Vote For The Best Metropolitan Diary Entry of 2021

Dear Diary:

One early fall morning some years ago, I decided to walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spend a few hours there before meeting a friend for lunch.

It was one of those days when the weather could not make up its mind between bright and sunny or cool and cloudy. I grabbed a sweater from the closet, wrapped it around my waist and set off.

After wandering through the museum’s galleries for a while, I headed south on Fifth Avenue to meet my friend. The sun had just disappeared behind a large bank of gray clouds, and I was glad I’d brought a sweater.

Standing at a corner waiting for the light to change, a man at a hot-dog stand waved and called out to me.

“Lady, are you walking as far as 72nd Street?” he asked me.

I nodded.

He reached under his cart and pulled out a light blue windbreaker.

“Could you please take this to my wife?” he said. “She has a hot dog cart just like this one.”

“Of course,” I replied, grabbing the jacket just as the light turned green. The man grinned and waved.

About 10 minutes later, I spotted a shiny steel hot-dog cart. A woman stood beside it, her shirt collar turned up against the cool breeze.

“Your husband sent you this,” I said, handing her the jacket.

“Oh, thank you so much,” she replied with a smile, quickly putting the jacket on. “He is a good man.”

– Faith Andrews Bedford

Dear Diary:

It was some years ago, and we had four front-row, center-balcony seats for a Metropolitan Opera performance of “Othello.” A young couple who weren’t familiar with the opera accepted an invitation to join us.

During the taxi ride from the restaurant where we had dinner to Lincoln Center, we unraveled the plot for our companions. With four passengers in the cab, I sat in the front seat and narrated to the rear.

The cab’s arrival at the Met coincided with my recounting of Iago’s plot of the concealed handkerchief. I tried to hand the fare to the driver as we prepared to get out. He stopped me.

“No one is leaving until I hear the end,” he said.

– Vern Schramm

Dear Diary:

Every morning before I left for school, my mother would hand me an emergency quarter. This was back when cellphones were a luxury and you couldn’t turn a corner in New York without seeing a pay phone.

“Only use this if you absolutely must,” she said as I slipped the coin into my pocket, where it would sit next to the one she had given me the day before.

I spent Fridays after school in a small barbershop in Corona, Queens, either getting a haircut myself or accompanying a friend who was getting one. Every Friday, an older Dominican man would walk into the shop pulling a red-and-white camping cooler.

Inside the cooler was a black bag. Inside the bag was what I had looked forward to all week.

The smell of fried dough would overwhelm the combined scent of talcum powder, barbicide and bay rum that had lingered in the air through the day. A well-trained nose could also pick up the scent of onions, olives and seasoned ground beef. Chicken, too, if the man had any left.

“Empanadas, one dollar and twenty-five,” he would bellow as the barbers continued cutting hair without flinching.

Every Friday, I would dig deep into my pocket and fish around for five quarters, one for every day of the week.

This is as good an emergency as anything, I would think to myself before making my request.

“You have any chicken left?”

– Carlos Matias

Dear Diary:

I stepped out of an East Side funeral home into the bright June sunshine. I examined the white plastic bucket containing my mother’s ashes, and then I raised my arm to hail a cab.

One pulled up, but something made me wave it on. I stuffed the bucket into my backpack, loaded the pack onto my back and started walking.

For the next hour or so, I took my mother on a tour of some of the monuments of our New York lives.

Past the old Drake Hotel, where we would duck in to grab a handful of mini-Swiss chocolate bars from the cavernous bowl in the lobby.

Past Saks Fifth Avenue, where we would squeeze into the tightly packed elevators operated by “elevator men” calling out the floors in deep baritones.

Past the MoMA sculpture garden, which my mother’s first New York apartment overlooked.

Past the Pierre Hotel, where my mother had conned the receptionist into giving her a room when she ran away from home as a teenager.

Past the long gone Auto Pub in the General Motors Building, where my parents threw the best birthday party of my life.

Past the old Rumpelmayer’s on Central Park South, where my mother would take me for vanilla ice cream sodas on special days.

Into Central Park and onto the park drive, which my mother hectored many a taxi driver into taking to “save time.”

And, finally, home to the empty apartment on the Upper West Side.

Thanks, Mom, for sharing these things with me. How pleased I was that day to return the favor.

– David London

Dear Diary:

I recently went for a run and ended up in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Just before turning to head home, I was stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a large piece of wood leaning against a bunch of trash bags. It was garbage night, but until this point I hadn’t noticed the rubbish I was passing as I ran.

This was not just any piece of wood. It was my desk.

My father had built the desk for me in 2010 when I moved into what had been my second apartment, in Chelsea. I had used it for six years before selling it to a woman on Craigslist. I was moving to Brooklyn and it wouldn’t work for me in my new apartment.

Now, I thought, after four years, it must not work for her anymore either.

After 10 years in existence, the desk — its wooden top separated from its rusted-pipe legs, which were nearby encased in clear recycling bags — was finally at the end of its life.

I felt myself welling up. I FaceTimed my father and pointed my phone at the piece of wood.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked.

He did, immediately.

I said goodbye to the desk one last time, wiped away my tears and continued my run home.

– Jennifer Fragale