Two young Irish guys overdosed on fentanyl in Florida a few weeks ago. One of them was cremated before their coffins were shipped back across the ocean. It turns out that whoever oversaw dealing with their remains, cremated the wrong body.
This is the lead story that popped up on my news feed on Saturday morning and I couldn’t possibly have had any less interest in knowing about it. I can’t believe that I am still thinking about it now, let alone writing about it.
I am sure that the family of the one reduced to ashes might be upset, but that’s their business. Why is this considered news? I just don’t care.
Maybe I was feeling cranky at having been dragged out of bed so early in the morning. I was being driven up to Connecticut in pitch-black darkness for a concert that night. As the ride went on it slowly got brighter. By the time I arrived, the sun still hadn’t made it up over the horizon although it was rainy and cloudy, so it was hard to tell. I am truly out of practice to be of much use during those hours.
Mixed in with the rest of the news that morning were items that touched on Russia and Ukraine and on Israel and Hamas. The lion’s share of it, though, was about the two old men running against each other for President. It isn’t as if there is much that has changed about the race in the last few days. Instead, it’s just that the news agencies have decided to fire everyone up so that people will choose to read about it on their platforms. Most of the day’s so-called news was conjecture, opinion, and peripheral nonsense.
“Biden treading through political minefield.” That was from the BBC. “Voters doubt Biden’s leadership and favor T----, Times / Siena poll finds.” That one was from the New York Times. “How RFK Jr. hiring a bird smuggler threw his environmental group into turmoil.” That little gem was commanding a lot of the Washington Post’s attention. “Illegal migrants praise ‘president of the immigrants’ Biden as they flood US through southern border.” That lead headline was, of course, courtesy of Fox news.
I tried to get through the article about RFK Jr., but I didn’t have the bandwidth for it that early in the morning. It seemed to be about something he did in 2000. Apparently, some lying is involved.
By the way, Siena polls are conducted by Siena college students and other folks from different institutions. Siena is a Roman Catholic Franciscan college in upstate New York. Students going there are likely to be less conservative than the local people they question for their surveys, but who knows? I am not inclined to pay them much attention, regardless.
This past week I was scheduled to be in jury duty every day. I was also on call for it all this week. My summons was for federal court. They don’t allow you to bring in your computer or phone the way you can while you are waiting around during state court.
On Monday, our first day, we all arrived at 8:30 in the morning and signed in. About an hour later they called the names of fifty or so people who were then led across the street to another courthouse. A short while later, another large group was called who were then, in turn, taken upstairs. That left about ten of us behind.
Off to one side of the large waiting hall, there was a small room with coffee and vending machines and a few short rows of chairs. The ten of us were spread out all over the bigger space. Slowly we all gravitated toward the smaller one.
The coffee makers in there were free. Plastic drawers stacked between them were filled with different blended coffees in pouches. There was nothing intuitive about how the machines worked. After a try or two, though, I figured it out and got my cup of coffee. The person who followed me couldn’t figure it out. As he was about to give up, I offered to show him how it worked.
Two or three other people were already sitting in one corner of the room, chatting. I sat down near them and after a minute I made a comment of my own. It got a reaction from the others and now I was in on it. The guy I had helped threw in an opinion about something else from across the room and before long, he was in on it too.
I don’t remember what we all talked about, but the conversation was easy, even, and non-political. Nobody was thrilled to have had to be there so early in the morning. One guy had left his house at 5:30 that morning to commute in from Rockland County. My commute was a straight shot on the C train as was another woman’s who lived just north of me. There was another guy whose wife was a hairdresser who had come in from Queens.
We all talked about nothing for about two hours. The only time the discussion even touched on current events was when someone wondered if we might be called for one of the ex-president’s many upcoming court cases. We didn’t get any more partisan than that. Before long we were released for lunch.
As soon as we were let go, we all dispersed in different directions. It was a beautiful day, so I walked into Chinatown.
In high school, I had a friend whose dad was an engineer. I’ve written about him before. The family was from Taiwan and lived in New Jersey just up the street from us. One day, his dad took my friend and me into the city to see the project he was working on which was the construction of the World Trade Center.
What an amazing day it was. We went up to the top of one of the towers which was still being built. Only the central core and the floors had been completed at the top. There were no outer walls yet. It was wide open. It was as windy as anything. And utterly terrifying.
His dad had a meeting scheduled, so my friend, Solomon took me into Chinatown for lunch. We went to several different places and ate something wonderful in each of them. The thing I remember most to this day was the steamed pork buns we got from a tiny bakery that was down a narrow flight of steps from the street. The buns were delicious – sweet and savory at the same time.
I don’t know where the place was that Solomon took me to, but on Monday I found some pork buns in another small place and had those for my lunch. Even after all those many decades, they were just as tasty as the ones I remembered from high school.
When I got back to the courthouse, I dumped my stuff into a chair in the main room and headed into the break room. Part of our little group was already in there and the rest slowly trickled back in. The conversation picked back up effortlessly from where we’d left off. It felt like hanging out with old friends.
After an hour or so, one of the bigger groups returned to the waiting room. A few of them started coming into what now felt like our room.
