Fifth and final day in Florida.
After not having brought it up for perhaps years, האמא had apparently recently remembered that I’d left my jacket in the car of the person who drove me to TIA about ten years ago and mentioned it a number of times this visit by way of telling me not to do it again this year. When Brian came to pick me up, he and I were about to leave when she launched into the anecdote once again, not only bizarre because of the timing but also because I would think it had been in B.’s car that I’d left the jacket in the first place and so he’d already know the story.
In the car, B. asked what I thought of the Parkland shooting that had occurred while I was coincidentally in Florida, and we discussed it a bit. I expressed my concern that extremists were trying to drive the narrative rather than more rational centrists. I also learned B. is from New York State.
TIA was trying out for the very first time a strange new system of passenger queues at the TSA screening area, separating us into separate sub‐lines before reaching the metal detectors, and even the workers there were openly expressing ambivalence to the passengers to the benefit of these changes. By wonderful circumstance, my line brought me in such close proximity to the worker to whom I was so extremely attracted in November that we struck up a conversation. The glare on his identification badge prevented my reading his full name without a long noticeable stare, but his surname is Bishop, the same name as a worker at a Bronx service station I used to visit about fifteen years ago. (See smartphone notes.)
At the gate (6676–81), I sat next to a trendy‐looking black man with whom I very briefly chatted after we stood to await boarding, and by coincidence, he (28D) and I (28A), as well as a young man to whom I was attracted (28C), all wound up in the same row (6682–92, 3437–39). I took the granola bar at snack time, and noticed the wrapper indicated it was made with “ingredients you can see & pronounce,” one of which was quinoa, which a fair number of people have difficulty pronouncing. The attractive collegiate and I had an empty seat between us, but he was too preoccupied with his music to converse with me.
Same collegiate boarding a bus at Lga. (6693). The SBS ride (3442–45) in New York was free due to a Presidents Day discount (3440–41), and there were two cute ישׂראלים on the bus having a conversation in עברית (visible 3444–45). It was lightly raining but the temperature was fairly high, so I wound up not wearing the precious jacket on my short walk home from the bus stop.
The receipt disappeared so I don’t remember what I bought at DR, 37th Ave., perhaps Valentine sweets. Both E’vine and S— were cashiers, but neither was mine.