I’m in love with the Voice on the Train.

I was riding on the Q last month, when the conductor told me that the train was, alas, going Express past my stop and I’d land up at the distant Kings Highway station, where I had to get out, go down the stairs and up again to the other side, catch another Q going in the opposite direction, and backtrack five stops to get back home to Avenue H.

It was a weekend; hinky things happen to the subway system here on weekends-in this case, the Local went Express in one direction to avoid construction. Construction is a code word for one guy in a neon vest smoking a cigarette while three others stand at the ready, to save him in case he catches fire.

Conductors in Brooklyn usually sound like you’d expect Brooklyn train conductors to sound: Prawspect Pawk, youse guys. These are mundane but real guys-or, in some cases, women-and there aren’t many of them left on the Q line.

New state-of-the-art Q trains are now slowly replacing the battered old fleet. On these, the voices are automated. They’re Disneyland Please-step-to-the-right, Please-don’t-stick-your-appendages-out-of-the-tram auto-voices: a blandly-pleasant female alto announcing each stop.

This voice a month ago, however. Man. That was a Voice. It was the voice of a spent jazz singer, an enigmatic man who lingers in smoky clubs, his fedora on the table, his hand wrapped around a Scotch-and-water, a cigarette between his fingers. A guy who leans full, whiskery lips to your ear and tells you-

Anything. Sigh. Absolutely anything you’d like to hear.

And some things you’d like to NOT hear, like the fact that your train is going to pass your stop and deposit you five stops farther down the line because six clowns in orange vests have parked themselves atop a stack of plywood on the Coney-Island-bound platform at Avenue H to swap ham-and-cheese sandwiches and sing Kumbaya.

The thing is, when this particular conductor gave me the bad news-I suppose he told us all, but it felt like his lovely, ragged bass was meant for only me, me, me!-I thought, Oh, Honey, I’ll stay with you for the next five stops. Hell, I’ll go all the way to Coney Island and back with you. Just. Keep. Talking.

But I had to return to my numbing, ordinary life at Avenue H. And so we parted at Kings Highway.

I was bereft.

Weeks passed. I rode many trains. I heard the Disney Lady; I suffered through the usual gaggle of shrug-inducing Brooklynese. I listened for the Voice in vain.

Then, this weekend, I was riding one of the new Q trains, heading home to Avenue H from a Yoga class. I was staring out the window at the blackness of the tunnel, and the Voice spoke. He SPOKE. He overrode the pleasant automated woman and spoke to me, me, me!

Attention, he growled.

I clutched my Yoga mat to my heaving breast.

The next stop, the Voice rumbled—to me, me, me!—is Prospect Park. It will be the last stop. There will be shuttle buses outside to take you to all the local stops from here to Kings Highway. Please follow the signs up the stairs to the shuttle buses.

My heart hammered my mat; my soul reveled in his sweet message, laid so cleverly between the lines: He’d been searching for me, too. We had but this one brief ride together between 7th Avenue and Prospect Park, and then—

All was lost. All was despair. All was a long, jerky, agonizing, traffic-clogged, horrifically inconvenient bus ride that pulled me farther and farther from Him, stopping to tantalize me at every damned corner, while a dozen guys in neon vests danced around an abandoned crane that reached motionless over the otherwise deserted Avenue H station.

Voice, I’m out here, every weekday, among the scattered plywood and scraps of ham and cheese. I’m here, on weekends, leaning on the light post at the shuttle bus stop four long blocks from my station. Voice, dear gravelly voice, wait for me—

Life, and the MTA, can be so cruel…

Umesh called today. He called to wish our son a happy birthday. He sang “Happy Birthday” on the phone message.

Last month, he called to wish Paul a happy birthday. He will call at the end of this month to wish us a happy anniversary.

I never pick up the phone when I see his number. Even so, his messages are unfailingly upbeat, perpetually cheerful. He invited us to his son’s wedding last year. We didn’t RSVP.

If that seems heartless, I should explain that I’ve only spent a few hours with Umesh. True, they were very, very memorable hours, but that was 2 1/2 years ago. And I paid for his services.

Got your attention now, eh?

Umesh was one of our guides during a month we spent in India. He was, to be specific, our guide in Jaipur, and his tours through castles and tombs and marketplaces added a true grace note to our trip.

