We’ll walk down 49th street, slowing our pace to grab at the privet leaves that grow all the long way down the block, crunching them with our fingernails and then throwing them to the sidewalk, already littered with blossoms from the few flowering trees along the way; mostly they’ll be sycamores – the ones with patchy bark that looks like the camouflage outfits everyone wore decades later after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as a fashion statement.

We’ll walk all the way down that impossibly long block, turning left at the very last alley, mine, and drop our school stuff at my house. There we’ll stop for some milk and cookies – though my mother never buys very good ones – and then dash out, candy bars lining the pockets of my jacket, and head across the alley. We’ll take the path on the right side, bordering the densely wooded upper community garden with moderately tall shade trees and bushes and maybe some tall purple irises scattered about – the colorful blossoming of early blooming crocuses and sparsely planted daffodils already gone – and wind up at the center of it all, at the heart of our garden.

Just before we get to the lower community garden there will be a walkway in between the two where, halfway across, will be an oddly situated set of short, widely set steps that stop at the upper garden and are blocked off. On each side of the stairway will be the iron bannisters with curlicues at the end, and twisting through them will be thorny bushes with small flowers which attract bees.

I’ll offer Nancy a piece of a candy bar I’ve unwrapped and we’ll sit, talking or resting in the companionable silence that we know as our safest place to be. But we’ll only actually be seated – and only at the very center of the stairway – for short bursts of time. We’ll have to get up suddenly and we will, shrieking, at the threat of being stung. But all the while, we’ll gaze up to see the tall, tall trees which stand in two broad lanes before us in the broad, grassy rectangular patch of the lower community garden. Birds will be flying high there, squawking as they light from branch to branch. It will never be quiet there – spring, summer or fall. (Only in winter will we make our way to the steps, buried deep in snow – trudging around, leaving tracks from our boots in the deep, silent whiteness.) Eventually it will be time to part, to leave our special sanctuary and return to our separate homes for dinner.

Nancy’s gone now; she died in Ohio years ago – as much, the doctors said, from complications resulting from their treatment of her scoliosis as from the breast cancer. I visited her there several times there, briefly, returning to my home in Brooklyn, and then for longer some months before she died. It was Halloween and I bought much more candy than we needed to fill the bowl Nancy held as she sat, dressed as a witch, handing it out to trick-or-treating children who came by.

The community gardens on my old block in Sunnyside are no more now, divided up many long years ago so that each home owner could have a bigger piece of land. So there is no longer access to that central spot with its strange stairway to nowhere. Or maybe it’s not even there any more. I haven’t gone back to check. But in my mind, in my heart, I return quite often. Especially during that time of spring when the days start out with a promise of warmth and an after-school visit with Nancy to our private place at the heart of the gardens.

Heidi Rain is a writer who has hosted poetry readings and written New Age book reviews and columns. She is currently working on a memoir about rediscovering her original father.

They and others like them found a felicitous culinary compromise at Bloch and Falk, a short-lived kosher idyll of Wurst run by Berlin émigrés that briefly thrived in the early sixties and then disappeared, as a consequence of changing demographics, on 37th Avenue, near the corner of 74th Street, in Jackson Heights, Queens, an enclave subsequently redubbed Little Bombay where now the Indians, Pakistanis and Sikhs coexist with their conflicting tastes and taboos.

In that Jewish replica of German Wurst-lust, the reprehensible pig-craving was painstakingly and precisely transposed, or rather reformed, into a kosher cow-craving. But even as a boy, I fathomed that, to get the flavors right, or at least to find a fair Kosher approximation for pork sausage, some enterprising Jewish butcher armed with a meat grinder and a willing tongue, had at least temporarily to suspend his Semitic aversion and embrace Teutonic taste whole-hog, applying a Talmudic rigor to isolate and translate porcine products, and beef them up for a Jewish palate.

How well do I remember Bloch and Falk’s the grand opening, with banners unfurled and mountains of Belegte Brötchen (finger sandwiches) stacked tall, free for the picking, stuffed with slabs of sausage and smoked meat of every description, Teewurst, Krakauer, Kopfkäse, Jägerwurst, Leberwurst.

From near and far they came, the strongly accented refugees of my parents’ generation, dressed to a T in ties and jackets or skirted suits, German from head to toe, except for a few recalcitrant curls and a certain sadness that never quite muffled their innate exuberance. Waiting patiently on line, with their little native-born progeny in tow, their mouths watered for a licensed taste of the taboo.

One woman, I recall, got so excited approaching the counter she could not control herself and succumbed to a nervous cough that sounded suspiciously like a dog’s bark. “Bitte, Lise! Control yourself!” her mortified husband looked aghast. But she couldn’t help it, and in any case, nobody but me seemed to notice, every other customer consumed by his or her own craving. Was it an involuntary response to the scent of sausage, I wonder, or just a bad case of the hiccups mythologized in my memory?

But on Saturdays, when Bloch and Falk was closed, my understanding mother turned a blind eye. My father, a man of prodigious appetite, took my brother and myself along on his weekly expedition to the City, ostensibly to buy tea from a Palestinian tea and coffee shop downtown, my recollection of which is laced with exotic scents. But afterwards we always ended up at Schaller and Weber, a German deli, now a chain, to sample a thick slab of the real thing, forbidden flesh cut off a fresh hot loaf of Leberkäse, still steaming under the knife. Sliced by a bald-headed counterman with gold-capped teeth and a grotesque grin straight out of a Georg Grosz drawing, it was the incarnation of what my father had fled. I watched him savor every bite.

