On time

"'On time' means 'on time,'" said one security guard to another. "But for some of these people, 'on time' means 'five minutes early.' They make me look bad," he said.

This was in the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Week in review

In the seabound Q, a man makes the sound of a cricket. “Cricket in the train,” he booms. 

A gleeful boy plucks feathers from his unprotesting mother's down jacket. 

“If it's not your time, it's just not your time,” praises a vigorous woman wheeling an old man along Ocean Parkway. 

Oh, really?

"I didn't like Paradise Lost," said a woman in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, "I thought it was too one-sided."

How pedestrian

"Is it luggage? Is it luggage?" said the man on the corner as I folded my Brompton. "Is it luggage?" 

"No, it's a bicycle," I said.

"Where do you ride that thing," said the man in the elevator.

"Wherever I need to go," I said.

In and out

"You have an inner ear outer ear problem," he said. "Everything I tell you goes in one ear and out the other ear."

Lady in red

Maiden voyage on the Brompton in Prospect Park last weekend. In search of lost time.

Photo: Ilya Nikhamin

After Eden

He said he hated to find himself walking behind a woman on a dark, narrow street. 

She quickened her nervous bird steps in response to his faceless but certain approach. 

He longed to overtake her, to pass her and walk on and on and on. He longed to turn around and call, "See, I didn't harm you."