My Sweet Old Town of Yesterday
I was at work last Friday and a coworker, who is too young to remember the Rubik’s Cube, let alone the Magic 8 Ball, was “reading” the paper, loudly commenting on the stories. I excuse her because she is too young to know any better. It had been a particularly bad week for the borough of Queens. The pages were riddled with crime after crime, one more violent than the next. There was the small argument about cutting in line at the bus stop in Jamaica, Queens that ended with the stabbing death of a 15-year-old girl. A teacher in another Queens town assaulted one of his students, just as the school year ended. A South Ozone Park guy was arrested for an armed robbery. She is smugly shaking her head, amazed, she says, that anyone can live there. From the other side of the room, I roll my eyes. This child, as I have begun to refer to anyone born later than 1985, is an extremely frustrating person to have to work with. She is not at all highly educated and I suspect she got the job based s...