He was a Brahmin philosopher, always smiling, freely dispensing anecdotes about life in the hamlet where he lived. He told us of his mischievous boyhood, and the trouble it merited him in school. He told us of his wife’s modesty (”If you came to visit,” he told Paul, “She would have to wear the end of her veil over her face.”). About the scandal when his son turned down the first marriage prospect his family had arranged (”She was a little bit fatty, and he didn’t want to marry a fatty girl.” Umesh cast his eyes to the heavens. “My God, it was terrible!”). And how the boy’s grandfather had disowned him until he redeemed himself by caring for the old man while he was dying. And how this son finally agreed to a match with a young professional woman who was not fatty, and was of the suitable caste and sub-caste for marriage (”Thank God! She was such a good prospect, I was afraid of competition. I gave Ravi a cell phone and told him, ‘Talk to her. Make her fall in love with you.’ And he did.”).

Umesh was, in short, entertaining, informative and personable. Sure, like all guides, he took us to shops that paid him commissions, but it didn’t seem to faze him when we bought little. He considered his profession a sort of Hindu holy calling, and he did a bang-up job at it.

At some point in our tours, he told us about how he had traveled to Seattle and Minnesota (”I have seen the Mall of America. The parking lot-oh, my God! All those cars!”).

Did he travel with his wife? I asked.

Oh, no. He waved his hand dismissively. His wife doesn’t travel. “She is,” he said, “a very particular vegetarian.”

“So am I,” I said. “There are lots of vegetarians in America.”

He did not look enthused.

What, then, did he do by himself in America?

“I visit all my clients,” he said, his smile brilliant. “I only have to pay the airfare; they never let me pay for anything.”

On our last day in Jaipur, Umesh took us to the Mantar Observatory, a massive 270-year-old outdoor complex of pits and walls and arches covered with intricate bas-relief measurements that permit one to find what sign the sun is in when. This is particularly helpful for Hindu families when it comes time to gauge the compatibility of a potential marriage match. At some point, as we climbed up and down and around, he asked our birthdays and those of our kids. He also asked about our anniversary date which, he agreed, surely had been an auspicious one, given the length of our marriage. It all seemed natural enough, given the setting.

We came home. Then, a few months later, came the first call, wishing our youngest a happy birthday. I answered, and we chatted briefly. Quite the businessman, Umesh, I thought.

Then he called for our older son. Then for Paul. Then for our anniversary.

I stopped answering.

It’s 2 1/2 years later. Umesh still calls. I still don’t answer. He sings. He tells us to return to India, please, and hire him as a guide.

It’s kind of creepy.

I know he’ll show up some day on our doorstep, smiling, needing a place to stay.

Looking for old clients.

Who won’t let him pay for anything.

We started up the Eiffel Tower with great gusto. Even though we had arrived in Paris just that
morning, even though we’d had only one hour’s nap to defray our jet-lag, we would
not take the elevator. We were macho Americans. Rugged boomers. Tough old vets.

Returned Peace Corps Volunteers.

We would take the steps. There were only thirty-five million, four hundred and
twenty eight. Approximately.

Friends had assured us that Paris in the summer is always warm and sunny. It’s so
warm and sunny that the whole city closes down so the natives can go somewhere
that’s less warm and sunny. Only tourists are left.

So as we mounted the wide steel stairs, we knew that, even though the sun was
going down, it would be warm up on top.

We climbed. Up. Up. A breeze ruffled through. A friendly, warm breeze. Up,
up, up to the first level.

Ahhhh.

The tickets from the booth downstairs permit you to mount to the second platform,
or roughly as high as the Matterhorn; once there, you must go to the second-level ticket
booth and buy the rest of the trip to the top.

And so we ignored the restaurants and souvenir shops on the first level and slogged up, up, up. This
part of the trip was made more challenging by the 150-pound weight someone had
surreptitiously clamped on each of my ankles.

We reached the second platform and the City of Lights lit up. The timing was
perfect. I pulled out my iPhone and took pictures.

The wind picked up a notch. Delightful. I snapped away (figuratively
speaking, since iPhones don’t snap).

A branch of lightning licked a distant dome, a glorious incongruity.

We found the second-level ticket booth closed. No explanation; just orange striped
tape,  a sign—Fermé—and an empty booth. Quelle disappointing.

We passed the second-level restaurant. Mobs of starving, ragged tourists were
storming it, Mastercards held aloft and snapping proudly in the streaming wind.

We edged away and started walking down.

The hailstorm hit us halfway between the second level and the first, where there was no wall to shelter us. It came on
the knife-edge of a gale-force wind and brought a drenching curtain of icy monsoon rain.

Mon Dieu.

It poured, blew and hailed. Paul clamped his glasses to his face with his hands.
Something plummeted from the second level above our heads; it made a small,
metallic, complicated explosion against the carapace of the tower.
Someone up there screamed. We wedged ourselves into the steel mesh cage that
surrounded the stairway and concentrated on taking in and letting out each breath,
which is not easy in a full-fledged multi-directional hurricane. The tower swayed
gently beneath us.

