Daily Blague

When I finally woke up this morning, the black dog was panting at my side. I'd had a bad dream, which was bad enough, but the taste of Diet Coke - my soda of choice, but not first thing in the morning, thank you - was in my mouth. I felt existentially null.

So I skipped the first section of the Times for the nonce and went straight to the Metropolitan Diary. Here I found six short stories drawn from True Life. In the fifth one, a woman got lost in Queens while trying to change Interstates. (She made the Sherman McCoy mistake - which I don't believe any genuine New Yorker would dream of doing, Mr Wolfe - of getting off at the next exit and looping back.) When she asked a policeman in a squad car for directions, he did the right thing, the only thing, the thing that I hope I'd do in his place: he told her to follow him.

I have no idea how drivers who grew up somewhere else ever learn their way around New York's tangle of roadways. Simply aiming a car in the right direction is enough of a challenge for those of us who know all too well that we're going to have to move through four lanes of Triborough Bridge in order to get to "Downtown NY," as the pathetic little sign puts it. When Kathleen and I had a house in Connecticut, I would begin my instructions with the assumption that visitors could get themselves to the south end of IH 684 in one way or another. That's almost ten miles beyond the city limits.

Two of the Metropolitan Diary stories involve small children and the darnedest things that they say. In one, a little boy asks the denizens of a senior center, "How do you get to be old?" It sounds almost like a wish. My answer would have been, "Continue breathing and wait," I don't know how old I was when I finally understood that I would really grow up some day. It would just - happen! I couldn't wait, and now look what happened. I've got as many years as Heinz used to have varieties.

(That's the first time that I've made that quip, but I've got an awful feeling that it's not going to be the last.)

In other story, a little girl, recently transplanted from the city to New Jersey, asks her mother, "Do I have a New York accident?" This reminds me of my childhood dream of owning a set of "Resonance" chessmen. (I never got them, but that was okay, because my obsession eventually taught me that they were pretty cheesy.) It also reminds me of how often I was told, when I went to school in Indiana, that I had an English accent. O were it so! I'd think to myself.

Then there's the correspondent who betrays his alien status by thinking that he's overheard someone order "a Kofi Annan bagel." Proximity to the United Nations is no excuse.

As for the story about the hero on the subway, it speaks loudly for itself. If only God would advise his churchgoing adherents that their selfishness gives him a bad name!