Going to Canal Street
Dear Diary:
It was a spring day, and I was walking toward the train station on my way to buy groceries on my lunch break when I saw an older woman with a cane waving and smiling at me.
She asked me where the Q train was.
“Right behind you,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Canal Street,” she replied.
She told me she had gotten lost and couldn’t remember how she had ended up in my Brooklyn neighborhood.
I watched her descend the stairs into the station carefully. She did it backward. She said it was easier on her hips.
I was worried about her, so I offered to ride with her to Canal Street. She agreed.
During our ride, she told me her life story: how she had grown up in Beijing in the 1940s, how her son had died from leukemia and how she had then moved to New York alone to study music.
When we got to Canal Street, I insisted on giving her my number.
I haven’t seen her in my neighborhood since then, but we do get breakfast every so often at a Chinese bakery near Canal Street. It’s her favorite spot.
— Cathy Zhang
‘Don’t Overthink It’
Dear Diary:
I was walking down the street with my dog on a Sunday in Carroll Gardens. As I got to the corner, a man carrying a large brown duffel bag was walking hurriedly in my direction.
“Really sorry about this!” he called out as he stopped at the corner.
My dog and I both looked at him, but he was looking up.
“Just throw them down to me,” he yelled. “Don’t overthink it.”
I followed his gaze up to the top-floor corner apartment of the building we were standing in front of. A woman was at the window holding a red sneaker.
“I just want to wait for … ” she said, her voice trailing off. She gestured toward me.
I smiled and waved up at her, and then continued on around the corner. Once we were a short distance away, I paused and turned around.
I looked at my dog. My dog looked at me. We both looked up at the apartment as a red sneaker sailed through the air.
I couldn’t see the man anymore, but I could tell he had caught the sneaker.
“Great,” he shouted. “Now the other one!”
A second sneaker flew through the air.
“Nice work!” he said before walking away in the other direction.
— Kat Lynn
Full Hands
Dear Diary:
I was on the F train going uptown when a young man carrying a large pizza and a small dog got on at 34th Street and sat down next to me.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Where are you getting off?”
Roosevelt Island, I said.
“Do you mind holding my pizza until then?” he asked.
I must have looked at him funny.
“I have a new girlfriend,” he said, “and I wanted to impress her, so my dog and I took the train up to New Haven this morning so I could buy her a genuine Frank Pepe pizza.”
“I’ve been carrying it for hours,” he continued, “and my dog needs my attention.”
He handed me the pizza and put the dog on his lap.
“What’s on it?” I asked.
“Sausage and mushroom,” he said. “Her favorite.”
“Mine too,” I said.
— Elisabeth Rosenberg
‘Gigantor’
Dear Diary:
I jumped into a cab on Park Avenue South in the 30s on a dreary, gray Thursday. The driver was friendly, and we started talking about the lack of snow in New York City.
Somehow the conversation turned to an old “Twilight Zone” episode. Realizing that we were of the same vintage, the cabby asked if I knew who Gigantor was.
Did I know who Gigantor was?
“Gigantor, Gigantor, Gigaaaantooor, Gigantor the space-age robot,” I sang. “He is at your command.”
As we went up Park Avenue, we broke into another one: “Come and listen to the story ’bout a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed … ”
Turning left onto 57th Street, we shifted gears again.
“Meet George Jetson,” we sang, “his boy Elroy, daughter Judy, Jane, his wife.”
Circling around Columbus Circle, we moved onto the 1970s and Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.”
The trip ended all too soon. I thanked the driver for a fun ride and popped out of the cab.
I’m sorry I didn’t ask for his name. But if he’s out there reading, I’ve got one more:
“Take our advice. At any price, a gorilla like Magilla is very nice. Magilla Gorilla for sale!”
— Marjorie Silverman
Tangled Up
Dear Diary:
I was walking past Zabar’s on a sunny spring day when I got tangled up in a small dog’s leash.
The owner apologized profusely, although she needn’t have worried. It only took a moment for me to free myself.
“What has happened to the Upper West Side?” the woman said, making small talk. “I haven’t been here in years. It’s so different than I remember it.”
“Oh,” I said, “where are you from?”
“The Upper East Side,” she said.
— Peggy Lamb
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Illustrations by Agnes Lee
