Trying to explain why retailers in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope have decided to put buckets of shareable umbrellas in their shops, today’s New York Times writes:
The program has a certain “only in Park Slope” feel to it. The neighborhood is, of course, home to a thriving food co-op where all 10,000 or so members have to work monthly shifts, and Catherine Bohne, the umbrella program’s organizer and owner of the Community Bookstore, says residents are always helping each other out. Once, she said, she found a bag of dog food on the sidewalk with a sign that read, “Perfectly good food, only my dog just doesn’t like.”
Ten to one, she’s talking about my dog food. Or rather, my dog’s. About a year or two ago, when my dog was going through one of the refinements of her palate that have become increasingly common with age, she took against a veterinarian-recommended, still-almost-full bag of kibble that was so pricey that I couldn’t bear to think of it going to waste. This was before the dog-food contamination scare, but I still feared the neighbors might be suspicious of a whole bag of opened but uneaten food. So I put a note on it asserting its edibility and my dog’s finickiness, and left it on the sidewalk outside our apartment. This being Park Slope, it was gone a few hours later. Now I know to whom!
As unlikely spotlights on our domestic life go, this rivals the time that Peter and I appeared in a New York Observer article as shoppers at the Fairway in Red Hook.
Great story. We've noticed increasing delicacy of the tastebuds with our cats as they've gotten older. Something that has been acceptable for years will be rejected one day with an elaborate mime of burying it with imaginary litterbox sand.