The Unfauxhemian

Kate Spade’s Ice Cream Soup, originally uploaded by unfauxhemian.

It’s been unusually hot so far this autumn. My coworkers and I still go out to Bryant Park any break we can. When I first started this job back in June, I was told that weird things tend to happen in and around the vicinity of Bryant Park. I was told many stories, such as the time when Linn was getting picked on by a police horse. She said they were all minding their business when a police man on a young horse trotted over, the horse ignoring his rider’s commands. It stopped behind her and put the back of her chair in its mouth, as if it wanted to pull it out from under her. Something else caught its eye so it meandered in another direction with a red-faced cop on its back.

As she was telling this story, an elderly man came up with about six cartons of milk and gestured for us to take it. “You take. For you.”, he said in broken english. “No. I don’t want any.”, said Melissa. But he insisted and put all of them down on our table and just walked away. We stared at the milk cartons beaming white in the hot sunlight. “I thought he wanted to sell it to us. I still don’t want it.. hot milk.”, said Tori. “Hey, why did he put them all in front of ME?”, asked Melissa, “Do I look like I need it or something?” Melissa happens to be the tiniest of all of us, and sat staring at the milk some more with her arms crossed. We got up when we were done eating and left the milk there, too guilty to just throw it away.

Since then, I started to carry a camera to lunch with me. On the way back to work we came across a white-haired crinkly old man in a wool vest on a hot day frantically playing a toy piano. He was playing with such vigor that I could hear his tinkly notes carry across 4 lanes of heavy traffic. As I pulled out the camera, I noticed that he was sitting in a make-shift ice cream cart that said KATE SPADE’S ICE CREAM SOUP. Nobody was buying any ice cream soup, but he drew a crowd anyway. I only wish that I had remembered that my little camera takes video.

~ by Unfauxhemian on October 9, 2007.