At the C-Town on Hugh Grant Circle in Parkchester yesterday I spotted a price of $8 for a pound of FOXY brand strawberries. I’ve never seen strawberries priced so high. For about 2 years now a pound of strawberries has been a central cuisine in my AM breakfast ritual. Not any more. I’m forced into plums and peaches and bananas, the last of which ahd always been a part of the mix.  But the plums and peaches and whatnot come with annoyances that particularly pique my miso-something in the early part of this precious gift of a day. Unlike strawberries, I am now forced to peel those irritating stickers off the plum, typically with the casualty of penetrating its flesh. The flesh loss is mostly a cosmetic concern but why did today’s single, average-sized plum have three of these fucking stickers on it? Each one needs a fingernail to peel off and I just happened to have cut those nails away. The extra annoyance comes from the mess that a plum makes when being consumed. Three napkins were wasted today cleaning up the joyful mess of its squirted juices and pitty remains. Strawberries are not flawless in this respect but they are much tidier than juicy fruits, and sticker free. Of course they are prone to mold and going bad before you can even finish eating them. $8 for a pound of FOXY strawberries reflects a rather sudden increase in the price of that particular product. Just weeks ago I found 3 for $5, and before that it was common to find a pound for $2. Even the local shop nearest me, which always had sane prices, is removing strawberries from my day by asking $6 for what was just $2 a couple of weeks ago. Some pleaces have no strawberries at all. It’s the strawberry crisis of 2024, and I suffer its consequences like a martyr. I am the Strawberry Martyr on New York City.

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I wandered Parkchester and Castle Hill yesterday, intending to make a quick visit to a new-to-me payphone on Starling Avenue only to find that the pharmacy in front of which the payphone stands was closed for the day, its metal doors lowered. Behind those metal doors hid the payphone I came to see. I could have checked ahead to see if the pharmacy had Sunday hours but it would not have registered with me that their closure would take the payphone with it. If anything that would have made a Sunday visit more appealing, as it would not arouse the attentions of the pharmacy peeps. I shouldn’t worry about that in any case, but still, if I had known the place was closed that would have been enough information for me to reschedule.

So I made a small journey of it, marching up Castle Hill Avenue, finding an unexpected community fridge with nothing but rotting tangerines and another fruit I could not identify. There was also an unremarkable Little Free Library around Grove Street. At the end of Castle Hill Avenue I came upon an unexpected cluster of St. Raymond’s churches and convents. This was nowhere near St. Raymond’s Cemetery so I don’t know if there are connections among those institutions. There is a small cemetery in front of St. Raymond’s Church, where I saw the somewhat amusing sight of a nun standing at attention outside the church, seemingly in an official Sunday role, only to be staring at her phone. Nothing wrong with that, I guess.