Sunday afternoon, I was stopped in my car on Columbus Blvd., waiting to turn left onto 676 to head back up to my neighborhood. I glanced up into the rearview mirror and saw the person in the car behind me was waving frantically, trying to get my attention. I took a closer look, [...]
Tonight, after work, I stopped into Trader Joe’s. It had been about a week since I had been and I was starting to itch for a TJ’s fix…plus I was out of cereal. I walked in, talking to my mom on the cell phone, but hung up with her as I grabbed a [...]
I got home from work tonight a little before six. I got onto the elevator and pushed my floor. It stopped on the 6th floor, and a man got on. I’d seen him around the building on prior occasions. He looked at the button panel, and seeing that the 20th floor [...]
I left work yesterday at 2:30 to head for 30th Street Station to catch the R1 to the airport so I could get on my 4:56 pm flight and get home to Portland. I walked out of my office building and headed down Market Street, towards the train station. Halfway between my office [...]
Yesterday I was standing in the back of Iovine’s Produce in Reading Terminal, chatting with a clerk while I waited for them to bring up a couple of cases of fruit for me from the basement (part of our APHA giveaway). We had been talking for about five minutes, when an elderly black man [...]
This afternoon I had to drive down to the Pennsylvania Convention Center to pick up my office’s passes for the APHA meeting. Trying to find parking in that area, especially the day after several inches of snow is not my favorite activity. I had circled the area twice and was starting to feeling [...]
Sometimes I have to believe that the woman who stops me on the street and asks for $.85 or a bus token is really going to use the dollar I just gave her to get home. I can’t always refuse, to turn down what seem to be heartfelt requests for help. I like [...]
Tonight as I was walking home down Chestnut St., I saw two visibly intoxicated guys greet each other like long lost friends. Who knows, maybe they were. They embraced wildly and as one of them stepped back out of the hug, he tripped on the front steps of a brownstone and fell backwards.
Hard.
This [...]
Walking into my building tonight I saw a cluster of people heatedly talking in front of the community room door. Their presence reminded me in a flash that it was election day (the retirees in my building take civic duty very seriously, voting is sacrosanct even on the off years).
Last year on election day, [...]
I met my friend Jess today for lunch. We ate potatoes she had baked in her office microwave, complete with sour cream, cheddar cheese, broccoli and black eyed peas. It wasn’t your standard work lunch and so to accompany it, we had not-so-standard conversation. We talked about the future and the past. [...]
