METROPOLITAN DIARY

Dear Diary:

He thought he saw me first. But the truth is we both saw each other at the same time.

It was 8:30 a.m. at East 53rd Street and Second Avenue. He was in his Jeep waiting for the light to change.

I was ready to cross the street, but something made me turn, and I saw him staring at me.

His strong, handsome face and salt-and-pepper hair and mustache took my breath away. My heart stopped. He said later that his heart had stopped when he saw me, and that he knew I would be his.

Then the light changed, and we both moved on.

Ten hours later, he walked into my place of work, and, amazingly, we were face to face. Our lives changed forever at that moment.

Now it is 50 years later, and we still have those moments when we gaze at each other, and our hearts stop again.

— Rose Ross

In Sheepshead Bay
Dear Diary:

I sit next to him at the counter at Lundy’s as he scarfs down raw oysters and clams with a zeal beyond my comprehension. They are smelly, slimy and, temporarily, alive.

I drink my water and watch. It is just part of the all-too-regular trip to Aunt Jenny’s to pump out her perennially wet basement.

The rickety wooden house is along the water in Sheepshead Bay and deceptively close to Manhattan Beach’s brick estates. The fishing boats come in loaded with lobster in midafternoon. Uncle Frank’s boat is in the flotilla.

“Go pick up a couple on your way home,” Aunt Jenny shouts to him. “And get me some eels.”

He brings the eels back and dumps them in her half-filled bathtub. I cannot look, nor can I look away.

“Grab me one,” she yells.

I slip back into the kitchen empty-handed. She laughs, grabs an eel, chops it up while it is still alive and tends to the pieces as they jump in the frying pan.

The musty smell of eel cooking and wet walls follows me to the old blue Henry J parked on the tight street.

I sit in the back seat with my sister next to the brown bag rattling with live lobsters with corks on their claws, as they, too, try to escape.

We are going home.

— JoAnna DeCamp

((MEMORIES with me now. Dad's best friend, when school boys!, lived with hs family in Sheepshead Bay, which we visited regularly, and had my first lobster @ Lundy's there! SOMEONE in the family had a Henry J, AND notiing name of the author, likely related to one of Dad's major clients, DeCamp Bus Lines from West OrangeNJ!!! WHEW!!! ))

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html