It’s the Metropolitan Diary editors who are a few weeks early. And the city’s haiku writers are jumping the gun:
This Daylight Saving
This hour gained, but empty, hushed
No one told the birds
Metropolitan Diary jumps the shark:
On a recent Sunday afternoon the following scene unfolded on an uptown bus: A mother, her sons (each about 6 years old) and their aunt boarded the bus. The boys sat with their mom across from their aunt. The dark-haired boy began a continuous complaint about wanting to take a taxi, NOT a bus. This tirade continued for several blocks, prompting the light-haired boy to cross over and sit with his aunt.
Finally, the aunt spoke up and said, “Henry, there’s someone on this bus listening carefully to what you’re saying and on one of these coming Monday mornings, we will be reading about this scene in the Metropolitan Diary.” Smiles crept across both boys’ faces.
Who knew your fans included 6-year-olds
Take the ubiquitous crosstown bus and cellphone combination and inexplicably add an opera singer and you’ve got the latest Metropolitan Diary:
My daughter, a social worker at Bellevue Hospital Center, was returning to her apartment on the crosstown bus after work. It was crowded and noisy — a situation not helped by one woman’s loud cellphone conversation.
In exasperation, one passenger began singing opera in an effort to drown her out. This did not help matters. The chatterer, whose volume rose steadily as she competed with “La Bohème,” explained to her cellphone buddy: “It’s a little hard for me to hear you; someone on my bus is singing.”
Today’s 61 degrees (so far!) serves as a gentle reminder of how out of touch Metropolitan Diary can be. See, in particular, today’s “January Lament”: “The weather shows it’s not July/and empathy’s in short supply.”
Has this person ventured outside in, I don’t know, the last 30 days? Because it’s not just today — the Sun reported on the warm weather — this January is one of the top ten warmest ever — back on January 11th:
In Midtown yesterday, it was evident that the recent bout of unusually warm weather is beginning to affect people’s perceptions of winter.
Some wore scarves but not jackets; others discarded all the trappings of the season and simply wore T-shirts.
Not that yesterday was a record breaker for warmth: The mercury in Central Park topped out at 49, 6 degrees above normal but 11 short of the record set in 1876. Monday was the record-setting day, when the temperature climbed to 60 at La Guardia Airport, shattering the record of 50 set in 1998.
. . .
So far this year, temperatures have dipped below freezing only three times, according to the National Weather Service. Normally by January, the jet stream is blowing cold air from Canada through the steel and concrete canyons of the city.
“Typically, by this time of year, things have shifted around where the northern branch of the jet stream has taken over, but that hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t look like it will happen soon,” a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, Adrienne Leptich, said.
Instead, warm air from the west and south has kept temperatures high. Warm days are expected for the rest of the week, with the warmest weather coming Friday, when temperatures could reach 60.
Nothing especially snarky to say about today’s Metropolitan Diary (What? Snarky — us? Never . . .) except that a deft turn of phrase in one of the anecdotes unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly — these New Yorkers, so meta and smart about shit like that!) reveals new shorthand for the feature itself: “All was right on East 88th Street.”
For posterity’s sake, here is the full anecdote:
Dear Diary:
I am the secretary at the Church of the Holy Trinity on East 88th Street, and on the Saturday of the recent blizzard I was helping with last-minute preparations for a party that evening for our departing interim rector. I was also worried that far fewer people than expected would come because of the snow and anticipated wind.
I stepped out on the porch of the parish house to take a breather and delight in the snow-covered dogwood and magnolia. Three corpulent (or very bundled) well-into-middle-age women came up the walkway. One was in a wheelchair. I was prepared to tell them that our Saturday Thrift Shop closed at 3:30, but they went away from the building, onto a path that even on good days is difficult: It is narrow, it has slate tiles, and it meanders. Why, I wondered, were they pushing a wheelchair on this path in this weather?
I got my answer when they stopped in front of a snow-covered bench. On the count of three, two of the women helped the one in the wheelchair up and plopped her on the snow- covered lawn. She sat upright for a couple of seconds, then lay down and started to make a snow angel, flapping her “wings.” After much giggling, the other two women helped back in her wheelchair. Then they plopped onto the lawn and made their angels. More giggling. Lots of it.
The snow kept falling. The people came to the party. All was right on East 88th Street.
I can’t tell if today’s Metropolitan Diary is obnoxiously condescending or just obnoxious. Please someone help:
WAITRESSES
(a poem about working on the Lower East Side)We work the late nights
in the blurred sight
of the drunks who drink in dim lights.
We share cab rides
in the sunrise.
We sit laughing at the stop signs.
We work the weekends.
We are a few friends.
We make the best of such a dead end.
I mean, I think I can visualize who could be writing this — somebody for whom waitressing is a stop-gap job in lieu of other interests — but on the off chance it isn’t, doesn’t it sound horribly obnoxious? Answer: Yes!
Also from today:
Bonus Point: Better (and More Frequent) Metropolitan Diary.
