Metropolitan Diary

Pixie
Dear Diary:

As a recent college graduate from Michigan living on Bleecker Street, I suffered from New York City impostor syndrome. No matter how I struggled to master the confidence “real” New Yorkers exude, my Midwesternness hung over my shoulders like a sandwich board.

One evening, I passed a man with a Rottweiler standing on the steps of a walk-up near my building.

“Cool dog,” I said, cringing inwardly.

“This is Pixie,” the man said. “She’s a sweetheart. Want to hang out with her for a while?”

“OK, sure,” I stammered.

He tossed me the leash, hurried up the steps and vanished into the building.

Utterly unfazed at having a strange woman at the other end of her lead, Pixie yawned and flopped onto the pavement, her massive chest on my feet.

I sat down too. Tentatively, I patted her head.

“Cool dog,” a man passing by said.

“This is Pixie,” I said.

“Is she friendly?” the man’s companion asked.

“She’s a sweetheart,” I replied.

Before long, it had happened again. And again.

We settled into a pattern, Pixie and I. She thumped her tail to all while I made introductions and assured strangers of her gentle disposition.

It gradually dawned on me that nobody knew this wasn’t my dog. Pixie, every ounce the streetwise urban canine, was making me look like a bona fide New Yorker.

My next thought was: What if her owner never returns?

Just then, he jogged down the steps, thanked me and grabbed the leash.

I gave Pixie one last wistful pat and continued along Thompson Street, an impostor once again.

— Kathy Passero

Getting in Tune
Dear Diary:

I was on the Upper East Side early on a Friday evening waiting to take the Q to Brooklyn. The platform was not too crowded.

Amid the calm, a busker’s song struck my untrained ear as a jarring din. The problem, it seemed, was his out-of-tune guitar.

When he paused, I approached him, nervously touching his arm as a signal that he not take me the wrong way, and then suggested that he check the strings.

Surprised but affable, he did and quickly made the necessary adjustments.

The reward was instant. As the next train arrived, a listener drawn by the guitarist’s sweetly melodic song flipped a fistful of bills into his bucket.

— Juliet Faber

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html