Special, Just for You

New York is famous for its bagels.  They're delicious and hard to resist...especially when they are shoved in your face by way of street vendors.  There is a street vendor immediately outside of the subway stop directly across from my work building and I began to give in to this delectable temptation about once a week.  Sometimes twice.

The first or second time I got a bagel (plain with cream cheese), the vendor held up a packet of jelly and said "Special, just for you" and tossed it into my bag.  This made me giggle...(who puts jelly on bagels anyway?) but I appreciated the gesture.  So from then on, he'd give me grape jelly, special, just for me.  After a while, he stopped saying anything.  He would just hold up the jelly so that I saw it, and toss it into the bag.  I wanted to be like "Hey Bagelman, am I not special anymore?"

One day I showed up and before I could even speak, he just nodded, and reached for a plain bagel with cream cheese.  That's when I knew that I had been eating too many bagels.  Sadly, a new vendor showed up shortly after that and it has been several months since I have seen my grape-jelly-giving friend.  I hope he is still somewhere in the city selling bagels and making people's mornings simply by saying "special, just for you."