I'm Terribly Sorry

There's a guy who patrols my neighborhood, making his living, or perhaps just amusing himself, by preying on the young or otherwise naive. His gag is a furrowed brow and air of barely controlled panic, and he comes dashing up and, gasping for breath, blurts out, "I'm terribly sorry, but would it be inconceivably rude of me to ask you for a minute of your time and some help with a cab?" Some drivel follows about his etchings being locked inside a friend's apartment, but the friend fell down the sewer grate and took the keys with him, and he's SO sorry, but it's such an emergency as his gallery show is opening tomorrow, and the story continues until the point when your polite smile begins to hurt and you would give him some cash to just stop talking. But you can't because you're a sucker and gently reared, and helpless against his nervous frenzy.

That would be the first encounter, anyway. An earnest student of New York, these days I am hard-hearted and savvy, cured, a la smoked herring, by diesel exhaust and eau de drunk on subway. Tonight I was strolling home after a very nice dinner at the cousins', enjoying the balmy 50-degree air and my first Tasti D*lite since last summer....chocolate and vanilla swirl with chocolate sprinkles in a sugar cone...ah, Tasti. I crossed Bleecker, vaguely noticing a man on crutches limping in my direction. "I'm so sorry," he said, lurching to a halt in front of me. "I know this is completely rude, but..." "Let me guess," I interrupted, "you locked your painkiller prescription in a friend's apartment." The con artist did a very abrupt and graceful 180 for a man on crutches, and I serenely kept ambling down the street, enjoying the smell of spring.