Today on the L, I sat behind a couple of teenage girls who were gossiping about an old lady they saw from time to time, a strange old lady who liked to feed the birds.
This strange old lady hobbled to the park each morning all by herself, a loaf of Wonder Bread stuffed into her purse. She spent all day sitting on a bench, tearing off crumbs and throwing them to the pigeons, who gathered all around her.
"I don't know what her problem is," one of the girls told her friend. "I wanna go, like, 'lady, the pigeons don't need you to feed them.'"
They were still to young to understand it was the old lady who
needed to feed the pigeons, not the other way around.
