two lives

I guess it's time I got around to writing about how I saved two lives in one day without risking a hair on my head.

A couple of weeks ago, on a Tuesday morning, I was running up Riverdale Avenue gasping ultra-humid air when I saw a parakeet walking down the sidewalk. I ran past him, and then I realized that parakeets usually don't walk down sidewalks in the Bronx, so I stopped and went back to get a closer look.

The area where we were is a very narrow one, with an apartment building to the left, a sidewalk running along side it, then a narrow street bordered on the right by a retaining wall. I realized that I needed to catch this little guy or he was going to become a parakeet pancake.

He was tame enough for me to approach him and talk to him, but agile enough to escape each time I tried to grab him. I crawled up and down the sidewalk while he bounced and flitted and screeched his displeasure. At one point I thought I had him trapped in the doorway of the parking garage when the door opened and I found myself looking up at the bumper of an impatient SUV.

Finally, I was able to secure the services of a local resident with a copy of the New York Post. While she corralled him toward me using the front page emblazoned with bad puns, I grabbed and grabbed and grabbed, and missed and missed and missed. I then had the idea of using one section and unfolding it, forming a larger and softer parakeet trap. My fellow hunter surrendered the TV listing section and I managed to snare the bird in it, using a technique which would have to be witnessed to be appreciated. As we descended down the hill, my new friend Sandra held her cell phone to my head while I told my wife to get our extra bird cage ready. By the time I had gotten home, the little guy had chewed through the paper and was valiantly chomping my left index finger, not realizing that he was biting the hand that saved his little feathered butt from a fate very much like death.

*

Later while making my way to work from my subway stop, my ears started focusing in on the sounds of little legs connected to little feet wearing spiky heels all of which were pumping like pistons behind me. For every step I took, she took two, and with such force I imagined little chips of concrete scattering in her wake.

I stopped at Herald Square, and made the mistake of smiling about a garish Ferrari that was making a left turn onto 33rd Street. My mirthful look was shared by an extremely strange man who decided that we now had a lot in common and were great friends. As the light changed, he began following me across the intersection, babbling about the folly of excess to the accompaniment of the staccato from the six inch stilettos worn by the girl who I now identified as a young Asian in a big hurry.

If any of you have ever been to Herald Square, you may have noticed that the traffic flows in the opposite direction than the one you would expect. Therefore, at the point you look for traffic to be coming from the right, it comes from the left. I observed on my left that not only was the aforementioned female in a hurry, she was also wearing some headphones connected to an Ipod that was shoving music at high volume into her little skull. I also observed that her little skull was about to become part of Broadway because she was about 2 feet from stepping in front of a red tractor-trailer. So, I broke one of the main rules of NYC commuting, which is to avoid interpersonal contact at all costs. I lunged across the babbling man, grabbed her arm, and yanked her back out of the intersection. Her facial expression went from fright to anger to realization to relief to gratefulness to complete blankness in the space of five seconds, a feat which amazed me.

Mr. Babbler followed us across the intersection, telling both of us how she "owed me for life". We ignored him.