Resurrection

Easter Sunday seems a fitting occasion to resurrect a presumed-dead blog and former writing outlet incantation. I started it in the summer of 2007, right after returning from a month in Italy and Greece. It was an effort to establish some avenue for creativity to inhibit getting sucked into the workaday creative vacuum. It served a purpose! Shortly after its inception I signed up for a Creative Writing Course (my first writing course ever) and then a Humor Writing Course. With my writing taking on a more academic pursuit, the blog was left to wither on the net. And in May 2008, with the launch of my travel blog "meanderings" became the forgotten ugly-stepchild. The travel blog incited my affair with amateur photography. In the travel blog, words matter but pictures are the thing! As with any affair, passions wane and a return to fantasies about first love is inevitable. So I return to writing stories unaccompliced by images.

Enough with the introduction! Where shall we meander?

23rd Street and 9th Avenue. April 10, Friday morning: 9:28. I'm adjusting my earbuds as, "Hey, I'm Anderson Cooper, welcome to the 360 podcast," greets me on my ipod mini-screen. I glance up to see if the M23 bus is nearing as a black teen-size version of an SUV crashed into a blacker mercedes. Both cars tried to avert the impact causing the mercedes to jump the median, plow down a street sign and straddle the bike lane. The moving image was fast in real time but slow in surreality.

As I stood there amazed that none of the twenty or so pedestrians on that corner (the one I'd stepped through not 30 seconds earlier) were hurt, the 30-ish blonde standing next to me said, "I saw a pedestrian get killed on that corner." I wondered if it was the elderly woman from my building who took too long to cross the street. This was before the Fort-Knox-like bike lane was installed with apparent success. An NYPD patrol car happened to be passing by, both drivers stepped out of their cars unharmed, and my bus made it across the intersection without delay. I boarded the bus, leaving the scene of the crime, tuned back to Anderson Cooper as he gave us an update on the pirate/hostage standoff in the Indian Ocean, and counted my blessings.