I came home from work this morning content with anticipation of coffee and the paper at my local Brasil Coffee House. The coffee there is so full of flavor, and the Daily News so full of shit (the way I love my news). < sigh > My neighborhood in Queens is populated by old-timers who have lived here all their children’s lives, and new renters who wish they could find the same rent they had in Indiana, and today’s yuppies (if that’s still a word) who can afford to buy the houses and apartments that high-rent-paying suckers like me wish we could win in a will. I’ve been saying hello to some of the same faces in this neighborhood for years, and find my heart swells with local patriotism (a natural ingredient in the stew of my mind). Leaving my coffee house this morning, I was full of zen content, jacked up on exhaustion and high-grade caffeine, walking home through a beautiful morning in a neighborhood I’ve grown to love, when turning onto my street I spotted the neighborhood gossip, a nice-enough long-term-local lady bent to her task of scooping up windblown newspaper pages from the sidewalk. She was in front of my building and making her way further down the block. I knew there was a fifty/fifty chance I’d get stuck in those unavoidable ten to thirty minutes of jabbering neighborhood gossip and complaints, and her required enthusiastic head noddings and gasps of, “You’re kidding me!” might not have been easily musterable in my current mellow state. My brain wracked for excuses. Should I just get in my car and drive away on a made up mission? Should I cock my head suddenly and say, “I think that’s my phone!”? I could have kicked myself in the balls for not carrying in my mind a list of ready-made excuses. But wait… she still hadn’t looked in my direction. Maybe I wouldn’t get stuck after all. I dug my keys from my pocket as jinglelessly as I could, stepped silent as a cat up the couple steps to my building’s front door, watched her a building away collecting trash intently as I turned my key and pushed inside. Yes! I had escaped conversation! I walked upstairs proudly, like I’d just won some top prize, entered my empty apartment, and thought to myself, “I wonder what’s been going on in the neighborhood? I’ll bet what’s her name would have felt like bullshitting for awhile.” I knew I should have made more noise with my keys.