I met this guy on the subway the other night as I was hurrying up to Central Park for the free Philharmonic concert on the Great Lawn (the concert ended tragically in a torrential downpour that sent thousands of brie-and-french-bread picnic-goers on a mass exodus from the park to take cover under the scaffolding that we usually so despise). Anyway, this guy took the free seat that had opened up in front of me and then noticed that I was standing there. He said, oh, do you want to sit down? and I said, no, I'm fine, and put my headphones on. And he says something but I can't hear him over the drone of Orgy, so I take my headphones off and hear him say, 'do you want to give me your number?' Smiling up at me like it ain't no big thang he's asking me this in the roaring silence of a crowded C-train.
My friend Josh has this misguided notion that my life is like Sex and the City because weird little subplots like this seem to happen all the time. But I think its more that I so savour the vignettes... like salt and pepper on the baked potato of life.
So anyway, I just laughed and put my headphones back on. And then I thought, you know, that was pretty gutsy, to just ask a girl for her number like that in such a nice way and with all these people watching even though she'd most definitely turn you down. And I thought, bravery should be rewarded. So I tore off a piece of the white crinkly paper that was holding MY french bread, wrote my number down, and blushing all over, handed it to him. Our fellow subway riders were watching in the way that we all watch in moments of boredom; those scraps of human-ness are just too good to pass up.
I notice that my salt-and-pepper has hazel eyes and find out that he is mixed like me, only his non-white part is Afghan. Interesting, and I wanted to tell him I had just been there, but that would have been a little lie, because I wasn't actually THERE, and would have to go into the whole story in front of all these people. I held my tongue. I'm learning to do that more often these days.
He hasn't called me and he probably won't. It was a good bit of flavor anyway.
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4 comments:
Josh and Reina, this one took me about an hour.
I was just watching CNN about this university in Liberia where students that have been studying electrical engineering for seven years have never had the opportunity to actually BUILD anything because they just don't have the facilities since they've all been ruined by years of civil war. It gave me goosebumps all over and I think, relative to them, my potato isn't even baked.
My actual comment was - "Your life is like something out of Sex and the City, just a little less glamorous"!
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