Tiny Bits Of Randomness
I was driving yesterday and saw an older gentleman walking on the sidewalk, holding a bag of Takis. I told his story for him. A hard day at work, he was feeling kind of down, no one really had noticed him that day, so he took home the bag of Takis that would soothe him. It could be true. Sometimes a particular food can cure all the ills of the world in a single bite.
My stepbrother and I were at a Knicks game as teenagers and were one hundred percent sure we saw our friend, Josh, on the lower level. I don’t know if either one of us needed glasses, but I had contacts in at the time. His hand movements were correct. The flaming red hair. The way his body moved when he jostled himself. At the end of the third quarter, we walked to the rail and realized it wasn’t him. We both still think it was.
A bag of Jelly Belly’s is the best flavor mixing you can ever do in your lifetime. But there are some errors you can make that can ruin your mish-mash. Cherry and cinnamon look very similar. Coffee and chocolate look very similar. When you think you just made cherry limeade and you get cinnamon-lime, it’s a harsh choking. Coffee stumps out all flavors in its cup.
My mom had a white Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. It didn’t have power steering, and when I tell you that taking a turn was like trying to close a pipe with a wrench, it was worse. I haven’t seen one in years. It suited her. I probably looked weird in it, but I didn’t care. I always thought cars were just a transportation mechanism. Even when my grandmother let my stepbrother and me use her Cadillac to pick up a friend in Miami and go to a party at seventeen. It was a fun night.
I once saw a van veer off the highway to the shoulder and drive right into a pole. I was still going pretty fast, but it was alarming. I wonder if people rubbernecked after I was long gone, or if anyone helped him. We didn’t have cell phones then, so it wasn’t that. My first thought was that he had a medical issue. Driving is the constant tightrope of strangers.
I went to see Seems Like Old Times or Same Time, Next Year with a girl from school. We were around ten years old and went to the movies alone. Welcome to Brooklyn in the late seventies and early eighties. She tried to hold my hand. I didn’t know what to do because I kind of thought of her as one of the guys. We got back in touch as adults thirty years later, and she was happily in a relationship with a woman. I wondered what she thought then.
I used to love fruit cup out of the can, the kind that was in syrup. It always had one half of a maraschino cherry in it. I got into the habit of making a bowl of cereal with milk, and then dumping the whole fruit cup in. It was amazing. I would eat that for breakfast now and be very happy. In college, I used to take a can of Progresso chicken noodle soup and then dump a whole can of corn into it, before crushing about ten crackers on top. I’m salivating.
We had a dog named Bo at my dad’s house growing up. I think it was my older stepbrother’s dog. He was a golden retriever. One summer, when we owned and managed the Cozy Cabins in the Hamptons, I remember him lying on the ground with a giant ice pack on his swollen testicles. I still don’t know what this was about. I always imagined him being a fancier dog if he was named Beau instead.
I wonder what cats dream about.
© Jonathan Greene, August 23, 2026
