Great Trebulation
Dear Diary:
It was late afternoon on a Sunday in April. I was walking down Flushing Avenue near Green Central Knoll playground in Brooklyn with my husband and a friend. We were dressed in full colonial attire.
A car with a strange wooden contraption on the roof drove by blasting “We Are the Champions.”
A tired-looking woman wearing a hoodie and a baseball hat approached. Her weariness, I guessed, was a result of the previous night’s festivities.
Do you know what is going on around here? she asked us.
A trebuchet contest, we said.
What’s a trebuchet? she asked.
A catapult, we explained. You build small catapults and shoot pieces of chocolate from them. See those guys in the car with the thing tied to the roof? They won, and we lost, unfortunately.
She did not seem to share our excitement about the Great Trebulation.
We live in a weird place, she said.
— Julia Lansford
Tompkins Square Park
Dear Diary:
After clouds tumbled through the sky,
A sun-filled aura
Brought in the scent
Of hot pretzels,
And the afternoon light
Poured like liquid gold,
Onto East 10th Street,
Reflecting off the sunglasses
Of people gathering
Into Tompkins Square Park,
Mirroring the moment
Into an even brighter light,
Miniature suns around the words
Of Ginsberg
Slipping off the speaker’s tongue,
At the Howl! Festival, 2011,
And we just sat
Hanging like soldiers
On every word,
And then the day was over,
And we ran to make the bus
And “vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey.”
— Kathryn Anne Sweeney-James
Flirting
Dear Diary:
After boarding an uptown No. 1 on a Tuesday evening, I noticed a man in his 40s talking to two women of about the same age.
“Sorry, but I was eavesdropping,” he said. “Are you dancers?”
One of the women, it turned out, had performed with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
The man said he had asked because his son loved to dance and had forced his reticent father to participate in more than a few TikTok videos.
“Do you have any shows coming up?” the man asked the dancer as his stop approached.
“Next Thursday,” she said, giving him the address of a studio in the West Village.
As the man hustled off the train, the dancer turned to her friend.
“He’s cute,” she said. “I hope he comes!”
“He was obviously flirting with you,” the friend said. “You should have asked him out.”
Two older women seated nearby leaned across the aisle.
“He was flirting,” one said. “Go ask that boy on a date!”
The dancer looked toward the doors, which were still open.
“Should I?” she said.
“Yes!” a whole group of us said.
A teenager reached an arm toward the closing doors to hold them open, and the dancer ran off the train.
We all craned our necks, watching as she caught up to the man midway down the platform.
The doors finally closed, and the train started to move. The man and the dancer were still talking. As we pulled away, she looked toward our car, flashed a wide grin and gave a thumbs-up.
— Zoe Menon
Family Affair
Dear Diary:
I was on the N to Brooklyn. Across the car sat a woman with two young children. The way they giggled and grappled while climbing all over her, I assumed they were hers.
At one stop, an older, slightly disheveled man wearing headphones boarded the train, noticed this family and walked toward them deliberately.
For some reason, I was worried as I saw him approach them. “Please don’t be weird and ruin it,” I thought to myself.
He stopped in front of the family, pulled out his phone, scrolled quickly and held it out to show the mother something.
“My sister and me, 1968, roughhousing, same as these two,” he said, pointing to the children.
He turned to walk away, but the mother grabbed his sleeve. He took the headphones out of his ears.
“Where is she now, your sister?” the woman asked.
“We see each other every week,” he said.
Everyone smiled as the kids continued to wrestle. He hadn’t ruined it at all.
— Bob Wood
On the M31
Dear Diary:
I was on the M31 bus on the way home. I had a cane, and seemingly half of the other passengers had canes or walkers or were otherwise sitting appropriately in seats marked for the elderly or infirm.
An older woman got on and saw that there were no empty seats. She politely asked a teenage girl to give up her seat, which the girl did.
As she was getting off a few stops later, the older woman stopped to thank the girl.
“Someday you’ll be a senior,” she said. “And then you’ll understand.”
“That won’t be for a while,” the girl said. “I’m just a freshman.”
— Paula Gray Hunker
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Illustrations by Agnes Lee
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