Dear Metropolitan Diary: What's the Point?
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Dear Diary:
One rainy afternoon, tired and laden with shopping bags, I boarded a crosstown bus and settled into a seat.
Fifteen minutes later we reached my stop, but something compelled me to keep riding. So I did. Eventually the bus reached its western terminus, turned around, and headed back east. In time, it reached its eastern terminus, turned around, and headed west. This went on for hours, the bus a rolling, rumbling metronome ticking away the beats of a dirge we feel but cannot hear, day after day and year after year, until the music ends, as all music must.
By the time I got home, my ice cream bars had melted.
I fell into bed, exhausted, but could not sleep.
—Saul Greenberg
Dear Diary:
Not long ago I was strolling down Eighth Avenue on my way to meet a friend for lunch. An older woman in a brilliant yellow dress and matching hat approached me, walking north. A classic film buff, I recognized her as a former film star from the studio system of the 1950s—a real beauty in her day.
I was eager to say hello. By the time this one-time queen of the silver screen was close enough to greet, however, I saw that she was dirty and confused, muttering to herself. I could smell the whisky on her breath.
She asked me for 50 cents.
Mortified, I ran into a Duane Reade, where people were buying shampoo and batteries and paper towels as if everything was perfectly fine.
My God, I thought. Will any of us wake up before it’s too late?
—Janet Coughlin
Dear Diary:
It was an unseasonably warm March day, so I decided to walk the 30 blocks home from my midtown office to the Upper West Side. As I neared Columbus Circle I saw a group of people gathered on the sidewalk, staring up at a rooftop. Curious, I joined them.
After several puzzling minutes, I realized they were members of an improv comedy troupe. Everyone laughed, and I walked away, humiliated and burning with a rage whose depth and intensity threatened to send me over the edge. And then what? Madness? Death? Something worse?
“Only in New York!” said a nearby hot dog vendor.
—Martin Beaumont
Dear Diary:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains many beautiful things. But even it will someday crumble and fall.
I do not have an anecdote to go with this.
—Seamus Cann
Dear Diary:
Growing up in central New Jersey in the 1960s, I didn’t make it to “the city” very often. But when I did, it was always a treat, usually comprising an off-Broadway show, window shopping along Fifth Avenue, and dinner at a hole-in-the-wall Italian joint in the Theater District. You know, the kind with signed photos of actors on the exposed-brick walls.
One particular visit stands out. It was 1967, and my parents took me to see a musical called “Curley McDimple.” The show was great fun, but it all ended much too soon, in my considered six-year-old opinion.
The curtain fell—and with it, a terrible darkness.
I had never felt so cold. So alone.
—Lloyd Hotchkiss
Dear Diary:
Many people think New Yorkers are gruff, cynical, and without charm. Having lived and worked in the city for nearly 30 years, I could share dozens of personal stories suggesting precisely the opposite.
But ultimately, what’s the point?
—Anthony Garcia