though, I worried, because things were a little unbuttoned at our neighbor’s apartment, and the smell from the cats was very great, and of course because of her dementia, that if Fire wasn’t dead, Fire was in trouble, and that one day little Henry would, while helping our neighbor search for Fire, find him, and that this would be worse than Fire having died some time ago and our neighbor, who loved Fire, having forgotten this. From our point of view, if not from hers.

But in fact Fire was alive, and under the bed, exactly where our neighbor thought he was. Fire was very shy, but one day Henry and I met him, briefly, before he yowled and ran desperately from the room. Our neighbor wasn’t mistaken about this. And our neighbor was herself, and not my grandfather, who had had Alzheimer’s, and whose body, seated loosely in a chair in his living room, was a figure of dread in my youth. She was a nice woman, someone else’s mother, and I could like her and take my son to visit her and offer her, one hot day, our fan, without feeling that something terrible was going to happen to me, and that I knew what it was.