Close Calls
Dear Diary:
New York City dog owners have their regular routes. For years, mine began with a right turn out of my Yorkville building.
One evening, I decided to turn left. My terrier tugged to go right, but my tug won out.
A few steps into our walk, I heard a tremendous thud behind me. I turned to see an air-conditioner that had tumbled from a window several stories up on the sidewalk just on the other side of my building’s front door.
A young man stood nearby facing me. He had stopped short in time to watch the heavy metal crash down at his feet.
I walked toward him and stopped, with the air-conditioner between us. His face was ghostly pale, as I imagined mine was.
A woman rushed out of the building.
“Oh my god!” she cried. “My air-conditioner! I opened my window and didn’t realize it was keeping the unit in place!”
“Or, perhaps,” the young man said, “that’s yours.” He pointed toward a second air-conditioner on the ground a few feet away.
“Oh no!” the woman said. “Mine hit another one on the way down.”
— Sylvie Farrell
Così Fan Tattoo
Dear Diary:
I have been attending operas for more than 25 years and getting tattoos for almost twice as long.
On a trip to New York in 2018, I attended a Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” that was staged in Coney Island and featured actual sideshow performers, including a fire-eater, a sword swallower, a snake dancer and contortionist.
Later that summer, I returned to the city for an annual tattoo show in Manhattan. Some of the same sideshow performers provided entertainment.
As one woman came off the stage, I told her I had seen her earlier that year in the opera.
She looked at the heavily tattooed and pierced crowd.
“I’m guessing you’ll be the only person this weekend who tells me that,” she said.
— Jil McIntosh
Lost and Found
Dear Diary:
I recently went to the Lost and Found at Grand Central, a musty office tucked in a subterranean corner of the terminal.
I explained to the man there that I was looking for my bright orange AirPods case, which I had left on a train about a month before.
He disappeared and then returned with a bin of at least 100 AirPods cases, each one carefully bagged and tagged. We looked through them together, one by one.
A young woman appeared at the counter. She said she was looking for her purse. Another employee disappeared into the back.
“I’ve been here four times since Tuesday to see if it’s shown up,” the woman told me, an air of desperation in her voice. She ticked off some of the important things in the purse: her wallet, a favorite lipstick, a deodorant she loved.
I told her about my missing AirPods case. We stood there looking forlorn together.
The employee helping her emerged from the back. He was holding a purse. Her face lit up.
“Oh my god!” she said. “I can’t believe it!” She threw her arms around me, and we hugged.
By then, the man helping me had gotten to the bottom of the bin of AirPods cases. Mine wasn’t there.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get your case back,” the young woman said.
“Well, I’m really glad they found your purse,” I replied.
“Thanks!” she said, running off to a train. “If it’s any consolation, they didn’t find my gloves.”
— Jennifer Bleyer
Home Alone
Dear Diary:
I was home in Brooklyn when he texted me: “I just walked by your apartment.”
Smiling, I responded: “Did you hear the dulcet sounds of ‘The White Lotus’ theme song?”
“Ah, you’re watching!”
I paused, flirting with a rare moment of spontaneity.
“Do you want to watch it with me? I just started.”
The text came back: “I just missed my train! But I would.” He was already at the subway.
“Oh, then never mind,” I told him, feeling sheepish.
“But I would,” he insisted.
I told him to holler when he was outside my window.
Ten minutes later, I heard my name.
— Louisa Savage
Loose Change
Dear Diary:
It was the 1980s, and we were going to visit relatives in Manhattan.
I had read that the fare boxes on the buses did not take dollar bills. You had to have quarters to pay the fare. So before we left for the visit, I went to the bank and got a $10 roll of quarters.
While we were in the city, we got on a Fifth Avenue bus near Central Park to go to Greenwich Village. I paid my fare and my husband’s.
People kept coming on the bus and asking other passengers for change for a dollar. I made change for four people.
The man sitting in front of me turned around to face me.
“What are you?” he asked. “Some sort of good Samaritan or something?”
— Marlene Hellman
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