IrvingD

I rode my bicycle everywhere. Don't tell my parents, but I even ventured into Brooklyn and Manhattan. But all that came later. As an eleven-year-old, I was just flexing my pedals in the discovery of New York, which means that I just rode around my neighborhood. One Saturday, I rode to the other side of Elmhurst, a quiet part of Queens populated by an equal amount of private houses and apartment buildings. Flying over the barrel bridge where 91st Place crosses the Long Island Rail Road, I sailed down the long hill across Corona Avenue towards the Newtown High School Athletic Field. I made a right on Justice Avenue, a quiet street that partly connects Broadway and Junction Boulevard. It got its name from the old Newtown Court House that stood on what is now a traffic triangle at Broadway, the heart of colonial Newtown before developers changed the name to Elmhurst in order to disassociate the area from the eponymous fetid creek that separates Queens from Brooklyn. Anyway, I rode ...

I sat with my mother and her friend at a Woolworth's lunch counter. Swiveling left and right from the ten o'clock to the two o'clock position on the round rotating red vinyl stool rimmed in aluminum strips, I slowly munched on a grilled cheese sandwich. A woman took the stool on my right. Her face wore a sadness that entered my bones and never left. I wondered why she was so unhappy. Her eyes darted back and forth with a nervous vigilance as if someone was looking at her. I averted her gaze, swiveled back to ten, stopped at twelve, and took another bite of my sandwich. Slowly moving towards two o'clock, I listened as the woman gave her order to the counter waitress. A cup of black coffee with a large glass of milk. Regarding her strangely, the waitress suggested that she might prefer milk with her coffee. She insisted on a tall glass of milk with a cup of black coffee. I checked in with my mother at ten, took a bite at noon, swallowed at two when I observed the woman d...