Metropolitan Diary; Wow

Dear Diary:

I’m standing on the northeast corner of 57th Street and Avenue of the Americas, waiting for the uptown No. 7 bus, when an agitated woman in a brown coat rushes up the street beside me, holding a small black purse open in her hands and calling, “Laura! Laura! Laura!”

She accosts every woman. “Are you Laura?” she asks them, the desperation in her voice increasing as she progresses, luckless, up the avenue.

At the corner of 58th, out of earshot but still within sight, a tall young woman in a black coat does a 180 in obvious response to the 15th call of “Laura!” Her hands fly up to her face in excitement, and then reach out to take the proffered purse. There is some animated conversation between them, culminating with brown coat holding up her hands in refusal of something offered by black coat.

Brown coat then hurries back down the avenue, hesitating at our bus stop only long enough to say: “That was Laura. She’s getting married in an hour. She had thousands of dollars in there to pay the caterer.”

With that, brown coat rushes off, no doubt in search of other good deeds to do.

Thomas Mowrey