I had remembered to pack everything—the sunscreen, the bikinis, the breezy beach read. My passport was in hand and up to date. I had waxed and pedicured and researched ground transport. I just hadn’t arrived at the airport on time.

And it wasn’t for lack of travel anxiety, either. That was what had gotten our family to the airport on time throughout my childhood, so why hadn’t it worked today? It had been a nail-biter all the way from my apartment this morning. First, I had to wait longer than usual for the B train at 81st Street. Then, the connecting E barely crawled through stations it didn’t even stop in. Finally, I arrived at Jamaica Station, and it came down to mere minutes on the air train to my terminal. I sweat bullets eyeing my watch, knowing that I had less than five minutes to get to a kiosk and print my boarding pass before entering the dead zone within thirty minutes of departure. The train doors slid open at terminal 5. I bolted out with my “personal item” over one shoulder bursting at the seams and my wheeled carry-on in tow. Shoot—an escalator. I hoisted my luggage off the floor and yelled up a frantic “EXCUSE ME!” to the one passenger who had made it onto the escalator before I had so he would move aside and let me pass. I stepped off the moving stairs. A quarter mile of corridor suspended over the street separated me from the terminal proper. I sprinted down the passage past its several moving sidewalks, wondering if this was what a panic attack felt like. A woman walking with her little girl laughed unabashedly at me as I ran past. My breath whooshed, and adrenaline pumped. I was thankful that I was in shape and had worn my running shoes. But I usually did this sort of exercise without luggage. Finally, after a downhill pass and a twist around the corner, I saw salvation just before the terminal entrance. Two kiosks where I could print my boarding pass.

I fumbled for my credit card, panting in front of the welcome screen. Every traveler who passed turned his head to see the crazed sweaty trembling passenger-hopeful. I was too focused to glare back. I swiped my card. The kiosk read 10:02, thirty-three minutes before departure time. I entered my destination city. The kiosk gave me nothing. I did it again. The computer refused to print my boarding pass but issued me an “oops” coupon to take to the check-in counter. I proceeded toward the terminal, this time at a mere brisk walk, since I had my coupon in hand as proof that I was here on time. Another escalator. At least this one went down. Once descended, I rushed straight to the first desk, where a woman was helping a middle-aged couple.

“My flight is—sorry.” I feigned politeness and flashed an apologetic smile to the couple who had gotten to the airport on time, actually stood in line, and waited to be helped. “My flight is leaving in just over 30 minutes, and the machine gave me an ‘oops’ coupon at 10:02.” Surely they could understand the supreme urgency of my plight. They seemed to. They repeated my assertion. “Ah, 10:35. It leaves at 10:35,” the husband said. The desk agent looked at me evenly and stated as a matter of fact, “That flight has closed.”

Now I was not only gasping from my boarding pass relay race, but it seemed I had somehow caught a tickle in my throat. I was wheezing and coughing between raspy words. In addition, the body heat from my mad dash was burning me up inside the layers of fleece I had donned for the blustery March morning. I was in rare form. Wiping my brow and convulsing with coughs, my words came out in guttural spurts while I unzipped and unpeeled layers of clothing. “But the ugh-bsite didn’t say! I guh! Ulways ged here thirty minutes bah-ugh! Fore.”

You might think the desk agent would feel sorry for the sickly speech-impaired stripper, but it was no use. She looked at me like the leper I appeared to be. “St. Martin? That’s an international flight. You missed it. You needed to check in one hour ahead.” Somehow, though I had remembered my passport, I had forgotten that St. Martin was part of a foreign country.

Speechless, with my hope deflated, I didn’t have the oomph to argue when she relegated me to the back of the queue for rebooking.

After twenty minutes of standing in line, I was beckoned to the desk of the same woman, who greeted me with an “oh!” of recognition and a snicker. She proceeded to inform me that the single flight that would get me to St. Martin today had closed check-in eight minutes earlier, twelve minutes after she had sent me away from her desk. I would have to repeat my journey to JFK tomorrow, preferably with certain modifications. I thanked my new worst enemy and walked away.

This is how I ended up sulking in the plastic blue chair.

I called my seven-month-pregnant sister, whom I was scheduled to meet on the island for a long girls’ weekend getaway before the arrival of her third child, to tell her that I would be there only for the last forty-eight hours of the trip. She was gracious as always. My dejection was debilitating.

When I could bear to stand, I hung my head and sulked back to the air train, wallowing in thoughts of what an idiot I was. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to print my boarding pass yesterday, when I was in my office, which happens remarkably to be equipped with internet access and high-speed printers galore. Alternatively, I could have stopped in the Kinko’s-like store across from my apartment this morning and cut five minutes from my morning workout. I could have gotten up forty minutes earlier. I could have taken a cab instead of the subway. But being me, and assuming that nothing bad would happen, I chose to get to the airport late and cut a day of vacation, leaving my pregnant sister alone in a foreign country.

I shuffled down the escalator that I wasn’t supposed to descend until I had a tan. I rode the train back from Queens to Manhattan, having no more to smile about than the tired faces on board. I trudged back up the front steps to my apartment building, hoping I wouldn’t run into any neighbors who had seen me bouncing down them with the same packed luggage this morning. I unzipped the suitcase that wasn’t supposed to be opened until I arrived in my bright tropical room where I could smell the ocean.

I was so full of self-loathing that I decided to call the one person who could rightfully say “I told you so” and wouldn’t hold back. She answered on the second ring. Though I wanted to punish myself, I pre-empted her speech. “Mom, I’m such a jerk.”

