I'm beginning to get over the shock of moving to NY, thanks to the bagel shop down the street. It makes the best smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches on bagels from heaven. Garlic, onion, plain, everything, pumpernickel, worth lining up for in the early morning, as the locals do. You think bagels are delicious, try a bialy! "Bialy, (n) a flat, round, baked roll with small pieces of baked onion on top." (and throughout!) (World English Dictionary 1999).
And then there's the neighborhood park where the children and their parents are the best theater in town, providing you can find a bench that the pigeons haven't used as their toilet.
Oh, the neighborhood park! Better than t.v. watching: The children in the sand pile, fighting over their pales and shovels and sand castles, and their parents yelling at them to calm down; and the kids on the swings, either screaming from sheer pleasure or fear as their parents swing them higher, and then a little higher, and higher still while talking on their cell phones; and then there are the kids who swing so high it's the parents who are screaming!
As we sit there judging and criticizing, and amusingly entertained, my mother is moved to recount stories of my childhood, "What an adorable child you were" kind of stories, immediately followed by the kind of mischief I got into and the many times she almost had a heart attack. Just outside the park, an ice cream truck is heading in our direction, my mother's attention is diverted. Her eyes have been following its movement for a while. "Do you have a dollar on you?" she asks, just in time to save me from another no longer entertaining saga of my youth.
