Welcome to the tenth edition of What’s Good? This in your inboxes a bit early today because I’m giving myself a summer Friday. Stay cool!
Earlier this week new CITY editor Harry Siegel and I spoke with paramedic Anthony Almojera about his new book, “Riding the Lightning: A Year in the Life of a New York City Paramedic” for the FAQ podcast.
I’ll warn you that the conversation got heavy. We talked about EMTs and paramedics in New York City committing suicide, and an attempt by Anthony in 2021, before he wrote this book.
But we also talked about the lack of resources given to the city’s EMS, to the pay inequity compared with fellow members of the FDNY, and to the systemic issues that haven’t improved despite what we saw and experienced throughout COVID.
Anthony’s book is an empathetic and honest look at the pandemic, on the ways it ripped through the city and through people’s lives.
The first gut punch comes in his prologue, at a home in Sheepshead Bay. It’s March 2020, and Anthony finds a woman dying of COVID, her husband outside hoping she’ll be OK. They couldn’t save her. Anthony walks outside to tell her husband but fears of the virus kept him from comforting the man, from putting his arm around the stranger and offering his condolences in a human way.
Anthony described this in our interview as a “grief transfer.” He hasn’t been able to save everybody as a paramedic, but usually takes solace in speaking with a person’s family. The job switches from trying to save a life to comforting the living, he said. But with COVID, everything changed.
“Normally I would be able to comfort him … and I watched this guy crumble to the ground and I stayed at this distance,” he said. He went back to his bus and cried on the job for the first time in his career.
“I knew we were going to be in for something here,” he told us.
You can listen to the full interview here, starting at around the 18 minute mark
RELATED READING
Journalist and Queen of Queens Mitra Kalita wrote this week about ways to support a sick or grieving colleague. Growing up my mom would make a “grief ziti” (or “grief cutlets” or “grief brownies”), and I’ve continued this as I became an adult. If I care about you and you’re going through it, I want to help — with dropped-off dinner or by shipping a pizza. Mitra offered suggestions on how to ask what someone might need, how to check in without expectation, and how to show generosity to the people in your life at a time they need it the most.
“Kindness begets kindness, and there’s no wrong time to bestow it on your colleagues,” she wrote. [TIME]
LISTEN
Musician Four Tet’s very, very long Spotify playlist (h/t Jen Smith) [PITCHFORK]
This month has been filled with stories about shark attacks along the Long Island coast. While it’s not new that sharks live in the ocean, it is new that they’re getting this close.
I grew up at the beach, but that was a different ocean. Our whale was a rejected statue from the Central Park Zoo; our dolphin was Flipper, my high school’s mascot.
But our oceans are warmer and cleaner now, which means we’re going to get more marine life — that includes Flipper and his friends, as well as the ones that bite surfers.
I wrote a bit about sharks with my colleague Sam Maldonado this week, checking in with the experts who reassured us they don’t want to eat humans, they just sometimes have to take a bite to know who we are.
And speaking of sharks, meet 16-year-old Max Haynes. A shark bit him on his foot while surfing on Wednesday. Hours later, he gave an interview to News 12 while still in his wet suit, and with his zinc all over his face. The kid also shouted out his Insta and a favorite restaurant — and hopes to be back in the water Friday.
“This is actually happening, this is a shark, I was like laughing a little bit,” he said of the moment he felt it clamp down as his foot dangled over his surfboard. (The funnier thing is every guy on Long Island who’s been bitten by a shark sounds exactly like Max.)
You can watch the interview here:
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Thanks for reading!
NOT going swimming.