Metropolitan Diary

Pasture Raised
Dear Diary:

I was at a business lunch at a well-regarded restaurant near Union Square.

I asked the waiter if the beef on the menu was pasture raised. He said he would check with the chef.

He returned a few minutes later.

“The chef says you can’t pasteurize a whole cow,” he said. “You can only pasteurize its milk.”

— Wendy Schmalz

The Back Lots
Dear Diary:

I grew up in the 1960s in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Most mothers stayed at home and ran their households, and the fathers went off to work.

As children, we had to answer to the “big kids” as well as to our relatives, the nuns at school and other adults.

But there was a singular area in the heart of our block where we held absolute dominion.

The block was the typical rectangular shape. On two sides were single family homes. Another side was dominated by apartment buildings and a convent. The fourth side had small stores with apartments above.

In back of these properties was a sizable lot that had no regular access. It was unclaimed and wild. We called it the back lots.

This area was on its own to do as it pleased, as were we when there. It was overgrown with weeds reaching the size of trees, the closest thing to a jungle we could find. There were dirt paths, grasshoppers and ivy. It was nature running wild yet hopelessly hemmed in on every side.

To get there, we had to climb a brick wall behind my grandparents’ garden and sidle along a chain-link fence, skirting the borders of several properties before hopping in. Once we were on the ground, the foliage provided cover and muted the din of the neighborhood around us.

Because entry was not possible for very young children and because older kids tended toward more remote places to escape, it was a self-regulating oasis of sorts.

We were natives in this small land, free to experience the wild and, for once, answerable to no one.

Until dinner time.

— Vincent Barkley

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html