11 January 2006

boroughs

There is a scene in Sex and the City where Miranda gets into a cab and says, "Brooklyn, please" and the cabbie says, "I don't do boroughs" and Miranda gets out and stands on the Manhattan street and says, "You know what? Neither do I."

For me, it's not that I don't do boroughs so much as that I just never have reason to go to them. I mean, I do them. I like Brooklyn. I like the trees and neighborhoods. It's just that I never quite get there. It's so far away. And Queens, too. So far away. It's too much work. Today, though, I had to go to Queens because I left my cell phone in a cab on the way to the airport in December and the cabbie (lovely, lovely man, I tipped him ridiculously even before I knew that I'd left my phone in his cab and he deserved every penny and more) called my parents (conveniently listed as "Mom and Dad" in the phone, making it pretty easy to figure out) and the phone has been awaiting me in Queens ever since.

So I subwayed it over there and got off on the Broadway stop of the N/W in Astoria, Queens. The guy at the taxi depot, whatever you call it, had given me directions and I was 20 streets away from where I had to be, according to the street numbers, so I set off walking and then got a cab because time was a tad short and the cab took me only two clicks of the meter. That's two fifths of a mile. Could have walked that one. Time wasn't that short. Apparently the numbers mean something different in Queens. In Manhattan 20 numbers is a mile.

I got my phone and all was well and I was happy and I walked back to the subway station, but on the way I started across an intersection and suddenly heard a sound as if there were huge drops of rain beginning to fall all around me and it turned out to be... well, I want this to be a G-to-PG-rated blog, so I will call it poo. A huge flock of pigeons was wheeling above me, dropping poo all over. I was in the middle of a poo storm, poo falling about me like rain, landing in huge white poo drops all over the sidewalk and the road. I could go nowhere. You can't run from that. I stood motionless until they settled on a building across the intersection and then walked calmly across the street and then tried to be casual about running a hand across my hair to see if one had gotten me. Which it hadn't, fortunately.

The day was pretty much uphill from there.

No comments: