Run It Back

 Dear Diary:

Every weekday morning when I lived in Morningside Heights, I would come out of the elevator, walk through my building’s cavernous lobby and across Riverside Drive to wait for the downtown M5 bus.

At least once a week, I’d realize I had forgotten something I needed. Back I would go: across Riverside Drive, through the lobby, into the elevator and upstairs to grab whatever I’d forgotten.

Invariably, when I came back downstairs and into the lobby, our doorman would say: “Mrs. Wilde, Scene 1, Take 2.”

— Wendy Schmalz Wilde

Dear Diary:

I grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn. My mother shopped at the corner grocery store, which sold lox by the pound.

She would often buy enough for one or two bagels, not unusual in our relatively poor neighborhood. She called it a half of a quarter of a pound.

Many years later, when I was an adult and living in Flatbush, I had the urge for a bagel with lox.

I stopped off at a nearby supermarket, went to the counter where the fish was sold and ordered an eighth of a pound of lox.

The gentleman cutting the lox paused and looked at me.

“Having company?” he asked.

— Howard Rubin