Pickled
Dear Diary:
I was on an uptown 1 coming home from my job at a SoHo restaurant.
As I sat there with my backpack and big black headphones, a man sitting nearby took a jar of pickles out of a plastic shopping bag. He opened the jar, ate two or three pickles and then extended the jar to me.
“Pickle?” he said.
I thanked him but declined, gesturing to the meal in my own plastic bag I was bringing home from work.
He shrugged and continued to eat pickles and sip the juice.
— Cara Denton
Love Is All Around
Dear Diary:
It was a Saturday morning in late summer. I had run out to buy bread and was walking home along Sixth Avenue in Park Slope.
At Carroll Street, a construction worker was redirecting traffic away from the block, which was closed for road work.
“I love you, lady,” he said as I passed him.
“I love you, too,” I replied.
“Hey, you really meant that!” he said, sounding surprised.
“I really did,” I said, a little surprised myself.
“I can tell,” he said. “I’m an empath.”
I kept walking, my bag of bread bouncing lightly against my side.
— M.J. Babic
Bassoon Man
Dear Diary:
I was on an uptown 6 train on the first truly cold day of December 2023.
A tall blond-haired man wearing a down jacket with a fur hood and weighed down by a large bassoon case got on at 14th Street. I could hear the bass blasting through his headphones.
He held onto a pole, closed his eyes and swayed as the train made its way uptown.
At 28th Street, he snapped awake and hurried off the train. A pair of gray wool gloves fell out of his pocket as he did. Three people called out to get his attention to no avail.
The gloves lay on the ground, palms up. “What can you do?” they seemed to say.
Just before we got to Grand Central, the woman sitting next to me picked them up and tucked them behind her as if the bassoonist might come back to retrieve them.
— Samuel Sullivan
At the Cookery
Dear Diary:
I was visiting New York City for the first time in 1981.
One place I wanted to go was the Greenwich Village restaurant the Cookery to see the blues singer Alberta Hunter perform. I had discovered her music in the movie “Remember My Name” and had then fallen in love with her album “Amtrak Blues.”
I was a scruffy 23-year-old, so I was seated way at the back of the restaurant. I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu.
Ms. Hunter was sitting alone at a banquette nearby, sizing up the audience before her set. She was a tiny woman in her 80s, wearing a glittery dress and big dangly earrings that looked like they weighed more than she did.
At one point, as I was looking for the rest room, Ms. Hunter saw me looking confused and pointed the way.
On my way back to my seat, I impulsively sat down across from her at her banquette and gushed like a fool.
I asked whether she would be singing “I’ve Got a Mind to Ramble,” my favorite song from the movie.
“Oh, dearie,” she said. “I’m afraid not.”
Later, toward the end of her set, she turned away from the microphone and said something to the band. Then she looked out to the audience and right at me.
“Son,” she said, “what song did you want me to sing?”
Everyone in the place turned around to see whom she had asked.
“‘I’ve Got a Mind to Ramble,’” I said.
“OK, boys,” she said to the band, “Let’s do that one.”
— Jeffrey Rotin
Ugly Pitcher
Dear Diary:
My girlfriend and I moved into our first apartment together in Carroll Gardens in 2008.
One day, I was coming home from the subway when I passed a stoop full of items that were up for grabs. One was an odd-looking, amateurishly handmade ceramic piece.
It was shaped like a creature with a catlike head on a Venus of Willendorf-style body, with a forked tail that doubled as the handle. It was equal parts creepy and hilarious.
My girlfriend and I often played little jokes on each other, so I brought the pitcher home with an idea. I left it outside our front door and went inside the apartment, where my girlfriend was sitting on the sofa.
I told her had I found something curious on the street and gave her a choice: She could open the door and see it, but if she did, we would have to keep it the rest of our lives. Or she could decline to open the door, in which case I would get rid of the item and never speak of it again.
Sixteen years later, we still live together in Brooklyn, are married with three children and have a hideous pitcher we can never part with.
— Aron Watman
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