Transported, New York City

“I’m almost dead.”

I realized after a second that the skateboarder rolling slowly to a stop near me was calling to his friend about battery power. Not health.

I see the future and it is e-assisted. Soon we will have bionic hands and plug-in feet and chip-implanted brains. Until they arrive, we are in the clunky appendage boom. We strap smart watches to our wrists. We cradle iPhones. We pedal-assist our bikes, Li-ionize our scooters, electrify our skateboards. In cities across the U.S., dockless Bird and Lime e-scooters duke it out with pedestrians and local laws. Personal transporters ‘R Us.

I snapped these two night riders at Columbus Circle just as dusk began to fall. Their boosted boards sent small cones of light ahead like tiny lighthouses across a pavement sea. Intrepid but practical, they were sensibly geared up in helmets, heavy jackets, gloves and backpacks. I figured the fellow with knee pads and fierce red tail-light had fallen once. His talismanic level of protection spoke to me of caution born of experience.

I was curious to know where they had started and for how long they had been going. I wanted to hear what brand they were riding and if they had tinkered with the design. But before I could get my nerve up to ask, the traffic light changed. They leaned back, tilted up, and off they went, across the circle and into the muffled velvet dark.

Big Root, NYC

Behold, the giant celeriac. 

After my local supermarket closed due to rising rent, I began ordering fruit, vegetables, meat and fish from New York area online grocer FreshDirect. Now and then I get a hilarious surprise.

Like this gnarled and tuberous Medusa head. When it was unpacked, it turned out to be the size of a brain and the weight of a puppy. Without a penny in the photograph, you'll have to take my word for it. How else would you know? You're in my exact same situation, stuck between a photograph and a thought.

A glance at the receipt showed it weighed out at $10.49. Would I have bought it in a store? Never. Still, less of a good story than the time my husband's aunt ordered a catalog sweater for her husband and received a mobile home instead. Or when my father mistyped and bought 1,000 shares online instead of the intended 100 (happily for him, the stock went up).

The Internet genies can be capricious. Press the magic button and you never know what might arrive next. Too bad for you, you often keep it. That 70-pound beige wool rug I expected to be ivory? Unrolled, it was too heavy to return. The fluffy featherbed that rose like helium to the heavens? Impossible to stuff back into its original plastic package. And so it goes.

Not everything that comes was meant to be. Just last month, gremlins at Bloomingdale's tossed a free $448 silk color-block dress by Tory Burch into my box of promised bed linens. I'd won a lottery I hadn't even entered. It took maximum effort and ethics to return it. I was so flattered by the size 4.

One thing I know for sure. Magnificent root vegetables should not be eaten quickly. Repurposed as art, my celeriac was quite the steal. I put it on a marble pedestal and for a few days had an organic Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Italian Renaissance painter of vegetable-headed dignitaries), or bust by  Philip Haas (contemporary American sculptural interpreter of Arcimboldo). My kitchen glimmered with the transformation.

And then I chopped it into soup.