A tow-headed boy on a bike rolled past us, sucking a bright green pickle. The sharp smell of knife-clean dill and garlic pulled a rip-cord in my head, dropping me into the middle of Rivington Street, between Orchard and Delancey.

Bright Sunday morning on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York's eager and determined bargain-hunters searching through the sidewalk bins for good buys and old friends. On the corner of Orchard Street, the Pickle Man presided over wooden vats of assorted sizes and shades of green and succulent submarines, each hue denoting a different stage or flavor of picklement. Half-submerged beneath the floating bits of garlic an peppercorns and twigs of dill, schools of pickles drifted like spiced fish waiting belly up for a bite. Nearby, sawhorse tables extended onto the sidewalk under a striped awning, holding flats of dried apricots, dark orange and mysteriously translucent. Beside them on the tables, long square wooden boxes half-open, waxed paper pulled back over the ong slabs of halvah, ground sesame-paste candy. There were boxes of vanilla, smooth chocolate, and the crazy-quilt mixture of the two - my favorite, marble.

Over all, in the sharpening autumn air, the smells from Ratner's Dairy Restaurant drifting around the corner and over the rooftops, cheese blintzes and freshly baked onion rolls. They mingled with the heavier smells of the delicatessen next door, where all-beef garlic sausages and stuffed derma nestled alongside of the kasha knishes in the window-warmer. To the noses on the busy street, religious and dietary separations did not matter, and Sunday morning shopping on Rivington Street was an orchestra of olfactory delights.

I wondered where the boy had gotten a half-dill pickle in Stamford, Connecticut.

- Audre Lord, "Zami - A New Spelling of my Name"