Fifteen minutes or hours passed. The wind dropped; the rain trickled to
a mist.

Our summer shirts clung our bodies. My jeans hung lead-heavy. Our sneakers
squished.

We breathed. Paul let go of his glasses.

He took off his shirt, wrung it out, replaced it gingerly on his shivering frame. I pulled my iPhone from my pocket, expecting disaster. Good old Mac: it was perfectly functional. But Paul’s pricey watch had
fogged up so solidly on the inside that he couldn’t see the hands.

We squish-squished down the steps, slowly, because every move created a breeze,
which raised goosebumps. Paris is warm and sunny in the summer, I told myself.
Squish. Squish. Warm. Squish. Sunny. Squish-squish-squish.

At the first level, the tower steps turned into the wind. We gasped and looked at
each other. It was a magic moment of silent communion in the City of Love: we realized without speaking
that walking wet into that *!@#! wind would kill us.

So we stepped into the platform and lined up for the elevator. We were not alone:
the anteroom was filled with wet people.

We waited for more than a half hour, steaming in the body heat of strangers.

The experience made me think about those who built the tower in 1900. How handy for them that there was a steel mesh cage around each girder.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps they didn’t need one. Perhaps they built it in summer. When it’s always
sunny and warm in Paris.

11:30 a.m. Saturday: “Stand next to the fence,” the coordinator tells Paul and me. “Someone will be by to give you instructions.” Rain sifts down on my umbrella. Warm April rain, but it’s June 20, the cusp of Summer. “At least it’s warm,” the girl next to us says. “This would be hellish if it was cold.”

We are in Coney Island, waiting for the 2 p.m. start of the 2009 Mermaid Parade, leaning against a wooden fence that advertises Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, dressed in brand-new canary yellow T-shirts with VOLUNTEER printed on the back. There are ten of us. We carry umbrellas; we wear see-through plastic ponchos. Paul wears shorts and a raincoat. We are Marching Marshals. I’m not sure what that means.

12:30: A trim blonde in a cowboy hat hands us hand-numbered signs on long metal poles. The guy next to me looks up at his sign, eight feet up against the drizzly sky. He cringes. “We could be hit by lightening.”

The blonde tells us we’ll stand along West 21st Street in sequence according to our number, and Mermaids with corresponding numbers will line up behind each of us. “You’ll each have 25 Mermaids,” she says. “Your job is to keep them moving.”

1:00 p.m.: We’re spaced along West 21st , leaning against the wall with our signs. Paul’s and my numbers are in the three hundreds, in the rear, only three other Marching Marshals behind us. The rain has let up, but the sky is murky.

The lightning-phobic guy laments, “I wanted to see the parade. We can’t see squat from back here.” I sympathize fully. He brightens. “Hey, they’ll put Harvey Keitel in the rear, right?” Keitel is this year’s celebrity King Neptune. “Maybe we’ll be close. I can take a picture.”

The street teems with Mermaids in home-made tails and shell bras. Some aren’t young. Some aren’t women. Some wear only pasties on top. Some shouldn’t.

1:15: Rain again. A marching band leans on our wall, chugging Budweiser. A tuba lies on the sidewalk, rain pittering its silver curves. A skinny woman in panties, two strategically-placed cotton balls, and gold body paint poses for pictures with a fat guy wearing only a jock strap. He jerks—“Oh!”—and pulls a cellphone out of the jock. He grins. “It’s on Vibrate.”

1:30: Rain pelts down. We stand in the flooding street, waiting for Mermaids to find us.

The band plays slurred New Orleans jazz. A nubile college girl in a sea-green filmy, finned skirt shakes her butterfly-shaped pasties at a nerdy guy in a striped cap. Dirty old men click their cameras. Roller-derby girls swap war stories. Body paint runs; glitter falls; fins grow limp.

“I can’t feel my hands,” Paul says. “Look—my fingernails are blue.”

1:50: Downpour. Gold Woman and Jockstrap Man rush by, thoroughly goosebumped. The co-ed in butterfly pasties dons a jacket. The band takes another Bud break. Nobody has claimed our sections, those behind, or the lightning-phobe’s up ahead.

2 p.m.: Still no Mermaids back here.

2:15: Not one Mermaid. “They’re not going to use us,” the lightning-phobe exclaims. He sounds disgusted.

The pack of Mermaids up front jostles; we all start forward.

“They’re making us march without Mermaids,” Lightning Man wails.

An organizer approaches. Paul tells him,“Everybody’s up front. We don’t have Mermaids.”

“Oh,” the organizer says. “Well. You don’t have to march.”

Cool. We’ll see the parade from the sidelines. “What a wasted day,” Paul mumbles.

The organizer collects soggy signs. He hands Paul a board painted with the word “Spring,” and me one that says “Winter.” Other Marching Marshals get “Summer,” “Autumn,” and bamboo poles topped with flags. “Take these to the boardwalk for the Beach Ceremony,” the organizer says.

No parade. No Harvey Keitel. We drag our burdens to the boardwalk. The rain eases; cold wind whips the flags.

The parade ends, for walkers and hand-pulled carts, on the boardwalk. All motorized vehicles—antique cars, trucks, floats—dropped off earlier, unseen by us. We lean on our props, waiting for the Beach Ceremony–whatever that is–watching drunken Mermaids stagger by. Many faces, and bodies, are familiar. Jockstrap Man, still bare-assed, wears a jacket. The butterfly-pastied co-ed is draped over her nerd.

Harvey Keitel and his Mermaid Queen wife whisk by in a cart, so quickly that I can’t snap a picture with my iPhone.

4:30: A coordinator shepherds us and our props from the boardwalk to the beach and lines us up. Four “gates,” red ribbons stretched between bamboo poles, lead down to the ocean like hurdles. Before, after and between them, we stand with our “Winter,” “Spring,” “Autumn” and “Summer” signs.

“You’ll wait here twenty minutes,” says the coordinator, “then they’ll come and cut the ribbons.”

“Who cuts the ribbons?” someone asks.

“Harvey Keitel.”

It starts to drizzle.

5:15: Observers straggle down to watch us. I trade my “Winter” sign for a pole. The sign requires two hands, the pole only one; maybe I can take a picture with my free hand.

They sweep down abruptly: a bevy of Mermaids and Harvey Keitel. And the combined press corps of the entire free world.

Harvey clips the first ribbon with giant shears. I can’t see him behind the hoards of photographers. The circus moves to my ribbon. My substitute holds up “Winter.” I aim my iPhone and shoot. The ribbon snaps. The mob advances to the third “gate,” where Paul holds “Spring.”

I glance at my iPhone: I’ve got it! A shot of Keitel’s face, his crown, his glitter-covered trident, his wife, over the “Winter” sign. You can’t tell he’s cutting a ribbon, but…I’ve got it.

5:20: We march our signs and poles up the beach to the Coney Island Museum, where they’ll be stored until next year. Paul looks chagrined.

“You finally got to do something useful.” I say. “Aren’t you glad we came?”

“Hah. When they hit my ribbon, the security guy ripped my sign out of my hands and held it up.” He snorts. “He wanted his picture taken with Harvey Keitel.”

It was midnight, and we were freezing our buns off, poking in the tide for spawning Horseshoe Crabs.

We’d been in Delaware for two days of our week’s vacation in Bethany Beach, and I’d seen the ad that morning, hanging outside the gatehouse to Cape Henlopen State Park. “Volunteers wanted for Horseshoe Crab Census,” the poster said. An annual census, taken at high tide, during the full moon. During mating season.

We’d walked the beach the day before, and I’d seen a Horseshoe Crab carcass in the sand. I’d only ever seen them in pictures, and here was a real one—a shell, at least—looking ancient and creaky and remarkably like my old Army helmet. I was fascinated by the critter.

And now the ad had also piqued my more prurient interests: these things actually…mated??

I tried to picture it, but my best scenario amounted to a pile-up of Sherman tanks. The only hope I could see for romance between such clunky creatures was eHarmony.

So I called the number on the poster. And spoke to Rob Schroeder, an Americorps volunteer coordinator for Delaware State Parks. He was also a retired high school Biology teacher and, it turned out, a helluva nice guy.

Rob told us to be at the park at 11 p.m. “Dress warm,” he added.

**

We met Rob and a bright young Americorps volunteer named Bridget—who manned (womanned?) the park headquarters as her day-job—in the parking lot. He gave us each a red light to strap to our forehead.

I expected him to hand us bags and send us into the forest to hunt snipe. Instead, he explained that Horseshoe Crabs have lots of eyes (as many as 10, says one website: two large-ish compound eyes on the sides of the shell, two teensy ones near these, three small eyes on top, two underneath near the mouth, and a light sensor system on the tail that counts as one eye). Flip a bright white light on all this sensory equipment, and it’s like dumping cold water on a pair of lovers. Except that these lovers were already in cold water. And they didn’t travel in pairs.

It seemed that mating, for the Horseshoe Crabs, is even more bizarre than I’d imagined. The female is big, maybe two feet long including her spiny tail. Males run about two-thirds as large, and have a set of rounded claws, like small boxing gloves. The males lie in wait beneath the high tidewater in the dark of night; when they find a female, they latch onto her shell with these claws. Then it gets really kinky: more males latch on—four, five, six of them—and the female pulls them all like a mobile orgy over the beach. She digs in the sand as she travels and deposits eggs, and the males fertilize them as she drags them over the nests.

So this is what we were looking for as we set off, red lights at the ready, young Bridget toting a clipboard and pen.

**

Rob has helped with the annual census since the University of Delaware initiated it in 1990. There are a total of 25 participating beaches in Delaware and New Jersey. The census is held for three days each during the full and new moons in May and June, when the tide is at its highest level. During his total of 12 days, Rob presides over 100 square meters of Henlopen Park tideline. He chooses two square meters out of every ten, to get a representative sample, and counts the number of male and female crabs he finds.

We paced the shore, stopped at Ron’s sample areas, bent over the lapping tide waters, hovered our red lights, and called out what we saw so Bridget could jot it on her clipboard.

Square One: Nothing.

Two: Nothing.

Three: A crab. Dead.

Nothing. Another dead crab. Nothing.

Finally, at Square 14—a crab. One lonely, living crab. A male. Swimming by himself. Looking for love in all the wrong places.

He was the only Horseshoe Crab we counted all night.

**

It happens, said Rob. We were back in the parking lot; we’d returned our red lights and were rubbing our frozen hands together. It’s unseasonably cold, he said. It’s only May; the highest counts are usually June’s. It’s the end of the full-moon phase, not the highest point of the tide.

Still… he admitted that the numbers seemed to be decreasing over the past few years (Note: The 2008 census report agrees; it quotes a marked reduction in spawning numbers over a three-year span).

Maybe it’s predators, he said: birds, fishermen using crabmeat for bait. Pollution. Beachfront over-development… Labs also use the crab’s blue blood to test for human infections, but they return the animals after the bleeding, and most survive (one source estimates a fatality rate of less than 10 percent).

A decrease in numbers is bad news for migrating sea birds, Rob told us. They depend on crab eggs to survive. When times are good, there are plenty to go around—it’s thought that a sexually mature female (nine or ten years old) could lay more than 90,000 1/16-inch eggs a season, fewer than ten of which survive to adulthood—but lean times are tough. Fewer spawning crabs means less bird fodder. And, of course, fewer new crabs.

It’s a sobering scenario.

Here’s a creature that’s lumbered through life pretty much unchanged for 250 million years. If the gods are kind, it lives maybe 20 years, eating worms and clams. It’s a model citizen, donating blood for the betterment of mankind and laying out caviar banquets for Mr. Audubon’s best friends.

All it wants from us is a beachfront rental a couple nights a year to hold its funky but silent little frat parties. And when the whoopie’s done, you won’t find a single beer bottle on the sand.

What kind of neighbor would turn down that modest request?

**

To learn more about the Horseshoe Crab, including how you can volunteer for the yearly census, here are two terrific websites:

http://www.ocean.udel.edu/horseshoecrab/index.html

http://www.dnr.state.md.us/education/horseshoecrab/

I have, in my travels, found a number of very cool spots in Brooklyn from which one can view the skyline of Manhattan. There’s the Smith and 9th Street F train station, high above the neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. There’s a lovely promenade in Brooklyn Heights, which overhangs the East River and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (the world’s most pock-marked parking lot).

And there’s a grassy hilltop covered with flowering trees and marble angels, the highest spot in King’s County, a grand stretch of green that rises over a grubby workaday industrial/commercial zone. It’s a stone’s throw from the buzz and hum of a major ConEd electrical nexus, and lies beneath the flight pattern of Brooklyn’s rambunctious wild parrots.

And yet it’s quiet.

Dead quiet.

It’s the view from the Green-Wood Cemetery.

Green-Wood was founded in 1838. The name is hyphenated because “19th century New Yorkers loved hyphens,” according to cemetery historian Jeff Richman, who writes books about and leads tours of the place.

Green-Wood was the site of the Battle of Long Island in 1776. If it hadn’t been set aside to serve the dead so long ago, its undulating 478 acres would ignite even bloodier wars today between developers. Instead, it’s a National Historic Landmark and an Audobon sanctuary. Its tour schedule includes a night wander for which you bring a flashlight and sign a “waiver of liability.” It boasts a rococo Gothic gate, a modern community mausoleum, and a Japanese meditation garden with pools full of fat koi.

There are, too, smaller family mausoleums. Some are austere vaults; others teem with steeples and angels and saints. One is a cottage-sized faux pyramid, its entrance flanked by what looks like the Holy Family and guarded by a bizarre sphinx-ish creature. I assume the people buried in it designed it themselves ahead of time; it’s not the sort of thing others build for you (Damn, I miss Jeremy—let’s build him…hmmm…how ’bout a pyramid?).

Not far from that monumental oddity, a granite bench sits next to a simple headstone that’s flush with the ground. The name on the stone: Leonard Bernstein.

In its relatively short history, Green-Wood has amassed roughly 560,000 residents. It’s still accepting applicants. For prices—which run roughly from the price of a car to that of a McMansion—check out http://www.green-wood.com.

New occupants will swap earthworms with an A-list that includes Henry Ward Beecher, the preacher who, while notable in his own right, will be eternally upstaged by his sis, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Newsman Horace Greeley’s planted there; apparently he never took his own advice to Go West. There are mobsters, “Crazy Joe” Gallo and Albert Anastasia. There’s Boss Tweed—speaking of mobsters. And local baseball hero Charlie Ebbet, former owner of the Dodgers and their long-lost and much-lamented Ebbet’s Field.

But, since I’m not dead yet, it’s the view that impresses me. You can lean against a flowering cherry tree and take in the Manhattan skyline. You can see the Statue of Liberty. In fact, if you go to the military section of the graveyard, up on the hill, you’ll see Lady Liberty over the shoulder of an outsized statue of the goddess Minerva. Minerva is waving across the water to her French amie. Really. It says so on the plinth beneath her big bronze feet.

Not long ago, private developers plotted to build a highrise on private land at the cemetery’s hem. The graveyard’s preservationists noted with alarm that the proposed building would obstruct Minerva’s view of her buddy. They put out petitions on the cemetery’s website to save the lines of communication between the two colossal women. “We did reach an agreement with the developer on the corner closest to Minerva to maintain her view of her sister, the Statue of Liberty,” says Jeff Richman. However, threats to the view continue with development in Red Hook, the section of Brooklyn that sits directly on the river. “We have tried to have the view protected,” Mr. Richman says, “but there is only one such protected view in NYC.” That view is the aforementioned Brooklyn Heights panorama.

Mr. Richman hastens to add that the cemetery’s advocates do not plan to give up the battle.

It’s an attitude that Minerva would certainly applaud, if she could lower her hand.

The kids at Methodist Hospital’s Pediatric Clinic were bouncing off the walls when I sat down at the round wooden table. I plopped my bag at my feet and asked, “Anybody want a story?”

Two four-year-olds pounced on the little chairs to my left and right. Boys.

Uh, oh.

I’m a Reach Out and Read volunteer. My stated mission is to engage children in the magic of reading during their long wait for their doctors, so their moms are impressed enough to take up the practice at home.

In reality, I function as a cross between court jester and lion tamer.

Today, most of the kids were boys. So I was the latter.

Don’t get me wrong: I love little boys, even as I love little girls. But they’re not the same.

In the 60’s, that was a dangerous thing to say. Gender differences were all about oppression. Parents gave their boys toy cars because boys could be free to drive away. Girls were saddled with dolls to turn them into compliant housewives and mothers. It was all a socially-engineered plot.

Then I had kids. I gave our daughter cars. I gave the boys dolls.

The boys ran over the dolls with their sister’s neglected cars. They bent them at the waist and shot each other with them. Kym found a book about a little girl holding a tea party for her babydolls. She made me read it every night. It began: “This is my house, and I am the mommy/My children are Annabel, Betsy and Bonny.” The only car pictured is the one a little boy rides off in: “Billy is daddy, he works in the city/He has a new car—isn’t it pretty?” Varrooom; exit Billy.

Kym dressed up in pink tutus. The boys dressed up, too—as Jedi knights.

Now Kym has two boys.

They live for fire trucks and front-loaders. Dolls are something to repair with their tools.

Another fact about little boys: in herds, they’re noisier than little girls. Squirmier. More ADD. I don’t think they’re necessarily that way individually, but en masse, there’s this dynamic. Try to keep the attention of five little boys. It’s like corralling baby chicks on a plate. Snag Gabe with Yertle the Turtle; Joaquin sits down; Gabe jumps up to chase a Shiney Thing; Kareem hops on the table; Michael runs a toy truck over the book; Max becomes an airplane and mows down Joaquin—

When chaos threatens to spill from the window and engulf Park Slope, I take out my WMDs (Weapons of, Maybe, Distraction?): crayons and blank paper. Yes, my mission is to READ to them—but, at this point, I’m desperate. It’s crayons or complete anarchy.

