Critters and Cash Flow

+ 🎂 Birthday Party Syndrome: Coming down from post-vacation bliss mode

✍️ Sunday, July 9

I returned from a week of vacation at one a.m. last night.

I stepped out of the taxi, rolling my carry-on suitcase behind me, and started up the stairs of our stoop, only to be stopped in my tracks by a classic New York City sight:

A cockroach.

Blegh.

It was chocolate brown, gleaming like a large piece of dulce de leche candy under the streetlights in the center of the stairs.

We both froze.

It sat there, almost teasing me to try to make it across the invisible threshold its presence created on the steps, long mandibles winding furiously in circles like wands.

I let out a small self-contained squeal and steeled myself by taking a big gulp of humid summer air, one mixed with smells of grilled chicken from the guys barbecuing across the street, their music thumping late into the night.

As I start up the stairs, rather than run off as I expected (hoped), the cockroach does a 180 and scuttles rapidly back in my direction, our feet missing each other by only a few inches on the middle stair.

EEEEEEEEE! 

A near miss, yet I still had a faint sense of foreboding. Somehow I knew that this one would end up in our apartment in the not-too-distant future, even though our apartment is on the third floor and not as accessible to insect intruders as the two units below us.

Let’s call it Checkov’s cockroach.

Brushing this fear aside, I walk into the apartment and am greeted by my boys, honored at how happy they are to see me.

Against his own nature, Michael had spent hours leading up to my arrival cleaning so that every surface glistened, because he knows how utterly delighted this makes me when returning home from a trip. (He runs the place like a man cave when I’m not around.)

And then I heard a sound that made my heart sank.

It wasn’t the cockroach.

It was something far more mundane.