For the last week, I have had a terrible cold, and have only been out to walk Maggie, which is four times a day. After doing this for a while, I am getting a more detailed sense of the neighborhood than I have ever had before. We either go to Riverside Park, with its abundant and bold squirrel population, or to Broadway, with all the stores and everpresent crowds of people. Maggie likes both of them, and so do I. I enjoy looking at the sculpted contours of Riverside Park, and the curved fronts of the apartment buildings that border it. Between Riverside Park and Broadway there are both apartment buildings of varying degrees of pomposity and some charming old townhouses, including some nicely detailed old brownstones. All the buildings date from the 1920's or before, and all feature some kind of ornamental decoration. (Ornamentation will be the subject of a future post, once I get the right pictures) Broadway itself has all kinds of stores, and including our 24-hour supermarket, which features brightly lit piles of fruits and veggies outside; quite a vision on a frigid, windy night.
Today, when I took Maggie on for a walk on Broadway, she stopped in front of a shoe store that had floor to ceiling windows. She gives me her look that says. "I want to go in here." I say "No, Maggie, that's a shoe store!". Maggie then sits, and gives me that very determined look "I really, really want to go in here!" I pull on the leash, and she won't budge. She really wants to go in there. I explain that there is a sign that says "No pets, please". Finally, I get her to move, and we go on to the next store, which is a pet store, which is what I think she had in mind in the first place. (The one with a parrot inside that says "hello" constantly, which gets Maggie very curious.) We had only been in that store once before, but I am wondering if she actually had a sense of where it was and was just off by one store. Or else she really did want a pair of shoes....
One other thing I have noticed that I hadn't really thought about before is that New York's system of garbage collection involves all the apartment buildings putting their garbage out on the street in plastic bags the night before. And with the recent blizzard, garbage collection got behind. For me, that means that Maggie wants to sniff every garbage bag there is, especially the ones that might have been chewed a bit by rats. There has to be a better way. (Though in Tokyo, they do it exactly the same way, and the Japanese have most urban things figured out..)