She responded more sympathetically than usual for such a foolish blunder, and I let down my guard. I told her all the details. “I’m on standby for tomorrow’s flight. I can pay to be confirmed, but the lady said there are a bunch of seats available. I’ll confirm if they start to fill up.” I should have known from thirty years of experience that this sort of information would not meet silence or approval.

She began to rant. “Please, Sabrina. I’ll pay the money! I’ll write you a check right now! Confirm the seat. Just confirm it!” Her tone verged on hysteria. I agreed that it was silly to risk the second flight and that of course it made sense for me to buy the confirmation. Then we hung up.

I thought about it a little more. How many people are going to book a trip to St. Martin between this afternoon and tomorrow morning? I’ll take my chances.

Sabrina Hassan is a lawyer. She lives and works in Manhattan.
 

On a recent Sunday the crowd pressed to the right of the stairs in a long drawn-out amorphous ring, from the midst of which emanated deafening music. Even the two Jehovah’s Witnesses stationed stiff as wax figures to the left of the stairs gave up God’s business for the moment and joined the onlookers, since nobody seemed to be interested in their message.

The object of everyone’s rapt attention remained a mystery to the chance passerby until suddenly the wall of humanity parted a crack, revealing a tiny figure mistakable at first sight for a little boy, but soon recognizable—on account of the powerful shoulders—as an adult dwarf. With a black hat set at a dapper tilt, dark sunglasses and a tight black sequined jacket, he moved gracefully and rhythmically backwards, in the soft stepping, faked forward motion of Michael Jackson’s trademark cakewalk, transforming the filthy, chewing-gum-flecked, floor into his stage.

"So beat it, just beat it!” the familiar androgynous voice blasted from a somewhat battered boombox, as the dwarf abruptly grabbed his private parts, and with shoulders flung back, obscenely heaving his hips, dry-humped the air before him. Some snickered, others cheered. “Don’t wanna be a boy, you wanna be a man. You wanna stay alive, better do what you can. So beat it, just beat it!” echoed the shrill command. Whereupon, after lowering the jacket slowly, provocatively, first from the left shoulder, then from the right, to demonstrate with rippling muscles the amazing strength of his arms, he started trembling suggestively, ever more unabashedly, first with the chest cage, next with the stomach muscles, and finally with his entire body, consumed by a carefully choreographed orgasm. Some spectators laughed out loud. Others turned red, covering their children’s eyes.

But they did the dancer an injustice. For his dance was at once a great tribute and an extraordinary send-up, in which he invested his entire tragic being and a remarkable comic talent altogether worthy of Aristophanes and Harpo Marx. –“Showin’ how funky strong is your fight, it doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right. Just beat it, beat it!”

The crowd fell silent as the song came to an end, and the dwarf took a slow bow, his hat pushed back, his glasses pressed down over his nose, his sadly noble, strikingly handsome Latin Mestizo face held up like a hidden treasure with the pride of a true artist and the desperation of an eternal outsider. For a split second his size was forgotten. In that instant he also revealed a striking resemblance to the fallen popstar. Coins and crumpled banknotes flew through the air. Every injured soul saw himself reflected in that face. And as the spectators scattered, the two Jehovah’s Witnesses surreptitiously slinking back into their corner, the dwarf deftly swept up his take, whereupon with hat, glasses and expression once again set aright, he bit his lower lip and prepared to be born again in the next dance.

A writer in multiple modes, including fiction (A Modern Way To Die), drama (The Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words) and translation (most recently, Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist), Peter Wortsman is the recipient of the Beard's Fund Short Story Award and The Geertje Potash-Suhr Prize of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, and was a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2010. Also a widely published travel writer, his texts have appeared in The Best Travel Writing 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.
 

My first visit prompts this assessment.

Arriving on the Flushing Line #7 subway and approaching the front of the building on foot, it is indeed an impressive site. The classical baseball stadium façade mimics and upgrades old Ebbets Field memories, while Jackie Robinson memorabilia and a photo-op with his number 42 dominates the rotunda.

In general, the facility ignores the New York Giants history (Willie who?), as well as the early and not-so-early Mets history. It is understandable, given the Wilpon family nostalgia and their friendship with the O’Malleys and the Dodgers. (It’s their prerogative, since they own the team.)

Approach or bypass the stadium by car from the east and there is another completely different visual experience. The outside reminds me of some junked-up construction sites, with an annoying array of posters, billboards, and a jumble of signs.

Access to the innards of the building is easy. “Visitors” and “Guests” — sorry, the staff of greeters and workers are encouraged not to call us “fans” — are funneled to the enormous main gift, sports shop or the first array of restaurants and bars. From there, guests are encouraged to circulate the concourse of food courts before heading for their seats. Along the way are numerous, spotless restrooms, quite a change from Shea.

There is a Kosher corner, Caribbean food, Hispanic food, Asian food, Italian food, seafood, soul food and in case you don’t fit any niche, a food-serving supermarket. Premium beers of all caliber from around the world are of course available at some premium prices. Steak sites multiply and frank and burger spots diminish.

When you finally get to your section of the ball field, you are chuted to your seating area. No longer can you enter the stadium anywhere and just walk around the stands, looking at the field and absorbing the baseball atmosphere, as you move to your section.

Oh yes, there is a ball field within the building. The seats are closer to the field and many are angled so that viewing the game from the foul lines doesn’t result in a stiff neck . But it has a strange configuration, with overhangs, corners, and fence heights varying without rhyme or reason.

