Tuesday, May 12, 2009

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."

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