Up There
Dear Diary:
While walking along a trail in Inwood Hill Park, I stopped to admire a rock formation helpfully labeled with a sign near the path that said: “Rock Formation.”
As I stood there, a bird watcher in full regalia paused next to me. Together, we stared at the rocks in silence.
“Would you like to borrow my binoculars?” the birder asked me.
“Sure,” I said. “What are we looking at?”
She pointed and traced her finger 40 feet up an enormous oak tree, stopping at a knot in the trunk before the branches split.
I put the binoculars to my eyes and looked up to where she was pointing. After a moment, I saw a small brown speck camouflaged in the bark staring back at me: a screech owl.
I brought the binoculars down and looked in the same spot. I never would have seen it, let alone noticed it, if she hadn’t stopped.
“Thank you for showing me,” I said.
“Of course,” she replied. “It’s always a pleasure to share the joys of the screech owl.”
— Nick Devor
8.10.23: 9:09 p.m.
Dear Diary:
hip-hop is all up
& down the street
i hear a kid to his girlfriend,
sitting on a low step
— i hear him say wu-tang
just released a new album,
Special Guest
Dear Diary:
I was in New York for a legal proceeding in summer 1980. During a lunch break one day, I rushed to Lincoln Center, where Richard Burton was reprising his role as King Arthur in the musical “Camelot.”
I wanted to get a ticket. I loved the music and the story and had been listening to the original Broadway cast recording for nearly 20 years.
I must have looked crushed when the man at the ticket booth informed me that there was no performance on Mondays. It was a Monday, and I had to fly out the next morning.
After a few seconds, the ticket agent told me he had two tickets, front-row center, to that night’s performance of the Berlin Ballet, and that he would split them up and sell me one.
I mumbled that I had never been to the ballet.
“Trust me,” he said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
I bought the ticket and joined in the collective gasp that night when Rudolf Nureyev, appearing as a guest soloist, literally flew through a window in the stage set and landed with a startling thud about 15 feet from me.
I will never forget his face.
— James Miller
Elizabeth Street Garden
Dear Diary:
It was 11 a.m. at the Elizabeth Street Garden. I took my seat at a table in the sun and opened my book.
Moments later, a wedding party shuffled slowly down the gravel path and gathered at the shaded end of the garden.
A man to my left sifted through a hefty pile of pages that appeared to be a script. Every few moments he murmured a line or two to himself, licked his finger and flipped the page.
Across from him, a woman’s face was covered by her laptop. She snapped her fingers and sang a pretty melody into her screen, hurriedly jotting down lyrics in the notebook beside her. All I could see was her curly hair bouncing to the beat.
A couple sitting beside the woman shared a Caesar salad with a pair of chopsticks, alternating bites between themselves and the chubby pug that sat by their feet and patiently awaited his next bite as drool dripped from his mouth.
To the left of these three, a group of girls pieced together their night out. One asked anxiously: “So, you guys swear on your lives I didn’t drunkenly call my boss in the bodega and quit my job?!”
“Namaste, Aliya!” one friend yelled back
All at once the actor looked up from his lines, the songwriter stopped snapping, the hungry family stopped chewing and the friends quieted down. The garden erupted in applause and stood as the groom kissed his bride.
I didn’t read a single page of my book that day.
— Morgan Weber
The Reminder
Dear Diary:
A dear friend visited me from California. After our visit, she was going to the Bronx to see her mother. She hailed a taxi, and I hugged her as the driver loaded her luggage into the trunk.
“Call me when you get to your mom,” I said.
A half-hour later, she called.
“I am calling to tell you I arrived,” she said, “and the cabdriver reminded me to call you.”
— Mary Fox
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Illustrations by Agnes Lee
