The pizzeria was crazy-busy on that steamy-hot summer day in the city – it’d flung its doors and windows wide open to sidewalk seating and the chaotic streets beyond. Where time is money – manners be damned – the frenzied lunch crowd dressed in their business suits and real working clothes shoveled slices of sausage and mushroom, ricotta and mozzarella into their blabbering mouths. They simultaneously ate, talked on their cell phones, careened dialogue at one another and barked orders at the seemingly mute and prescient waiters who scurried like mice through the maze of tiny tables carrying trays heavy with drippy glasses of iced drinks, cold beers and carafes of chianti for the tourists wearing ‘I ‘heart’ New York’ t-shirts. Ignored children sitting in the corner booth blew the white paper off of straws and shot spitballs at one another as the mother and father placed their order for them. The parents ate oblivious to their surroundings while they conferred life over their day planners and palm pilots. On the wall next to the men’s bathroom — one of those civic-minded, under-appreciated Choking Victim posters hung crooked and discolored in a gold tinted frame.

A young girl wearing an intolerably short denim mini-skirt and flip-flops sat across from an aged woman – her grandmother. The old lady sucked on her gypsy moth cheeks with exasperation as she leaned over the table to admonish the child when this nymph from the New Jersey Shore furiously shook crushed red pepper all over their pepperoni pizza. But an ambulance was trying to negotiate an emergency down East 60th street. The traffic jam and the sirens stole all sound — reducing the grandmother’s mouthy rebuke to a series of clicks and clatters like a ventriloquist’s bad nightclub act or SOS spelled out in Morse code (three dots, three dashes, three dots). ‘It’s probably a good thing that she couldn’t hear me — or pretended not to’ the grandmother thought to herself as she sat back in her chair sizing up the girl’s budding breasts and onset of adolescent acne. ‘Let her have her way with the hot pepper flakes’ she figured because their time alone together would be coming to an end. She knew that soon enough that child wasn’t going to want to spend a day in the city with her. The kid chewed her pizza like cud and reached down under her chair to reassure that those little brown bags from Macy’s – the gifts (or were they bribes?) from her elder were still there. The old lady went back to picking the pepperonis and what she could of the red chili flakes off of her slice of pizza and blotted the oil with a polyester napkin. She took one bite and looking around the frenetic restaurant with a sulky mouthful — wondered what happened to those days when people ate lunch together and meant it.

Between sips of diet soda — the girl pulled her head up high enough out of her bad pasture to look at the grandmother as the grey-haired stranger she’d become. All around them, the lunch crowd went on gnashing their way through greasy starches, excessive salads, and their sugary caffeinated and/or artificially sweetened drinks. When the ambulance finally got unstuck — rumbling exhaust-spewing delivery trucks took its place. Saffron-robed Hari Krishnas walked by wired to their iPods, a man bent down to clean up after his dog, a waiter spoke to the girl and she answered politely, and under the hot summer sun the city streets turned into gravy.