Even small, squirmy little boys love crayons. They love to roll them, stab each other with them, eat them, put them up their noses. Sometimes they even draw with them. They don’t particularly love to share crayons, so I become a referee: I catch rolling crayons before they hit the floor, where little feet grind them into greasy spots. I kindly but firmly remind Kareem that Michael can use the black one now, since he had it first; see how many great colors are left? And yes, Gabe can have some,too. Yes, GABE CAN HAVE SOME, TOO, thank you. And let’s let Gabe’s little brother Max take the crayons out of the box and put them back—yet again—because that’s what two-year-olds do, and it’s not hurting anything. And no, Joaquin, that’s Burnt Umber. Not chocolate.

In the middle of Crayon Time today, a pink-ruffled little girl sidled up with a book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Tears leaked down her cheeks. She’d had a shot. “Read?” she entreated.

A little girl! Wants me to read! Omigod! I’m in heaven!

I lifted her onto my lap and opened the book.

Michael and Kareem sword-fought, blue against green. Joaquin nibbled; Gabe scribbled; little Max once again took every crayons out and put every crayon back in.

I read. And I felt my lap get very, very wet.

The pink-ruffled little girl sniffled up at me. “Read?”

Sigh.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is normally not a long book. But today…

One of my favorite restaurants in Brooklyn is Red Bamboo. It’s in Fort Greene, about five miles from our neighborhood as the crow flies-which is irrelevant to getting anywhere in Brooklyn unless you’re a crow.

It’s completely vegetarian (the restaurant, not the crow).

I’m a vegetarian-technically, an ovo-lacto vegetarian: I don’t eat meat or fish, but I don’t sneak into barns to set cows free from grasping nipple-kneaders.

I did not grow up vegetarian. Turning away steak in the 50s and 60s was considered a mortal sin in Indiana, even for non-Catholics. Still is, in some towns.

When I used to go back there in the days when my mother still lived at home, she began every visit with, “You still don’t eat meat?”

“I still don’t,” I’d say.

She’d say, “Well, I’ve got some green beans in the freezer. Help yourself.”

She was serious.

To be fair, I’ve only been veg for twenty years. One day I realized that my love for animals seemed at odds with my desire to eat them. By then, luckily, there were cookbooks and magazines dedicated to vegetarianism, and that law about always eating beans with rice had been repealed.

Progress continues to be made. Even some Indiana restaurants now offer pasta primavera. Which, in Indiana, can be pretty scary.

I wasn’t a vegetarian when we served in the Peace Corps, thank the gods. In Venezuela, in the 70s, I would’ve had only arepas with yellow or white cheese to eat. My veins would’ve gelled to a halt.

Here in Flatbush, nearly every hole-in-the-wall serves veggies. I can eat just about anywhere but the jerk chicken joints and that Dominican place where they simmer pork in their beans and serve meat, meat, meat. Pakistanis serve good vegetarian fare. So do Israelis, Afghanis, Greeks; even our neighborhood Mexican places. Some restaurants, like Red Bamboo, baffle me with choices from a full vegetarian menu.

Traveling beyond Brooklyn can still be problematic.

My husband and I traveled to Viet Nam in 1999 with a bicycle tour. I can’t speak Vietnamese, and had to rely on our interpreters, who couldn’t comprehend why I wouldn’t eat meat.

Finally, one beamed. “Ah. You Buddhist, right?”

Well…if it means vegetables, I’m Buddhist.

So every time we stepped into a restaurant, the interpreter proudly explained that my eggrolls should be vegetable because I was Buddhist.

Most restaurants, even in countries where vegetarians are considered weird, will work with me. They will take the soup back and assiduously remove the beef. They’ll serve me veggies over dumplings made with animal fat. “Is vegetarian,” they’ll insist, “No meat.” And, hey, I’ll eat it; I respect their confusion and appreciate their efforts. My vegetarianism is a kind of pacifism; it’s a bit incongruous to spark a war over it.

There is one place, however, where my eating preferences unwittingly draw their own nasty little line in the sand. That’s Russia.

Last summer, Paul and I took a river boat tour from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Ours was a utilitarian craft, not luxurious but decent enough. But the food on board was awful, even for carnivores. Whenever we could, Paul and I ate ashore.

I can usually make up for language deficits by smiling and miming a lot. In Russia, this isn’t enough. In Russia, speaking English is a terrorist activity.

Who can blame the Russians? In Soviet times, the Good Russian’s duty was to harass foreigners. Now, those same citizens are supposed to embrace us. I’d be confused, too.

