Should I worry about my mental health? After the colonoscopy, I was told that everything was normal, and my first reaction was, “I went through all of that for nothing!”

Whenever I see a man walking with a flower bouquet, I wonder what he is apologizing for.

She said, “I never said I was a good mother.” The eleven-year-old boy sitting next to her replied, “And I never said you were a good mother.” “I am only being a mother until I can get you out of the house.” “Fine with me. [Pause, then, somewhat anxiously.] But you are always going to keep my room as it is. You aren’t going to make it into a study!”

What question would you have asked?  The restaurant prominently displayed a sign that said, “Voted the Second Best Chinese Restaurant.”

Questions I did not expect to be asked on the subway.  The young, purple-haired woman wearing a frayed, but clearly “vintage” jacket said, “Excuse me. Do you know geometry?” I looked over and she pointed to a sketch book on her lap.  An octagon was carefully drawn.  (During the ride I learned that it was going to be a frame for a mirror, and she was on her way to buy some reclaimed wood.)  She said, “If the diameter is sixteen inches, can you calculate the circumference?”

He was pontificating as some are wont to do in a bar. He may have had more than the beer that was in front of him when I sat down. It was shortly after the last presidential election, and he was talking politics and history.  He rambled, but what he said about why Trump had won had some sense in it. I joked that he was one of the few people I knew that had voted for him. He quickly said that he had not, and then went on to say that he had taken his seven-year-old daughter to vote with him. He pulled out his phone and started scrolling. He found the picture of her entering his ballot into the scanner, a cute black girl in braids, and showed me a picture of his ballot, which had only Democratic votes.  I asked him how he felt the morning after the election when he found out who won. He said that he had been awake at 3 AM and that is when he found out.  His daughter was awake at 4.  He told me that she had become a devoted Hillary fan. When he told her that Trump had won, she said, “But he’s so mean,” and started to sob. He said that he did the only thing he could do. He picked her up and held her tightly and kept repeating until she fell back asleep, “It’s going to be all right. Daddy won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

“Nature takes good care of her appearance. What makes nature ugly is the behavior of human beings.” Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography.

Do you hold the emery board still and move your fingers or move the emery board across a still hand? Or do you use a nail file? Or do you only get professional manicures?

Mario’s Pizza is on DeKalb. Luigi’s Pizza is a half mile down that avenue. Do you, too, want to ask them whether they are brothers?

What is your reaction when you are bored and turn on a sports channel just looking for anything competitive to pass the time and you find that a dog show is on?

Parking increasingly requires us to go to one of those machines and buy a slip with a time printed on it to put on the car’s dashboard. With a parking meter, there was always a chance that time still remained on the meter, and we might need fewer coins than we thought. It was not a huge joy when that happened, but it always made me feel at least a little bit good. But that happy moment is now gone. Or does anyone, when leaving a parking place, give the slip with time remaining on it to someone pulling into a spot?

Will a new generation know what “Rita the Meter Maid” is about?