So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
A recent workday I’m rush-stepping along the Manhattan-bound subway platform at Union Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, catching the R Train (normal arrival time 12:04 p.m.); it’s pulling in right on time, par for the course in the longtime upscaling neighborhood, where service managers attend to the product, not like the stories I hear from friends in Clinton Hill or Bed Stuy or Crown Heights; am on my way down the platform in order to get on at the back of the train when I’m met by an alarmed-looking fellow commuter moving rapidly along the platform in the opposite direction. I immediately see why. A rat the size of a loaf of ciabatta is scurrying toward me at about the place on the platform that I like to board the train. Discretion the better part of valor, I turn on my heel and follow behind the commuter, my eyebrows raised as I pass a young woman who turns and follows our as-yet silent parade, whatever was on our minds, gone, poof, like an unstuffed puff (cheese, that is, recipe from the latest “All About You” magazine that landed on my desk yesterday [Nov. 29]), scrubbed by the rat, who is still coming, not any faster, but now the train is stopping, the door’s opening, and I’m at the platform’s near-front, stepping into a car, as I watch over my shoulder to see if the rat does too, follow me into the crowded car, but she doesn’t, and the shrieks and screams and loud thumps of swung and missed briefcases and canes and backpacks and lethally brandished high heel shoes caused by the rat who had surely entered the train, for where else could she have gone, never comes.
