I DIDN'T THINK SO; or, QUÉ HA PASADO CON EL COMUNISMO, part 3

i think that i had meant to go. the posters were up in the streets of the macarena at least two weeks before the event, but the sixteenth of december came and went, not without fanfare, because it was probably for too much of it that passing a friday evening at wherever it was that the event was being held seemed insufficiently attractive. the cause could have used some bedazzling of its advertisement. with everything else assumed to be happening in december, that poster really should have tried for something more than the tired old faces of lenin, stalin and chairman mao. "qué ha pasado con el comunismo?" the sixteenth of december is well behind us: it's a thing of the past. but its reminders still decorate the macarena, and watching a scrap collector push by under a ragged array of those posters that covers almost the entire street level wall of a building off of san luis, i wonder how anyone here manages to secure themselves a shopping cart. maybe the ones in circulation have just been passed down or over since before security was increased to its current levels at the grocery stores. (and that is, at the groceries stores that still have them.) the cart at her apartment on twelfth avenue ultimately went back to the streets without her finding a friend who wanted to inherit it. so it was left, filled with skeins of her less expensive yarn and piloted by two cabbage patch dolls (and filled still with the skeins of the expensive yarn that she couldn't take). it was left for someone to push, as a friend held the door, still piloted by the two cabbage patch dolls through the deliveries door of the design firm that had opened on the other corner of that block of twelfth avenue. but before it was the depository for those shoes of hers that she couldn't throw out but wouldn't wear except around the building and across twelfth avenue to the grocery store owned by the femmalien (she called her) -- which was before she threw out those shoes to store her yarn -- the cart had once (at least that once) seen its purpose fulfilled for shopping. the shopping had actually been done, but with two bags each on both arms each, she said she wouldn't be able to walk the ten blocks back to the apartment on twelfth avenue. but look, a shopping cart. it's probably someone's, because shopping carts that have made their way out of somewhere anywhere have, anymore, had intentional help. but she's already putting her bags inside. the bikini she knit herself didn't work out for her so well at the beach, but she looks not so surprisingly appropriate test piloting the cart for the cabbage patch dolls in her miniskirt and the leg gauntlets she sewed for herself out of a purple vinyl coat. and she looks now not surprisingly inappropriate struggling for the cart with the man who's trying to wrest her hands off of the push bar. she shakes his hands off of her instead. then it's him her hands are pushing as he's screaming that the shopping cart is his. "is your name walgreens pharmacy?" she says and then he slides down the tree that's planted in the sidewalk somewhere along tenth avenue. and i look at the scrap collector and wonder if i shouldn't reevaluate missing events like the one that passed on the sixteenth of december instead of chasing the tails of phantom banalities through streets of a city they'll probably shouldn't see. but she's still talking to that man on the ground. "i didn't think so."