Special Ingredient
Dear Diary:
After my daughter was born, everything felt hard. Even my quaint Brooklyn neighborhood began to sour for me. The stuffed raccoon on its hind legs in the coffee shop window, the plant store with only four plants, the fedora shop: It all seemed like a kitschy Hollywood back lot.
One day, I dragged my daughter in her stroller to a local sandwich shop where the sandwiches have clever names. Looking for comfort, I ordered the one simply called Meatloaf.
“Your baby is beautiful,” a man’s voice said.
I looked up to see a young man with a handlebar mustache, a big smile and a tattoo encircling his neck like a shawl.
“Thanks,” I managed to say from within my fog while trying unsuccessfully to soothe my crying daughter.
At first, my sandwich — a slab of meatloaf slathered in a tangy sauce on a roll the size of a Nerf football — seemed like another test I would fail. I took a bite, then another. Then I devoured it.
“What’s the secret?” I asked the young man as I ordered a second sandwich. I felt hungry for the first time in weeks.
“It’s the pickles,” he said with a grin.
When I got outside, I found two cups of them inside my bag.
— Sarah Gundle
Keep Moving
Dear Diary:
It was a cold, windy day in December, and I was on my way home after taking the train to the city from a day spent in Philadelphia.
I was walking to the 34th Street R train station behind a family whose members were walking at various paces and taking up most of the sidewalk in a way that no one could pass.
“Ellen,” I heard the father say to his wife, “put your phone away and walk faster! You owe it to the people.”
I could have hugged him.
— Kristina Moris
Tomorrow
Dear Diary:
My friend of 72 years and I stopped at a bodega on Broadway and 107th Street to buy lottery tickets. We don’t play unless the payout is astronomical.
It was 9 o’clock on this particular Saturday evening, and we thought we were the only customers in the place. We asked the owner when the drawing would be announced.
Midnight, he said.
My friend and I agreed that we would be asleep by then and would have to learn the results the next day.
At that moment, a man dressed entirely in black whom we hadn’t noticed standing in a back corner spoke up.
“No one promises you tomorrow,” he said without looking up from the gardening magazine he was reading.
My friend and I, both 79, were all too familiar with this wisdom. We exchanged knowing glances with the bodega’s owner and politely thanked the man in black for his advice. He ignored us.
We went to my friend’s apartment, where we tried, and failed, to stay up till midnight.
We learned in the morning that we had unfortunately not won the lottery. On the other hand, we had our tomorrow.
— Michael Weiden
Two Stops
Dear Diary:
It was a drizzly June night in 2001. I was a young magazine editor and had just enjoyed what I thought was a very blissful second date — dinner, drinks, fabulous conversation — with our technology consultant at a restaurant in Manhattan.
I lived in Williamsburg at the time, and my date lived near Murray Hill, so we grabbed a cab and headed south on Second Avenue.
“Just let me out here,” my date said to the cabby at the corner of 25th Street.
We said our goodbyes, quick and shy, knowing that we would see each other at work the next day. I was giddy and probably grinning with happiness and hope.
“Oh boy,” the cabby said, shaking his head as we drove toward Brooklyn. “Very bad.”
“What do you mean?” I asked in horror.
“He doesn’t want you to know exactly where he lives,” the cabby said. “Not a good sign.”
I spent the rest of the cab ride in shock, revisiting every moment of the date.
Happily, it turned out that my instinct about it being a great date was right, and the cabby was wrong. Twenty-four years later, my date that night is my husband, and I know that if your stop is first, it’s polite to get out so the cab can continue in a straight line to the next stop.
— Ingrid Spencer
Geography Lesson
Dear Diary:
When I was a freshman at Barnard College, my parents visited me from Indianapolis because my father, a radiologist, was attending a medical meeting in New York City.
One of his colleagues took us to dinner. Riding in a cab afterward, my father and the cabdriver were bantering when my father’s colleague interjected jokingly.
“Please show some respect for Dr. Campbell,” he said. “He is from the Midwest. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes,” the cabby replied. “Between Fifth and Sixth.”
— Nancy Duff Campbell
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