There is something about New York: you can't deny it.
It is spunk.
It is the go-get-'em attitude.
It is guts.
It is the entrepeneurial spirit.
This is the seventh day of rain in a row for New York City. It has been a long wet week, and umbrellas have been dying in their thousands, the weak and feeble weeded out by wind, fatigue, and bad stitching, to find their ignominous ends with their crumpled souls thrust deep into the murk of green trash cans. Bin by bin, they look like bunches of startled birds; heads perkily aloft and alert for predators.
The umbrellas still going well, still waterproof, still braving the sudden gusts of wind as their owners come to bear in the rushes of air which wait around street corners, well!
They are the fittest, they are the strong, they are the great and the good.
New York has been systematically purged of crap umbrellas.
Yet the umbrella salesmen persist, as they must.
The exit to my subway station is covered and pleasantly dry, but then the wetly gleaming traffic swooshes by and you're reminded of the real weather. This morning I walked away from the subway steps and popped open my stalwart black umbrella - eight hundred foot across, stiff against the wind, waterproof as only extremely waterproof things can be, and due to be commandeered by the city of Beijing for the upcoming 2008 Olympics.
Full of confidence, I strode out into the falling drops.
"Umbrella, umbrella?" asked a hopeful asian woman, sitting behind a rack of said items.
I stopped and looked at her. Then I looked at her umbrellas. Then I looked at my umbrella. Then I looked at her again. Silence thronged damply between us.
"Umbrella?" she asked again.
I was protected from the elements, and a lucky thing it was, because at that moment a half-hearted breeze would have deprived me of the organ in my skull.
But of course I'd stopped now, and in spite of the excellent awning I was already sporting, she thought she had a customer. An insane one, obviously, but the possibility of a transaction was on the cards.
"Er, no," I retorted, wittily.
Still fascinated, I stood for a beat too long.
"Umbrella?"
Sorry, I thought, got to go. I have a brain to catch.
Hi! Thanks for stopping by. A "skritch" is like a scratch, only softer. At least, I *think* so. Charles Schulz coined the term in a Snoopy cartoon. Charlie Brown said something like, "Other people have dogs who like to be scratched. I have a dog who likes to be skritched."