Our gang were all concentrated in one corner so most of the new folks just ignored us. They drank their coffees and left. One or two joined in for a minute or two but they soon left as well. It’s not as if we ignored them. Maybe it just seemed to them that we were a group and that they weren’t welcome.
The next day, we all returned to the courtroom. I saw the guy whose wife was a hairdresser talking to the guy who had commuted in from Rockland County, so I went over to them. The husband of the hairdresser had found out that one of the cases that the bigger group had been voir dire’d for the day before was a copyright case. He didn’t think they had found a full jury yet and that we might be called in for it.
The woman who lived north of me on the C line came over and soon our small band was back together again. We went into the break room. While we were drinking our coffees and laughing, we were suddenly all called back into the main room. The bailiff called out names for the next case for which potential jurors were going to be interviewed. I heard my name, so I got in line.
We all went upstairs. We were being considered for a criminal trial that had something to do with a guy being arrested for drug trafficking and unlawful possession of a gun. They held us out in the hallway for a few minutes before being led in. Our group, which someone had dubbed The Breakfast Club the day before, all found each other again. None of us knew each other’s names so when the bailiff had called us all out, we didn’t know which of us were heading up. We were all there.
For the next few hours, we were questioned by the judge. I got the sole laugh of the morning when I was asked what my husband did for a living. “He’s an actor with a reoccurring role as a judge on Law & Order.” Judge Torres thought that was hilarious. I wasn’t ultimately chosen to sit on the jury, and I wonder if that had anything to do with it.
We had all been given juror numbers based on the random way we were initially called. I think that they started at the top of the list when they were choosing who would sit on the jury. If nobody objected to number one, then number one was on. I was number fifty-something, so they didn’t get anywhere near me. Both Rockland Commute Guy and Hairdresser Husband Guy were close to the beginning. They were both skipped over.
Apropos of nothing, Hairdresser Husband’s uniform blond hair seemed suspicious to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if his wife had used him for dyeing practice.
At the end of the questioning, we were all sent back down to the main holding room. Before we could do anything, the bailiff told us we were dismissed for the rest of the week. We might be called in the following week, but we wouldn’t know until Friday evening. We were given a number to call in at that time to listen to a recording for further instructions.
I said so long to Hairdresser Husband, but I didn’t see anyone else. I headed out.
On Saturday up in Connecticut, I found myself waiting for everyone to get ready to start our sound check. There was nothing for me to do so I went back to checking in on the news on my phone.
According to the BBC, Gaza had gotten its first airdrop of US food supplies. The New York Times reported that Republican challenger Nikki Haley had mentioned the Times / Siena poll results in a speech that afternoon in North Carolina. She used it as evidence to support her claim that she’d be a stronger candidate against President Biden than 45. The Washington Post had also picked up the Gaza aid drop story and had dropped the RFK one off its feed. Fox News led with an opinion piece about a looted CVS store. In it, the author maintained that rising crime in America’s cities has become a “moral panic.” I couldn’t read any more about this vast impending crisis without officially signing up for Fox News. That, I was not going to do. Instead, I just had to imagine the worst based on a fractional viewing of the whole article.
Human beings form themselves into groups. We don’t seem to be able to help it. I still don’t know the names of my fellow Breakfast Club members from jury duty. I may never see any of them again. For a day and a half though, our common experience of being in that room by ourselves brought us together. We created a strong enough bond in that very short time that it unwittingly became a barrier that kept other people from joining us.
Only one of the people in our group, as far as I could tell, had anything remotely to do with show business. She was in the hair department at MSNBC. The rest were all from different walks of life than mine. None of us had a connection that we knew about beyond our not being chosen to be in either of the two big pools that first day in court. Nevertheless, we became an “us”.
The corporate news agencies want to separate the public into teams. Newspapers and television news programs only make money when they attract readers and viewers. Just giving us the news is not always going to do that. The more that they can enhance the apparent divide between “us” and “them”, the more people will want to tune in to see how their side is doing. The more anxiety the news outlets can generate, the more we will look to them for answers and consolation. It seems to be easy to separate us into those two opposing camps. We are halfway there to doing it ourselves anyway.
I have no idea what the politics were of our potential juror band of ten. It never came up in our casual conversation. As far as I can remember, we didn’t disagree about anything. If somebody said something that offended someone else, it was never mentioned. There was never any apparent tension. We never fought. Despite only knowing the barest minimum about each other, we all laughed together and shared stories for an entire day. Maybe if we’d been together longer, disagreements and rifts may have sprung up, but that didn’t happen on Monday and Tuesday.
What a gift it was to have been forcibly separated from our smartphones and computers for a while. We had no idea what was going on in the greater outside world and we were all the better for it.
When I called in to the number we’d been given on Friday evening, the recording told me that my jury duty service was done and that I didn’t have to come back in again. While it is a relief, to have it out of the way, I am sorry not to have been able to say goodbye to that little group.
On the plus side, now I don’t have to resort to calling in sick for our next concert which is scheduled for this coming Friday out in New Jersey. I was already feeling a bit guilty about that.
I wasn’t, however, feeling bad enough about ditching my responsibility for a day that I wasn’t going to do it. I’m sure that my friends in The Breakfast Club would have covered for me.
I gained nothing from reading this. You usually write an interesting column.