Unlike Shea Stadium, where almost every seat had unobstructed views, there are whole sections at Citi where the only way to see the play in a corner, or down the line is — you guessed it — by watching it on the TV scoreboard as a replay. Unfortunately, it is also no longer easy to peer into the dugouts or the bull pens.

Once you find your seat, you discover you are in a long — a very long — row of seats. And with minimal in-the-stands vendor service — you’ll see an occasional ordinary beer vendor, a hot dog seller, a peanuts guy, — the guest is encouraged to go to the concourse for food and services. This means the visitor is constantly standing up to let someone come or go. Not to worry, though, there are TV sets all around the court and you can watch the game on a TV as you wait in a line somewhere.

And I’ll ignore the outrageous increase in ticket prices, the disappearance of promotion days savings, parking rates with an astronomical hike — after all, visitors and guests are likely to be more well-heeled than baseball fans.

All in all, an interesting tourist attraction, or a business meeting distraction. What are missing are the fans just going to a ball field to watch a game and root for their team.

Peter F. Eder recently retired from the marketing career he began in the mailroom at J. Walter Thompson. He’s written for The Futurist magazine and served nine years in the New York National Guard as a Sergeant and qualified Army engineer. His passions include the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Mets.
 

I was six years old in 1990 when my dad brought a white rabbit home for Easter. Unlike bunnies in other Italian-Catholic abodes in Whitestone, Queens, ours was not for eating. Snowball was for snuggling, brushing, feeding, and loving. Whenever my parents were rocking my infant brother, Ralph, to an afternoon sleep, I was outside cradling the pet. He closed his red-button eyes and thumped furry feet against my forearm. My bare toes clutched the grass as we swayed side-to-side, mother and bunny, carving temporary spaces in the air with our small bodies.

To give Snowball freedom to run, Dad put him on a dog’s leash and attached it to a red stake in the ground which, when removed, left a hole.

“You know who lives down there? Alice in Wonderland,” he said, as if “in” was part of her name.
I fell to my knees and peeked into the hole, hoping to see her. Instead, I spotted a worm. My father said if I wrote her a letter, he’d put it in the ground. I scurried inside to scribble:

Dear Alice, I’m so happy you live here. I have a white rabbit too. Write back. Love, Nicole.

Dad worked nights as an electrician for New York City, coming home when the neighborhood was stepping into slippers and turning on the coffee. He pulled his Buick into our driveway the next day when I awoke for kindergarten, and I ran outside with Christmas anticipation to greet him and to see if Alice responded. We sprinted toward the grass and our eyes fell upon a sheet of paper jutting from the ground.

I sang the words aloud:

Dear Nicole, Thanks for the letter! What’s your rabbit’s name? Let’s be pen pals. I love you. Love, Alice.

My father and I beamed, co-masters of a tiny universe we’d founded accidentally. We agreed I should write letters regularly, with one condition: “Just don’t tell anyone about this,” Dad said, “or she’ll disappear.”

I nodded, happy to accept this responsibility. This was our secret. It was why we winked at each other across the dinner table that evening when Mom was watching the baby.

The letters continued. In late September, the grass turned brown, and I skipped on crunchy leaves toward the hole to keep corresponding with my new best friend. One Sunday afternoon, I was depositing a note when my Aunt Joan swung her car into the driveway. She asked what I was doing.

“Alice in Wonderland lives down there,” I said. “We’re friends.”

“Oh, how nice,” Aunt Joan said. She smiled and bent down to hug me the way I’d now hug a child who said something cute. I knew right away she didn’t believe me.

I can still feel the way my stomach tensed up as I told her about Alice, knowing it was against the rules. I tried to ease my fears, insisting my pen pal wouldn’t mind because Aunt Joan was trustworthy. It didn’t matter. Alice never wrote to me again.

It was poor timing, too. My father had just gotten sick. His body and eyes turned yellow and he spent the next six weeks hallucinating between his bedroom and Elmhurst General Hospital. Mom was always changing a bandage on his leg, which I once saw covered a very bloody sore that took up most of his calf. We had special garbage bags for those bandages, special gloves Mom wore to apply and remove them. Sometimes an ambulance would come, and my parents would spend a few days in the hospital together. But they always came back, and I’d show my dad the gifts I got from the relatives who watched me while he was away – a doll’s blow dryer, a VHS of My Little Pony.

When he was home, he didn’t act the same around me, like the day I tried to bring his medicine to his room. I stood by his bedside with a metal spoon and a bottle of medicated liquid. “Get Mommy to do it,” he said. So I called for her, but he kept shouting: “Get Mommy to do it!” He continued to yell it, even when Mom got up to the room, and even when she kept saying, “It’s me, Ralph.” When he wouldn’t stop screaming, my mom said I should leave. She said that he was confused because we were both wearing black sweaters. I did leave, but it took a moment to get my legs to move. I wanted him to stop joking around, to scoop me up and prop me next to him in bed like he used to.

He died that fall, in early November. I learned soon after that he had hepatitis. I didn’t know what it meant and wondered if it was my fault.

I gave Alice several opportunities to write to me again. In letters I apologized for my slip. I told her that my dad died and I missed them both. I spent the rest of autumn crouched in the yard, whispering pleas to the dirt, like an animated garden gnome. When I finally realized it was over, I blinked tears into the empty hole, guilty for driving her away, lonelier than ever.

Winter’s snow and hard dirt closed Wonderland. Our white rabbit died the following summer. Alone with two babies, Mom accidentally let Snowball fall asleep in the sun. My father and he were put in the ground: Dad in St. Mary’s Cemetery, the pet in a shoebox in the backyard beneath the bushes.

