Scene and heard

On Friday, June 16th, I went into the City after work to meet my daughter, who was taking me out a little belatedly for my birthday. On the PATH train into Penn Station, I couldn’t help but notice a rather spherically shaped woman sitting opposite me. In her restful pose, her second chin came perhaps 2 inches below her shoulder; it’s distance from the original proving that once there was a neck. I was rapt in a form of morbid fascination, watching this enormous double chin vibrate to the motion of the train and reminded of a colleague from 1987, whose name I purposely withhold. She would constantly take drinks of water from the fountain near my desk, and run down one woman for wearing cheap clothes, another for having a shiny forehead (I shit you not) and another for being classless. All the while, below her shiny forehead, her shall we say amply padded face and enormous multiple chins, water droplets glistening as they slowly headed downwards towards freedom, would wobble violently, and I found it impossible to look away from this spectacle . She would actually tell people that she became skinny once, but didn’t like that men only paid attention to her for her body and not her mind, so she purposely put her weight back on. And everyone believed her!

The same evening, on the N Train into Brooklyn, there was a man wearing a ring on every finger except for his ring finger, each a cheap, oversized brass, with most unattractive green inlays. Do they give knuckle dusters in cereal boxes nowadays? Between the rings and the two equally attractive bracelets he was wearing, he probably spent as much as for a pair of silver hooped earrings on Canal Street. Clearly, a man of taste!