Pasture Raised
Dear Diary:
I was at a business lunch at a well-regarded restaurant near Union Square.
I asked the waiter if the beef on the menu was pasture raised. He said he would check with the chef.
He returned a few minutes later.
“The chef says you can’t pasteurize a whole cow,” he said. “You can only pasteurize its milk.”
— Wendy Schmalz
The Back Lots
Dear Diary:
I grew up in the 1960s in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Most mothers stayed at home and ran their households, and the fathers went off to work.
As children, we had to answer to the “big kids” as well as to our relatives, the nuns at school and other adults.
But there was a singular area in the heart of our block where we held absolute dominion.
The block was the typical rectangular shape. On two sides were single family homes. Another side was dominated by apartment buildings and a convent. The fourth side had small stores with apartments above.
In back of these properties was a sizable lot that had no regular access. It was unclaimed and wild. We called it the back lots.
This area was on its own to do as it pleased, as were we when there. It was overgrown with weeds reaching the size of trees, the closest thing to a jungle we could find. There were dirt paths, grasshoppers and ivy. It was nature running wild yet hopelessly hemmed in on every side.
To get there, we had to climb a brick wall behind my grandparents’ garden and sidle along a chain-link fence, skirting the borders of several properties before hopping in. Once we were on the ground, the foliage provided cover and muted the din of the neighborhood around us.
Because entry was not possible for very young children and because older kids tended toward more remote places to escape, it was a self-regulating oasis of sorts.
We were natives in this small land, free to experience the wild and, for once, answerable to no one.
Until dinner time.
— Vincent Barkley
Float
Dear Diary:
I was at that place in Central Park
That place replicated to look like Paris
Where people come to sail model boats
A kid eating ice cream
Handed me his remote control
Urging me to cast off
Zoom — Zoom feel the glide
Zoom — Zoom how relaxing
Ice cream kid asked
If I could sail anywhere in the world
Where would I go
I answered, I’d like to go to England
Ice cream kid replied
If you get to go anywhere
It’s best to go someplace with a volcano
After thinking about it
I didn’t disagree
— Danny Klecko
Dragon’s Breath
Dear Diary:
I don’t remember if it was June 1989 or July or maybe August. I know it was Manhattan and my first stay there, for a summer study program during college.
I was on a bus. I’m pretty sure it was traveling on an avenue on the Upper West Side. Was it going uptown or downtown? I’m not sure.
This I remember: As I stared out the window into the dark of the evening, we passed a side street where a one- or two-story tall creature was breathing fire.
It was not a paper dragon with red ribbons and dry ice smoke, but something I couldn’t define astride a horse and with plumes of fire shooting from its gaping maw.
I craned my neck to hold on to the view for just a moment longer as we kept going. Then I looked at a fellow wide-eyed passenger.
“You saw that too, right?” I asked him.
“Oh, I saw it,” he said.
We laughed and shook our heads.
No one else on the bus seemed to have noticed what looked like a fire-breathing dragon riding a horse on a side street in New York City.
Two years later, now living in New York, I was in the darkness of a movie theater when something on the screen caused me to jump in my seat and squeal.
No one else reacted the same way, but several people did turn to look at me.
I didn’t care: I had just seen my fire-breathing dragon again. It was the Red Knight from “The Fisher King.”
— Alia Covel
Bar Cat
Dear Diary:
I was on a first date in a crammed bar on the Lower East Side. Just after we sat down at the bar, I felt a tickle on my leg.
I looked down and saw it was a bag that the woman sitting next to me had put on a hook under the bar.
She apologized, and we both joked that it felt like a cat and agreed that the bar should get a house cat.
The woman got up to leave after about 20 minutes. She said goodbye and grabbed her bag.
“I’m taking the cat with me,” she said.
— Mack Rosenberg
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