I walk by a couple of things every day, most days, some days. The deli right on the corner. Someone smiling across the street. A pile of garbage. My mailbox. All these are the places and things I call home. I tend to notice these kind of things: the smiles, the garbage, the moments of the day. A woman has been hanging out on my Bushwick street. She has probably been there since long before I moved here or started noticing. But I like the fact that I walk by her every day, most days, some days.

She sits outside. I wonder what will happen when it is cold?

Bushwick’s many layers reveal themselves on a walk down Knickerbocker. I took home a tasty tiramisu and this picture after stopping at Circo’s Pastry Shop. You can smell this place when you get off the M train.

There’s something about New York and eating late. And I want to show that it happens in Bushwick, too. I hope you had just as good a dinner as I did. We cooked empanadas. Actually, I took the picture and she assembled the food. I’m not good with spices. Everything tastes like it was catered by Mrs. Dash if I get near the stove. I’m good at doing the dishes or at least that’s what they tell me to get me to do the dishes.

I found a set of lost keys on the J train on Friday around 9:15pm. I saw them when I got on at Marcy, headed east. What to do? Leaving them seemed pointless. Their owner has virtually no chance of finding this same train again. Maybe by some long and odd stroke of luck, weeks from now, the owner might happen onto the train and see them. The key ring could spend weeks sliding back and forth on the seat and floor. But at any time, I reasoned, someone could kick them from the train down to the street. Or someone could just pick them up and keep them as a memento or make some art from their lonely uselessness. I decided to give them to the conductor. He just laughed and put them in his pocket.

Sometimes I feel like the keys.