I moved to Bergen County, North Part of New Jersey five years ago. Before I lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is a very specific borough. It reminds me Babylon Tower. Because there are many different neighborhoods in Brooklyn. So for one day I can visit China, Greece, Poland, Israel, Africa, Russia and many more countries and continents in Brooklyn. I can eat their national food in their national restaurants. So still almost every weekend I drive to Brooklyn to see my relatives, friends and to buy some delicatessens from Russian Grocery. Usually I take George Washington Bridge(GWB) , FDR* and Brooklyn Bridge. If I am lucky and there is no traffic, my commute takes approximately fifty minutes.
Last Sunday as always I passed GWB and my car’s tires sang their song on FDR: ’sh-sh-sh’. All lanes were busy. Especially there were many yellow cabs and black limos. The weather was gorges. The sun was still bright, the sky – deep-blue and light breeze from the East River.
But suddenly my attention was attracted by something small moving on the edge of the road near the concrete barrier, which divided lanes with opposite directions. My foot automatically pushed slightly on the brake.
- What’s that?
- Animal?
- No, it’s impossible.
Any animal trying to cross a highway always hit by a car. I saw many of their corps: big and small, white and gray, brown and black. Deer, raccoons, skunks –
all of them were killed by cars on highways. It is a real tragedy of American animals.
I was approaching closer to that strange object. It still was moving. It had a round shape and dark-gray color. Closer-closer – it was a ball. Probably it was a soccer ball. I was not able to differentiate. Somebody dropped it from a car by accident. And it was impossible to pick it back. So, that ball will be jumping along FDR nobody knows how long. Probably it belonged to children before and they took it to the summer camp in the Catskill Mountains. They had a good time there playing ball. And when they came back to city the ball jumped through the open window.
It was funny. It was just a ball.
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* Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive