Rear Window

Remember? Jimmy had a broken leg and Grace Kelly came to nurse him back to health and in the meantime they fell deeper in love AND solved a murder?

Nothing like that here, really.

As I continue to be laid up with this cold and entombed in my late 19th Century New York brownstone complete with patio, I feel much like Jimmy - frustrated, bored, trapped etc. I have no Grace and can't even find a murder let alone a lonely ballet dancer to stare at through my window looking onto the backs of all the apartments on the street one number lower than mine in the NYC grid system.

There is that apartment with the big sailboat in the window. And there is that one up a few flights and over to the right with the TV on throughout the night. I wonder what that is about? But rarely do I see humans. So odd that. No fight scenes or sex scenes or entanglements of even the grocery sorting kind.

I do have new neighbors on the next patio over who like to sunbathe and BBQ and smoke. They are a young and beautiful couple with a dog. Pleasant. Neighborly. I am the grizzled, sickly neighbor who catches her in her bikini when I go out to water in my grey sweat shorts, growth and wife-beater. If I had her body I wouldn't be shy either. I find myself more Raymond Burr than Jimmy Stewart these days. Hmmm?

I hear a guy singing to a piano. Standards mostly. And there is some stone blasting and Spanish being spoken.

But no murders or gorgeous pre-Royalty nursemaids.