|
|
|
Brooklyn Public Library
Wednesday, August 15 2001
I've eaten three chicken burritos in the past three weeks from the Taco Express down near 7th Avenue and 23rd street, and every time they've been made in exactly the same imperfect manner, as a large soft-shelled taco with a wide stripe of contents visible in the unfused dorsal region. I'm beginning to wonder if this sort of burrito is a local New York style of burrito, one I never saw in Los Angeles simply because Los Angeles doesn't make burritos in the New York style. In all other respects, mind you, the New York burrito tastes and looks like a Los Angeles burrito. It's even served wrapped in tin foil, a defining burrito characteristic I've noted since burrito joints first started invading Charlottesville, VA (circa 1996). But why, I wonder, do New York burrito makers consistently (and thus, clearly, deliberately) fail to completely wrap the burrito contents within the soft shell of the wheat flour tortilla? Perhaps it's to allow me easy access for adding salsa and sour cream. So today when I ordered my chicken burrito, I applied salsa and sour cream copiously to the exposed dorsal cleft. What a disaster this proved to be! I picked up the burrito to eat it with my hands (the fate of any self-respecting burrito) but the sour cream immediately squished out of the dorsal cleft and onto my hands, bringing bits of lettuce, tomato and roasted strips of chicken with it. There must be some other explanation for the dorsal cleft.
I should mention, by the way, that in Los Angeles most burrito places offer a varied salsa bar for people wanting to customize the flavor of their burritos. In New York, at Taco Express anyway, there is only one flavor of salsa (red) and it comes in a little plastic cup, as does a little plastic cup of sour cream. I never once saw sour cream offered as an agent of burrito customization the whole time I was in California.
This evening, for the first time in over three years, I walked into a brick and mortar library. The last library I'd been in was the Ann Arbor Public Library back in July of 1998, where I'd gone in search of expedient internet access. Since the invention of the web it's been most practical for me to retrieve the information I need in online form. It's rare that I need a specific book or other informational artifact.
The library I entered today was the Brooklyn Public Library on the east side of Grand Army Plaza. Living where I do, something like two blocks away, it would have been a difficult library to avoid, although I never once entered the San Diego public library in Ocean Beach, and it was about equally close to 4886 1/2 Cape May Avenue, where I lived for well over a year.
Back before there was a world wide web, back when I was kid living five miles south of Staunton, I used to go well out of my way for the services of a modest library. In those sweet young days I would ride my bicycle into town most weekends just so I could sit in the Staunton Public Library and read the magazines, make xeroxes, and entertain fantasies about the teenage girls who noisily frequented the second floor stacks.
The Brooklyn Public Library is in the grand tradition of stately urban libraries. Its front is adorned with a number of massive columns, and as one approaches one begins to see that etched into the concrete walls in low gilded relief are massive stylized murals done in the manner of ancient Egyptian tomb art. It's a little over-the-top for an official public building in the Western Hemisphere.
Gretchen had brought me to the library so I could get myself a library card and so we could check out a few movies. There was even a small rack of those new-fangled rainbow-casting DVD platters, and as I'm sort of curious whether or not my computers' DVD players can actually play them, I got a couple of those. A gentleman in line in front of us tried to convince one of the checkout staff people to give him four quarters for a dollar and the staff person was perfectly happy to oblige until the grumpy older checkout woman to his right, apparently a superior, spoke up in a hard-baked Brooklyn accent, "You can't do that, it's against policy!" And so Gretchen and I did what we could in the battle to cut through red tape and gave the poor guy a quarter.
As we were leaving the library, Gretchen remarked, "Oh yes, this place has books too."
Later we were walking Sally the Dog in Prospect Park and she suddenly decided she really wanted to chase after chipmunks in the dense succulent weeds (rich in pokeberry and various nightshades) behind the concrete retaining wall running along the freshly-refurbished Prospect West sidewalk. In her determined friskiness, Sally was cute at first, digging doggedly in the moist earth and dashing off after one distraction followed by another. But when we finally retrieved her, her entire dorsal side was caked with some sort of unspeakable brown pungent substance. Even from a considerable distance she smelled like a combination of all the unpleasant fragrances you can imagine: rotten eggs, decaying flesh, age-liquified mushrooms, and hot molten diarrhea. She'd been dragging her leash behind her and had managed to thoroughly contaminate it as well, so for the remainder of the walk home, I used a stick so as to avoid holding it. We gave her a thorough hosing down back in front of the brownstone, but the stink was so tenacious that it clung to her fur no matter what solvents we tried on her organic upholstery.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010815 feedback
previous | next |