I made the connection between the cessation of Alice’s letters and my father’s death when I was nine-years-old, the same day I found out that Santa Claus, too, was a fib told for my entertainment. At first, I resented my parents for forcing fantasy on me and vowed to never lie to my own children.

It has been 20 years since my dad first introduced me to Wonderland, and along with my childlike gullibility, most of my memories of him have disappeared. I no longer remember what it felt like to have a father, and only recall him in snapshots: the day we rode horses in the Poconos, the afternoon he taught me Beatles lyrics in the basement. But I’ll always remember the months we spent on the grass, absorbed in imagination. And I think of him whenever I pass the bronze Alice in Wonderland statues in Central Park, my new backyard since moving to Manhattan. I like to see her there, frozen in time and always at play, like my final lasting memories of my dad. As Alice makes her cinematic return to the rabbit hole so many years later, I hope for her sake and mine that this time Wonderland can be saved.

Nicole Ferraro’s memoir-in-progress is about losing her father at a young age. Her writing has appeared in Our Town and New York Press.

I told my mother I was going into Manhattan to spend the day at the New York Public Library on 42nd street. This came as no surprise to her. I loved that place. She knew it and delighted in the knowledge her son should find such a retreat. While she cleaned the bathroom or made the beds—she always busied herself around the apartment–I sneaked from the apartment with a small valise filled with the essentials: a toothbrush, socks, razor (for the twice a week I shaved), nail clippers, a few pair of underwear, three undershirts, an extra pair of jeans, and some shirts, including my folk period, blue work shirt and one white dress shirt—it occurred to me I might apply for a waiter’s job.

At 165th street, I hopped on the rattling old Q15 bus and rode through the lovely tree lined streets of Whitestone into Flushing. There I boarded the steamy, screeching F train. The moment I passed through those subway doors, I felt exhilarated. I headed into Manhattan with a pocket full of cash (money squirreled away from babysitting and dog-walking jobs), a packed valise, and a head filled with spectacular, if half-formed, dreams. I was really doing it. At sixteen, I was “lightin’ out for the territory,” going “on the road”; I was running away from home. Huck and Jack had nothing on me; I was about to be free, too.

Howard Mumbleby, my twenty-your-old City College friend, had agreed to put me up. He told me to meet him at his apartment on West 80th street between Broadway and Amsterdam at 11 A.M. Once there, I trudged up the stairs to the fifth floor of his five-floor walkup. I arrived at 5C and knocked. And knocked and knocked. No Howard. I walked down the stairs and examined the hallways on each floor in search of my friend. Howard was nowhere to be found. I thought he had walked down to the market on the corner at Broadway to load up on vegetables for lunch. (In the mid-60s with fast-food palaces on the rise, Howard was among a small but growing number to swear off meat.) Or, maybe he had wandered down to Amsterdam at the other end of West 80th to find one of the hookers who, as he delicately stated, “helped me out.” I walked down to the foyer, took a seat on my small but sturdy valise (a relic from the ‘40s my parents still used) and proceeded to wait for Howard.

As I sat there, I became aware of a sickeningly sweet aroma. The smell had a distinct odor I couldn’t quite place. It approximated the vapors in the Hershey chocolate factory my family and I visited years before. But this odor smelled different. It lacked the overwhelming sugary sweetness that suffused the Hershey plant. It smelled more tart or pungent, maybe vinegary, and carried a faintly nauseating sensation. The more the odor seeped into my nostrils, the more I dug into my olfactory memory to identify it. I couldn’t, and this bothered me. Finally, I stopped a guy exiting the building and asked him about the odd smell. He barely stopped to remark, “Mrs. Graham, the white ghost.” I had no idea what the guy meant. Perhaps, I thought, his answer alluded to a malodorous concoction Mrs. Graham had brewing.

I remembered Mrs. Graham, aka the white ghost. Late one afternoon as Howard and I descended the stairs from his fifth floor apartment, we passed a tall, ancient woman with skin so pale it seemed translucent. Her eyes shone the faintest waxen blue. She wore a long, black, crinoline gown. Her thinning hair appeared an astonishing white. With her ghostly pale skin and wrinkled gown, she made a striking figure standing there on the stairs. As we passed, Howard said hello to her. In answer, she just stared back at us. Howard told me her name was Mrs. Graham, she was about 90 years old, and lived alone in 4C directly below him. He said she didn’t get out much. The stairs were too difficult for her to negotiate easily. I asked who brought her food and supplies. Howard had no idea. He saw her rarely, he said, and only when he passed her on the stairs. On occasion, he told me, he heard other tenants refer to her as “the white ghost.”

At sixteen, still young and naïve, I couldn’t rightly connect the guy’s answer about Mrs. Graham to my question about the smell. I continued to wait. An hour passed and still, no Howard. The smell had filtered into my gut and made me queasy, so I got up to leave. As I stood up, an eye-poppingly attractive young woman entered the foyer. Almost too intimidated by her looks to speak, I stopped her anyway.

“What’s that smell?’ I asked.

She gave me one of those “don’t you know” looks and steamed on past. But she had second thoughts. She stopped, turned to me, and asked, “didn’t you hear about Mrs. Graham?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t live here. I’m visiting Howard.”

She flashed another peculiar look; this one as if to suggest, “oh brother, you’re kidding.” Clearly, this beauty had issues with Howard. She started to leave again, then again stopped. “Didn’t Howard tell you– about Mrs. Graham?”

“No,” I countered.

