A pause on Riverside Drive, watching faraway figures come to life and more reader tales of New York City in this week’s Metropolitan Diary.
Afternoon Break
Dear Diary:
I was on Riverside Drive between 89th and 88th Streets, heading home after shopping for groceries at the Food Emporium on Broadway. It was a quiet weekend afternoon and not many people were around, so I decided to take a break in the middle of the sidewalk.
I dropped the plastic shopping bags I was carrying on the ground, inhaled the cool fall air coming off the Hudson River and looked upward.
There, a brilliant blue sky was framed by shining golden leaves. As I looked around, I realized that the leaves on all of the trees on the drive and in Riverside Park had turned to gold.
I had just pulled out my phone to take a photo of the view and was punching in my mother’s email address to send her the picture when I heard a man’s voice behind me.
“It’s beautiful, huh?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, turning to look at him.
He smiled and quickly walked off. I again owned the view.
— Aiko Setoguchi
Like Toy Figures
Dear Diary:
My husband and I were on the 14th floor of a building at York Avenue and East 74th Street waiting for a medical appointment.
The place was beautifully furnished and had drop-dead views of the East River. We took a pair of comfy chairs at the south-facing window, looking down onto the F.D.R. Drive and the esplanade.
The river was surging and traffic on the drive was humming, but the esplanade seemed strangely quiet for a summer afternoon. There was not a runner or a cyclist to be seen, only two figures lingering in the shade of a clump of trees. One was in a wheelchair; the other was on a nearby bench. They looked very still, like toy figures.
As we watched, they began to come to life. The person in the wheelchair rolled forward. The person on the bench stood up, then bent down to adjust something.
Was it a hoverboard? It was a hoverboard!
The person on the hoverboard began to push the person in the wheelchair. They headed off down the esplanade together, gathering steam.
We watched them glide away, then sat back down.
— Jane Scott
Discovering Schav
Dear Diary:
I was shopping for groceries with my mother at a supermarket in Riverdale. I noticed a dozen or so jars of something called schav lined up against a wall in the Jewish food section.
I had never seen it before. It looked like a greenish vegetable soup.
When we got out to the street, I asked my mother what it was.
Before she could answer a man who was walking in front of us turned around.
“What?” he said, looking me right in the eye. “You don’t know what schav is? You eat it with a cold boiled potato and it’s delicious!”
— Nancy L. Segal
Not Him
Dear Diary:
It was winter 2005, and my brother and I were driving across town through the Upper West Side with my father.
As we turned the corner at 81st Street and Amsterdam, my father thought he spotted Michael Richards, Kramer on “Seinfeld,” walking down the street. My brother and I were kids at the time, but we had grown up watching the show.
Excitedly, my father slowed down, and my brother rolled down the window.
“Hey, are you Kramer?” he yelled.
Moments later, he pulled back into the car with a dejected look on his face.
“Well,” we said, “what did he say?”
“No,” my brother replied, “he said he’s Frasier.”
— Doria Leibowitz
On the Williamsburg Bridge
Dear Diary:
I was cycling eastward across a quiet Williamsburg Bridge just after midnight when I noticed a glowing smartphone on the pavement.
I stopped, picked it up and then continued to climb my way over the bridge. I peeked at the device to see if I could figure out whose it was.
Then it hit me that if I did figure it out, I would probably end up having to meet the person someplace, and to do that we would have to plan and text and so on.
So I decided I had to get rid of it, and by then I had reached the juncture on the bridge that divides cyclists from pedestrians.
A man and a woman were standing there, and because I had decided to shift this sudden burden of mine onto them, I figured I might as well be unfriendly about it.
“I found this smartphone back there,” I said, pointing toward Manhattan. “But I don’t want it, so I’m going to leave it here.”
I placed the phone onto the pavement and had started to pedal off when I head the man speak.
“That’s mine,” he said. “Thanks so much.”
— Thomas Carrow
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Illustrations by Agnes Lee
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