Some days, the Times’ Metropolitan Diary feature nails too well the psyche of New York City. This week is a perfect example.
First, the righteousness of liberal guilt:
It was a weekday afternoon. I was on a downtown E train absorbed in my newspaper. The door from the preceding car opened and a bespectacled man entered.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted and, as if reading my mind, added: “I am not here today to ask you for money. I am here to thank you for what you have already been kind enough to give me over the past few months. Your money has allowed me to get these special glasses that I am now wearing. I am still legally blind, but now I can read. This is what has allowed me to get a job. A job! So I thank you! I thank all of you!”
He went into the next car, and I could see him addressing those riders, too. I couldn’t remember encountering him before this, and I certainly didn’t remember giving him any money. But I certainly would like to have done so.
Next, the myth that everyone in the City is cultured and talented:
I was thrilled when a pianist friend of mine offered to sublet his fantastic apartment to me on a delightful West Village street brimming with performing artists. As he showed me around, he told me that during my stay I should feel free to use his piano, day or night.
“Don’t the neighbors complain about the volume?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” he replied. “Though they do complain about tempos.”
Obligatory Corned Beef:
Scene: Delicatessen on Houston Street, crowded at lunch on a recent Sunday, paramedics wheeling out a stricken gray-haired man.
His not-visibly-distraught wife, bringing up the rear, paused at the door, turned to the crowd lined at the cashier, and called out, “It wasn’t the corned beef sandwich!”
Yearning for The Way We Were (otherwise known as Creeping Salingerism):
To help pay my way through Brooklyn College in the 40’s, I had a series of part-time jobs - library clerk, doctor’s receptionist, temple secretary, baby sitter. In all my three and a half years at school, there was only job at which I lasted less than a week.
Most of this work came through the college placement office, and one such referral landed me at Lady Hilda Frocks, One Flight Up.
My first three days as a sales trainee, I found bald, mustachioed Mr. D. all right as bosses go. But on the fourth day, he had a brainstorm.
Apparently the dress display in the window was not enough to entice customers up the long staircase. Mr. D. knew he had to move the merchandise one way or another.
“Shirley,” he said, “I want you should go in the dressing room and put on this number.”
I was a trim Size 10 back then and had no trouble slipping into the fitted and peplumed garment. What a subtle way to feature his wares, I thought. But Mr. D. didn’t deal in subtleties.
“Now climb up to the window I just emptied, and walk slowly back and forth.”
Did you ever watch a model sashaying up and down the runway? Well, now picture the opposite. I slunk along hoping that no one would notice me. When a couple down below pointed up and a small crowd began to form, I caved.
“I can’t do this,” I told my boss.
“Well, you have to, if you want this job,” he said.
So I quit.
Today I think modeling dresses in a window might be kind of fun. But not only has my self-consciousness vanished; so have the offers.
The Red State-Blue State Divide and the Righteousness of the Blue:
On a recent rainy morning in Central Park’s Conservatory Garden, a large group of touring Midwesterners stopped, fascinated by the horticultural activity. Under the direction of the curator, Diane Schaub, volunteers and park employees, many of them protected by bright yellow slickers, were tearing out the annual plants in preparation for bulb planting.
One of the visitors cautiously approached Ms. Schaub.
“Are you in charge here?” she asked.
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, it’s a beautiful garden, but don’t you have any help?”
“Yes, indeed I do,” Ms. Schaub said, gesturing roundly at the volunteers, including one or two grandes dames, authors of books on gardening, retired schoolteachers, Army brass, Broadway veterans - the usual New York mix of volunteers.
The woman came a bit closer, and asked in a hushed tone, “Are they inmates?”
As Ms. Schaub hesitated, for once at a loss for words, the woman added, “They’re what we use in the gardens in our state.”
Straight-Up Class War (Now!):
On a recent beautiful Sunday afternoon, Susan Futter was in East Hampton and found herself walking next to a woman and her daughter (about 4), and overheard the following conversation:
Little Girl (spotting her father across the street): “Daddy! We’re over here!”
Mother: “Honey, please use your ‘inside’ voice.”
Little girl (confused): “But Mommy, we’re outside.”
Mother: “That’s right, honey. But when we’re in East Hampton we have to use our inside voices, even when we’re outside.”
And last, but not least, The Everpresent Threat of Crime:
The Friday night was rainy and cold, and I had had a very long day. I was eager to reach my apartment and leave the long work week behind.
As I trudged down West 43rd Street, I saw the headlights of a double-parked police car through the fog. Suddenly, the officer’s voice crackled over his loudspeaker: “A knife! A knife!”
I looked around. I was alone on the deserted street. Surely an assailant was lurking in the shadows, ready to strike. My pace quickened as I approached the nearest shop, the Little Pie Company. At the entrance I could see another police officer, most likely trying to stop a robbery in progress. Oh my God, I thought to myself, I’m about to be taken hostage at knifepoint!
Again, I heard the officer in the car use his loudspeaker: “A knife! A knife! Get a knife, too!”
I hope they enjoyed their pie.