So I had to labor for my blinis. And sometimes, patience, diligence and good humor didn’t work.

Take that day we trooped through the Hermitage, then repaired with our fellow boaters for lunch to an assigned Tourist Restaurant in St. Petersburg.

It was a house remodeled with schlocky opulence, staffed by waiters in Royal Guard costumes. One brought me a chunk of chicken with a side of rice.

I told him I didn’t eat meat. He glared at me. I motioned our interpreter over, and asked, quite civilly, if they could maybe find me a salad.

She interpreted. The waiter sniffed and grabbed the plate away.

Ten minutes later, he brought it back, and banged it in down front of me. “Is all we have,” he huffed.

I ate the rice.

The cold, smirking rice.

She was dressed in black-long black skirt, long-sleeved black blouse, long black veil that covered her entire head, with two hand-sewn eyeholes-and she stood outside the apartment next door. Smoking.

I’m not sure why this surprised me. I don’t know of any Islamic anti-smoking prohibitions, and if anybody deserves a good puff, it’s a woman in a Burqa. She’d obviously done it before, and wasn’t going to set her face on fire.

It was just . . . incongruous. Like the parrot in the tree over my balcony, or the forty-pound cockroach in my bathroom sink. I didn’t expect this in Brooklyn.

Okay-maybe I did expect the cockroach.

My husband and I have lived in Flatbush since February. People ask us why we moved to Brooklyn from Massachusetts. I tell them Paul retired, so we moved south.

In truth, we’ve always loved to travel, to boldly go where people speak strange languages and don’t eat hotdogs for lunch. We met in Viet Nam, and later joined the Peace Corps and kicked around Venezuela until their newly-elected government declared us, shall we say, mammary glands on a bull. We’ve been all over the world. Now the kids and grandkids live in various corners of Brooklyn; it was a natural enough choice.

I just didn’t realize how much like the Peace Corps experience this move would be.

I mean that in a good way. Mostly.

It’s certainly educational. For example, I was walking down Coney Island Avenue one day, and I saw a sign in the window of a little laundry that declared “Your clothes can be tested here for Shatnes.”

I glanced down to find myself scratching my stomach. Do Shatnes bite? Can you catch them on the subway? Is Brooklyn infested??

I pulled out my iPhone and Googled Shatnes. And was relieved to find that it meant mixing linen and wool, a no-no for the Observant Jews of the neighborhood.

There was a sale on Sukkahs next door to the laundry. They were little nylon tents. The shop also sold decorations for them. Cute concept, if strange: pin a silk flower on your tentflap.

A few days later, Sukkahs sprang up in my neighbors’ driveways and yards. Nylon, wood, even cardboard tents everywhere. Decorated and plain. People sat in them. They ate in them. The one next to the temple down the block was made of canvas. I heard voices singing in it, and it wasn’t Kumbya.

Sukkahs. You have Google: Look it up.

I am, by now, accustomed to seeing guys in big, round fur hats the size of snare drums and long coats and tights. Women in saris swarm my post office. Bewigged ladies roam my grocery’s aisles. Men in white beanies congregate outside nearby storefront mosques. I wave to the Burqa Lady (she doesn’t wave back). Russian is more common than English on my subway train; riders read Korean and Japanese and Chinese tabloids. Hip-hop youth in droopy jeans hang out (literally) on our corner. My doctor’s Indian; Paul’s is Haitian. Our apartment super is Jamaican. The guys from our local gypsy-cab company are Mexican (Don’t look for yellow cabs in Brooklyn. More importantly, don’t look for yellow cabs to Brooklyn). The wild parrot? Probably from Argentina.

We even have Mormon missionaries.

We’re not in Kansas, Toto. We’re in a Peace Corps fever dream, where there’s no language training that covers all the bases, or even the Brooklyn-born patois.

A Peace Corps where there’s no clear mission.*

Aaargh!!! I’m no entrepreneur. I’m too clumsy to start an amateur sports program (and anyway, there are the Mets). There are medical clinics on every corner, and everybody who speaks English offers ESL classes. Betty Smith to the contrary, a vast number of trees grow quite nicely in Brooklyn without my help.

I am not going to start a smoking-cessation class for Muslim women.

What can I do to make my new world a better one?

Hmmm . . .

Stay tuned.

* Not that our mission in Peace Corps/Venezuela was crystalline or, for that matter, had anything to do with reality — but that’s a long, weird and, I hope, untypical story. Read about it in the Peace Corps Writers’ archives: The Non-Matrixed Wife.

— Susan O’Neill