Coconut Cream Pie
Dear Diary:
I was at a bar in the financial district. I had coconut cream pie and an Arnold Palmer. A man wandered in through the employees-only door like he owned the place. He was dragging a little brown-and-black Chihuahua mix behind him on a pink collar and leash.
He ordered something to go and chatted with the bartender while the little dog wedged herself between his feet and the bar.
Her beady eyes locked onto me. Naturally, I stared back. She sniffed the air as I took a bite of pie.
“Can I pet your dog?” I asked, anticipating that rejection was possible, if not likely.
“You can try,” the man said. “She’s not really a people person. Got her from a rescue a couple weeks ago.”
The dog put one paw forward as she sniffed my hand and then, in the most hesitant, begrudging way, licked it. Twice.
The man and I both immediately lost our composure.
“She never licks people,” he said with a grin, holding out his fist for me to bump.
I think perhaps it was that coconut cream pie.
— Teresa Wilson
Driving Stick
Dear Diary:
My girlfriend and I were living on the Upper West Side. She commuted to work as a department manager at Bloomingdale’s in New Jersey, driving my Buick Skyhawk with a stick shift.
She never quite mastered the manual transmission and burned through two clutches in six months. She had to be towed off the George Washington Bridge when the third one gave out.
“Buddy,” the tow-truck driver said when I came to pick her up, “either change your car or change your girlfriend.”
I sold the car. The girlfriend and I have now been married 46 years.
— Paul Tichauer
His Song
Dear Diary:
I’ve been obsessed with the Dirty Projectors’ song “Remade Horizon” since it came out in 2009. It’s one of the few songs I keep permanently downloaded on my phone, so I don’t need Wi-Fi when I want to hear it.
When the mood strikes — and it often does — I press play, and there it is: a strange, beautiful bit of art pop with a wild passage at the end where two women’s voices trade off notes so quickly it sounds like one instrument.
Some years after first hearing the song, I moved from Dallas to the Lower East Side. Not long after that, I was at my favorite neighborhood bar, talking with my favorite bartender, Kayla, when her two roommates walked in.
They joined us, and I ended up chatting with one of them, Haley, who took the stool next to mine.
I asked the usual New York question: “So, what brought you here?”
“Oh,” she said, “I moved to Brooklyn to sing with a band.”
“Would I have heard of them?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “They’re called Dirty Projectors.”
I didn’t say anything, just pulled out my phone, opened my music library and turned the screen toward her so she could see the title: “Remade Horizon.”
“Are you on this track?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, as if it were nothing.
It turned out that the voice I had been hearing for more than a decade leaping through that final passage belonged to the woman now sitting next to me.
We became friends, and I still have “Remade Horizons” on my phone. Now, when it comes on during a crowded subway ride, New York feels exactly like the place I wanted it to be when I moved here.
— Steve Crozier
Worth the Effort
Dear Diary:
I was walking through Peter Cooper Village and came alongside an older man all bundled up for the cold and windy weather.
Peeking out between his hat and scarf was a small section of white beard.
“I like your beard,” I said.
“I just trimmed it this morning!” he replied, smiling and nodding for a long time.
If no one else noticed it all day, I thought, he would be glad to have made the effort.
— Barbara L. Chanko
Feeling It
Dear Diary:
It was a Tuesday night, and I was headed home after teaching my adult literacy class.
I got on the subway at Wall Street. The man sitting across from me was noticeably dancing in his seat. When he got up to get off at his stop, he bumped fists with the man sitting next to him.
A few stops later, the second man asked if I wanted a bag of high-end hair products. He had just come from an event and didn’t need them because he was bald.
I accepted and asked if he knew the man who had fist-bumped him.
“No,” he said. “But he was grooving out.”
— Malory Hom
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