“She died about two weeks ago. The hallway began to smell terribly, worse than this. No one knew what it was. Someone figured it out though and called the fire department. The firemen had to cut through the burglar bars on the forth floor to break into her apartment. They found her in bed, dead and rotting. How awful. That’s the smell you smell. Poor old Mrs. Graham.”

A vivid picture of the natural brutality of Mrs. Graham’s sad and lonely death immediately painted itself onto a wall in my memory. Little did I know that picture would remain there my entire life. With that indelible image settling into the deepest recesses of my brain, I picked up the sturdy little valise and marched my runaway ass through the foyer and out the door. With Howard AWOL and the insistent and unnerving odor of Mrs. Graham attacking my senses, it didn’t take me long to dash my plans to run away from home– that day.

Carl Schinasi, a native New Yorker, teaches at the historically black college, Miles College, in Birmingham, AL. Recent essays have appeared in Baseball/Literature/Culture and Ducts.

Rotation 1010 meant the Kansas City Best Western, watered-down orange juice at Waffle House, and no in-room movies.

Rotation 1001 meant a 48-hour layover of tapas, sangria, bullfights and dancing.

I’d planned on the waffles. I didn’t have my passport. I was at the wrong airport and it was 5 p.m. in my beloved New York.

The Grand Central looked like a packed subway car. The Van Wyck, a clogged hive.

I told this to the scheduler on the phone. His name was Sheldon. He was in Atlanta. “Hot-lanta!” Sheldon would say and hoot. Woot. Woot. Yeah.

Sheldon hated New York, New Yorkers. It wasn’t a secret. He told me so a month back when he short-called me to Newark during the Macy’s Day Parade. “All you turkeys look out for that big blow-up turkey now!” he said. “Woot! Woot!” He laughed and hung up.

I’d never met Sheldon in person. Maybe if I had it would have been different between us. It’s easy to be cruel long-distance.

“Well-hell,” he said this time. “Well-hell, y’all just have to do your best then.”

Sheldon talked like he was chomping cotton. He talked like there was a tongue depressor in his mouth. If I didn’t make it to Kennedy in an hour, Sheldon would make sure I lost my job.

This is how it is in the airlines. One mistake and you’re done. In training, my instructor liked to tell the story of the flight attendant who, on her way to an early sign-in at LaGuardia, choked on a muffin. The flight attendant was driving. She pulled over, got out of her car on the Grand Central, threw herself over the hood and did an improv’d Heimlich Maneuver. She hocked out the muffin, got back in her car, fixed her hair, wiped the muffin-spit off her regulation silk scarf, and made it to the airport in time for sign-in.

“That’s the kind of dedication we’re talking about,” the instructor, a perky blonde with a furriest face I’ve ever seen, crowed. “That’s initiative.”

“She could have died,” I said.

“Exactly!” the instructor said, and beamed.

A month after we finished training, my friend Allen showed up late for a flight and was fired on the spot. He had to buy his own ticket back to Jackson, Mississippi where he got a landscaping job cutting rich people’s grass.

“I’ve been grounded,” he said and laughed too long at his own joke.

I’d never been fired from a job and most days I hated this one, but I needed it. I’d left home and everyone I loved to move to New York. It had been my dream as far back as I knew. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” Sinatra sang. “You’re going to make it after all.” That’s The Mary Tyler Moore theme song. But now I wouldn’t make it past this day.

I hung up on Sheldon and knew it was hopeless.

“Home,” I said to the cab driver when he asked where I needed to go, and of course by then I was crying.

“What’s wrong with you?” my cabbie said. He looked in his rear-view mirror. “What’s your trouble?”

And I couldn’t help it. I told him everything, more than he needed to know, more than I needed to say. I’d become the crazy person on a bus, spilling my story to this stranger who was probably sorry he’d asked.

“It’s o.k.,” I said finally, and wiped my face on my flammable blue polyester sleeve. “I can go back to Pittsburgh. I can type. I can wait tables. I can get another job.”

My cabbie friend’s eyes squinted down to coin slots. “This person who says you have to get to Kennedy,” he said. “Doesn’t he know this is New York?”

“He’s in Atlanta,” I said. “He doesn’t care.”

What is it that makes one person choose to help another?

What’s the key to compassion?

My cab driver was from Zimbabwe. His English was edged, precise, better than mine. Maybe he remembered what it was like to be helpless and far from home. Maybe I reminded him of someone. Or maybe he hated Atlanta the way Sheldon hated New York. Whatever it was, I’m still, years later, grateful.

The cabbie said, “Atlanta?” and winced. He said, “Atlanta. Ha!” He said, “I will get you to Kennedy.” It was a vow, an oath. “As God is my witness, I will get you to Kennedy.”

He said exactly that, like a line he’d learned from the movies, and then he threw the car in drive and drove.

He drove up over the berm, off the side of the road. I’ve never seen anything like it or since. He kept at the horn. He stitched the cab in and out of the lines of cars. He rolled down his window and waved his arm like a propeller.

At my apartment in Queens, he kept the cab revved and I ran up four flights and back down with my passport. He peeled out and took some back roads.

When we hit the Van Wyck, he drove on the embankments and the car tipped sideways and I covertly tightened my seatbelt. I didn’t want him to see. I was afraid I’d hurt his feelings, like I didn’t trust him, like I doubted, and it was true — I thought we’d never make it. But we did.

At Kennedy, he leaped out of the cab and tossed my bags from the trunk to the curb in one fluid move like a shot-putter. “Run!” he said, “You go! Fuck them!”
And I did. I ran. I made it through security and onto the plane just in time.

The A-line flight attendant rolled his eyes and said, “Nice of you to join us.”

