‘A Young Woman Opened the Door on the Other Side and Slid in Next to Me’

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Catch of the Day

Dear Diary:

I was working at the headquarters of a large restaurant company in Midtown. My office was next to the purchasing department, which regularly received samples of food products.

As I was about to leave one day, someone asked if I wanted a large, fresh steelhead trout of maybe 15 pounds. I said I did and decided to take the fish home in a foam cooler lined with ice packs.

The cooler was heavy, and I had to get it to my Upper East Side apartment. It could be a challenge to get a cab outside the office during rush hour, but luckily a cab with its light was pulling away from a hotel across West 44th Street.

After hailing the cab, I opened the door and jumped into the back, hugging the cooler onto my lap.

Just then, a young woman opened the door on the other side and slid in next to me. I asked where she was going.

To visit someone at the hospital, she said.

Her destination was on my way with a minor detour to York Avenue, so I offered to drop her off at my expense.

There were a few minutes of awkward silence, and then she spoke.

“What’s in the cooler?” she asked. “A dead fish,” I replied.

Nothing more was said until she got out at the hospital.

— John Harding

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Rooftop Party

Dear Diary:

A friend from work invited me to a rooftop party on lower Lexington Avenue. I met a charming, funny guy and was disappointed when his girlfriend arrived and joined us.

A few minutes later, he introduced me to his sister Elise, who had just moved back to New York from California. We hit it off and exchanged phone numbers. It turned out she lived not far from me on the Upper East Side.

We became fast friends and were almost inseparable for the next several years, hitting the city’s bars in search of boyfriends and usually ending up at a place midway between our apartments for a nightcap.

Years later, we remain close and now live near each other in the suburbs. What was a minor disappointment at the party that night turned into a treasured friendship.

— Bo Argentino

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Clanging Away

Dear Diary:

I was the super of a building on West 25th Street that had a huge rooftop patio where I placed the kinetic noise sculptures I was beginning to create. They clanged away whenever the wind blew hard enough to make them spin.

Across the street were some lofts whose owners I did not know but whom I occasionally saw through their windows. I wondered if they could hear my noise machines.

When I was moving out of the city a few years later, I happened to meet one of the loft occupants on the street. I asked whether they had ever heard any racket coming from across the street.

Yes, this person replied, lots of it. Was that you?

— Anthony Howe

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So Close

Dear Diary:

Headphones in my ears, I sauntered down Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. The rhythm of the music had me dancing as I walked.

When I crossed 76th Street, I flailed my arms as I danced. My phone fell out of my hands and into a storm drain.

The phone was thin enough to have fallen straight through the bars of the grate, yet it was somehow dangling precariously about a foot from falling down to the sewer below.

I bent down to retrieve it with my pudgy fingers but could not get to it. A woman and her teenage son noticed me hunched over.

“My son can reach through the bar and grab it,” the woman said.

Her offer was so kind, and she was so insistent, that I agreed.

Her son got down and tried to slip his hands through the grate, but the space between the bars was too narrow. I thanked them profusely.

A tourist in his 20s walked by and offered to call 311 for possible help, but when he did, he got an intermittent busy signal.

The woman who was with her son pointed out a hot dog cart across the street. I walked over to him, and he said he could try to grab my phone with his hot dog tongs.

He sat down on the sidewalk near the drain and placed the tongs in the drain. The woman, her son, the young tourist and I looked on in sheer anticipation.

The vendor tapped the phone slightly with the tongs. It barely moved. Then he tried to grasp it more vigorously.

Suddenly, the phone fell down and out of sight, into the sewer system below.

I thanked them all for their efforts and went off to get a new phone.

— Kayvan Gabbay

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Butterfly Effect

Dear Diary:

Overheard at the American Museum of Natural History’s butterfly vivarium:

“So, what’s the deal with butterflies?”

“Well, they eat sugar, look beautiful and then die.”

— Evelyn Shannon

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Illustrations by Agnes Lee