‘Love the Fit’
Dear Diary:
When New York doesn’t drive me nuts, it makes me smile, mostly because I talk to strangers on a daily basis.
A few years ago, my husband and I were returning home on a sweet Saturday eve after seeing the Edward Ruscha exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Heading south on the F, I stood up well before the train pulled into West Fourth Street because I love the feeling of surfing the ride.
One person in a fun group of 20-somethings who were in the car noticed my black jumpsuit and vintage fringed jacket.
“Love the fit,” they said, “and love the earrings.”
I noticed their lacy white top.
“And I love your look,” I replied, adding that I had just turned 63.
“Girl, you’re rocking it.”
As we pulled into the station, we each took one last look.
“I love everything about you,” I said.
“I love everything about you,” they echoed.
I practically skipped home to Thompson Street.
— Beth Saidel
How It’s Done
Dear Diary:
Some years ago, I was knitting while riding the Fifth Avenue bus from the mid 80s to the mid 50s when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
I turned to see a woman. She asked how far I was riding and then said I should move over. She wanted to show me how to knit properly.
— Carol Waxman
New England Thruway
Dear Diary:
“I’ll go, but I’m not to be called a Fresh Air kid.”
That’s what I insisted when they said I was to go upstate, where my 7- year-old sister’s Fresh Air Fund host family lived.
“She was lonely,” Mrs. Granger had told my mother on the phone. “Maybe send her big sister with her this summer?”
At 12, I was too old for the program, which served underprivileged children from the city. I was mortified.
Outside our basement apartment, my father talked with Mr. Granger, who had come to drive us. I snapped off “Dancing in the Street” and packed “Oliver Twist” into my shopping-bag luggage.
Mr. Granger, tall in a white shirt and tie, looked down at my father, who leaned on the broom he used to swipe cobwebs off the pipes.
“All ready for your holidays in the country, love?” Dad asked me.
Carrying loaves of soda bread in tinfoil, we followed the men out past the rotten-smelling garbage cans and up the steps onto Daly Avenue, where we found a convertible as big as an airplane.
Passers-by gawked. Raymond DeJesus tripped, screamed and hit his brother.
“Jump in, girls,” Mr. Granger said.
We thought he meant it, so we stepped back to run before he folded back the huge front seat.
I placed the soda bread on his gleaming briefcase and sank into luscious leather. My sister sat in front.
He draped his arm along the seat, and soon we were soaring, unable to talk because the wind blew our words away. My sister looked back. We couldn’t stop laughing.
“Memories Are Made of This” streamed from the radio. We raced beneath a sign: New England Thruway. The roads blurred with trees as I murmured, “thruway … thruway.”
Thruway, an escape road out — to somewhere else.
— Mary Casey Diana
Favorite T
Dear Diary:
It was May 2004. I was visiting my son Nick, a high school teacher. He was living in the West Village.
During one of our catch-up calls before my visit, he had been lamenting the loss of his favorite T-shirt, a hand-painted original given to him as a gift by an artist pal.
Nick routinely dropped his laundry at the neighborhood dry cleaners-laundry, which is where the shirt had gone missing.
We were standing at the corner of 10th Street and Bleecker debating where we would go for dinner when a young man walked toward us wearing Nick’s shirt.
Eureka! His name was Max, and he had found the shirt in his bundle of clean laundry. He said he had been wearing it around the neighborhood hoping that someone would claim it.
He went to his nearby apartment and soon returned with the shirt in hand. He and my son became friends.
— Martha Ceresko
Bad Habit
Dear Diary:
I was driving home after an afternoon in New Jersey with the grandchildren. Creeping crosstown on 57th Street can sometimes be the longest part of the drive, and I was anxious to make it home for dinner.
On this day, traffic was crawling, and I was nervously chewing on my fingernail — a bad habit I have never been able to shake.
I made it to Sixth Avenue when I heard a persistent honking coming from a bus next to me.
I was confused. Had I cut the bus off? Was something wrong with my car?
The bus pulled up alongside me, and I looked over cautiously.
The driver was opening the door and leaning in my direction.
I rolled down my window and mouthed a quizzical, “What?”
The driver smiled, leaned a little closer and teasingly held out a nail clipper.
Busted.
I smiled sheepishly and mouthed: “I should quit, right?”
He grinned in agreement and passed me as the light changed.
— Camille Greenwald
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Illustrations by Agnes Lee
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