The first-class passengers looked up and scowled.

Within minutes, I was strapped into my jumpseat and the plane was lifting up, all impossible airy grace and light, and the city stretched out below me like a promise.

I wish I’d written down my cabbie’s name or cab number.

I wish I’d had the time or the tip money to thank him properly. It was all sudden and unexpected, the way it is with all miracles, the way it was with that one good man and his lesson – in the face of everything else the world offers up, sometimes there’s kindness.

Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Miss New York Has Everything (Warner/Hatchette 2006). Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, 5 AM, River Styx, and elsewhere. She left New York in 2001 and has felt a little off balance ever since.
 

In September 2008 my husband and I bought an old house in Sunnyside, Queens. Due to unpredictable but steady cracks, leaks and drafts, we spent much of our first year at our local Home Depot. While some cunning pigeons who had moved in to Home Depot ravaged the seeds in the gardening section, we emptied the shelves in the paint department. Hardly a day passed when we weren’t preoccupied by the intricacies of weatherproofing and contractor psychology. If it hadn’t been for the turkey on one of Home Depot’s sale signs, Thanksgiving might have well gone unnoticed.

Laden with caulk guns and ceiling tiles, we stopped to marvel at the fat bird: Someone had drawn a magnificent turkey and painstakingly colored its wattle and each individual feather with thin markers. Despite his limited tools and colors, the artist had created a lively and accurate depiction. The carefully hand-drawn letters, oddly nostalgic, completed the sign.

Across the aisle from the turkey I noticed another original. The banner’s drawings of Roybi drills and DeWalt circular saws were meticulous in their details. Its slogan had a quaint air. “WANT TO CUT IT. NAIL IT, ROUT IT, SAND IT, DRILL IT, PLAIN [sic] IT OR BORE IT?” the ad asked. “Whatever the Job, we have got the TOOLS.” (And we bought them.)

The holidays had passed and the cracking and leaking had somewhat abated when I approached sign maker Nelton Small in his tiny, cramped corner in the back of the store. Small put down his T-square, ruler and markers and emerged to give me a brief tour. He wore a white ivy cap and a bashful smile; his dark skin faded into the dark of his clothes.

A 62-year-old Jamaican immigrant, Small lives with his sister in Westchester. He says he loves Picasso and on the weekends attends the Bronx Baptist Church. Five days a week at 6:30 a.m. he embarks on a two-and-a-half-hour journey to get to his workplace in Queens. At night — after another tiring two-and-a-half-hour journey back home — he sometimes lies awake as he tries to come up with new, catchy slogans. If something original crosses his mind, he gets up to write it down.

“From when I was small I liked to draw,” Small said in his whispery voice as we walked. I had to prod and praise him until he mentioned his graphics diploma from the Jamaica School of Art. He shyly led me through the store to show me his Glacier-Bay-toilet and Restyle-Your Kitchen signs.

Small worked as a sign maker in Jamaica for 15 years until he left for the U.S. in 1999. In the decade since his arrival he has lived the American Odyssey with all its unpredictable ups and downs, its gritty jobs, and the occasional silver lining behind stormy clouds.

He started at Sam’s Club grilling chickens. When he lost his job after the company moved, he endured a “lean spell.” Walking around town asking strangers for work, he found a job at Home Depot. For a while he wrangled shopping carts and kept the parking lot clean. Then he was promoted to the lumber department. It took over three years before Ken Richmond, the store’s manager, discovered Small’s talent. Noticing some elaborate drawings sticking out of the pocket of his orange apron, the manager was impressed.

“It was like pictures of people and some writings,” Richmond remembered. “And I said, ‘Hey, would you like to make signs for us?’ ”

While every Home Depot has someone assigned to paint simple sale signs or operate the sign-printing machine, Small’s expertise and dedication stand out. Richmond thinks that Small’s masterly work also pays off. He attributes the overwhelming success of Home Depot’s first “Ladies Night” to Small’s flashy campaign (think high heels, champagne flutes and power tools).

“Customer appreciation!” Richmond said. “People come in and they comment. They say, ‘Wow, who’s doing that?’ That’s every day. Ever since he has been doing the signs.”

Small’s humility belies the commitment to his craft. “If you get a stencil, it’s going to cost a lot more money,” he said as we returned to his hidden niche. “So I do it free-hand.”

Maybe once he finishes the ornate letters trumpeting “Behr Paint, The Name You Know and Trust!” Nelton Small will briefly return to the front and, from a safe distance, observe customers admire his signs. “Sometimes I wonder what they are saying,” he admitted, engrossed in his thoughts, before he returned to his modest tools.

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Sabine Heinlein is a contributing writer to the Brooklyn Rail and a podcast producer for Artinfo.com. Her articles and stories have been published in Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, City Limits and The Idler, among others. She was awarded a Sidney Gross Memorial Award for Investigative Reporting (2007), a Yaddo residency and fellowship (2009), a NYFA fellowship for nonfiction literature (2009) and a MacDowell residency (2010).

The only therapist I could find in Astoria held her sessions in her apartment off Broadway. She was willing to discuss a sliding fee and had an open slot Wednesday evenings at 6pm. I am not a fan of therapy, especially if it is being “practiced” by social workers in ill-fitted pantsuits and pumps. I usually end up sitting on a couch that is more cat fur than fabric focusing my attention on a home-sewn quilt that continues to creep on to my shoulders. I can’t listen to what he or she is asking me because my eyes are busy searching the walls for a degree: Devry, University of Phoenix, Apex Tech? How is this better than a palm reading on Canal Street or calling Ms. Cleo (of the once renowned psychic hot line) in her jail cell? But with no healthcare I wasn’t getting any PhD. treatment.

I buzzed Karen’s apartment and walked up to the fourth floor, crossed the threshold of her door and introduced myself. She was barely up to my shoulder, she wore bifocals like my father once had worn while reading, a chain looping around her neck secured them to her, hair as long as Joan Baez and as dark, adorned head to toe in a black cloth dress, she looked to be in her late fifties.

The place was a railroad apartment. I didn’t know whether to lead or follow. There was nowhere to go but forward, I let Karen lead. To my left the walls were heaped with framed slogans and quotations – as if a crossword puzzle for self-esteem vomited on it and to my right mirrors replaced what would have been walls, top to bottom all the way to the sitting room: mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. Then the apartment sprung a wing housing a couch, a chair, a coffee table, more mirrors, and knick-knacks as if a vending license had been obtained to run a flea market out of this one particular corner of Karen’s home. Oh my god and the dust – now picture this doubled – due to the fun house like effect of the mirrors.

“Sooooo do you think that the mirrors make your apartment look bigger?” How could I not ask?

“Yes!” Karen replied. “That was the initial intention.”

“My Dad thinks that too. I never bought into the illusion. Just seems dogs and people hurt themselves.”

Karen then told me a story about someone she knew who walked into a full-length glass door due to how stupendously clean it was.

“I know plenty of people who have done that, porch screens too, I think it’s hilarious. My Dad thinks I have a sick sense of humor.”

“Do you like mirrors?” Karen inquired.

Wow and now we are totally off track, trailing off on to a tangent. I didn’t come here to discuss your mirrors.

“No. I don’t have any mirrors. I wouldn’t want to double the size of my life.”

I don’t take to therapy because of these types of banal conversations. “All About Mirrors, etc.” I spent a chunk of cash one year bitching about my cat.

“Why the hell does she trip me all the time?”

Sue, my therapist during this neurotic my-cat-wants-me-dead-series, would seemingly reserve judgment and say, “Well, who has the choice to get out of the way?”

I would belligerently reply, “Umm she has four legs, what do YOU think!”

One therapist told me not to sling my jacket over the back of my chair, “Hang it up!” he insisted.

“Why?”

He had no rationale as to what it mattered where my jacket went. I knew the answer. I was taller than him, he was bald, and gay – done and done. That session was over in 15 minutes rather than 50.

Another asked me if my parents thought I was a failure. I told him “yeah, of course they do.” He wanted to know how that made me feel. I said it made me feel like they were on to something.

A therapist on the Upper West Side stood during our sessions. I wanted to know why. He told me he had sciatica. I found it quite unnerving to have him lording over me each session and I could not stop myself from chanting “sciatica, sciatica, sciatica…” In a “Dog Day Afternoon” Al Pacino way – naturally we parted ways.

People, neither client nor provider, never leave their shit at the door, though that maybe the intention. And I never made it back to Broadway Karen and her room of reflections. I don’t need to double my fun and waste my funds.

My history with glass is plentiful. It is probably why I was first sent to therapy at the age of seven. I piled my carefully coveted dearly beloved glass menagerie into a multicolored Fisher Price train blew its horn and hurled it down our spiral staircase. When I saw the splintered dolls smashed on the tile floor below I was inconsolable. It was as if I had taken a pick ax to each of them.

In 7th grade I would open the window of my science classroom on the third floor and toss test tubes and textbooks down to the asphalt only when an audience was gathered to witness the incidents. By 10th grade my steel toes and me were knee deep in telephone booth glass. And my ears came alive with the sound of empty Absolut bottles meeting the porcelain of my sink.

French windows were destroyed by my field hockey stick or softball. I loved the sound of shattering glass. By my twenties the relief of ripping a medicine cabinet mirror from its hinges and watching it explode on the floor of my studio apartment was roar galore orgasmic! Busting wooden cabinets was never as cathartic as the fire works of flying glass. I can’t even tell you how many French Presses I’ve gone through, there is always an understudy beneath the kitchen sink.

My landlord in Chelsea used to give me tons of glass mugs – the kind cheap diners serve bitter coffee in – and told me “just smash them over the rug.” I wore goggles, used a hammer and bang, bang Maxwell did what I loved. I have history with glass.

I have been more proactive smashing it than sitting in a room surrounded by it and a stranger trying to get me to look at life in double. So I stopped seeing Karen. She called me to “calmly” discuss the situation. I could hear the buttons of her microwave being pushed while she told me I was “never going to get well.” She was probably irritated because she was doing the phone shoulder hold and had to be on her tiptoes to get the microwave to work. Ooooh and the kitchen is on the left so she could see all this reflected in the mirrors – bet she wanted to smash it, the image that is, instead she just continued yelling at me. Karen is a therapist, a social worker, not family, not a significant other – I don’t pay people, sliding fee or not, to yell at me. I dissolved the relationship permanently.

Everyone has their non-debilitating secrets. So my cat trips me, she doesn’t charge me and she lets me nurse Vermouth while I’m on the couch. We’ve taken a more Freudian path. Her ascot is pristine, her monocle is clean. We don’t use mirrors, but smoke is fine with me. She never interrupts and I never shut up. Things that happened in the past – well that’s where they stay, it’s progressive in a cognitive behavioral kinda way.

Abigail A. Frankfurt’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Minneapolis Observer, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and on this website since 2000. She has read on NPR’s Savvy Traveler, and is currently a graduate student in English literature living in Astoria.