Well, Everyone Has to Pay Taxes

Mary Altaffer/Associated Press Liberty Tax Service is one of the fastest growing chains in the city, according to a new survey.

It should come as no surprise to any New Yorker that Dunkin' Donuts and the Subway sandwich chains have continued to spread throughout the city. But Liberty Tax Service?

The latest annual census of chain stores in New York City found that the tax-preparation franchiser known for hiring people to dress as Lady Liberty or Uncle Sam and wave at passing cars, is branching out faster than almost any other chain.

Libert y now has 127 locations in the city, almost triple the number it had four years ago, according to the report released on Monday by the Center for an Urban Future. Only Dunkin' Donuts, Subway and the T-Mobile cellphone seller have added more stores in the city since 2008, the report said.

Dunkin' Donuts is “on the precipice of becoming the first national retailer with 500 stores in the five boroughs,” the report said. When the count was conducted during the summer, there were 484 Dunkin' Donuts stores in the city, an increase of 18 in a year.

Subway was an oncoming No. 2: The sandwich chain added 24 stores during the year to remain second only to Dunkin' with 454 shops in the city.

Starbucks, which ranked third with 272 stores in the city, was the most ubiquitous chain in Manhattan, which has 200 of its stores. Starbucks added five stores in Manhattan and four in Brooklyn in the past year, but none in the other three boroughs, the report said.

There are only six Starbucks in all of the Bronx, the report found. That is at least three fewer Starbucks than there are on just one street â€" Broadway - on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

In Tappan Zee Replacement, Location Adds to the Cost

Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times The Tappan Zee Bridge, seen here in 1955, was built at one of the wider points along the Hudson River, which had made replacing it an expensive project.

If this were a docudrama, it might be called “A Bridge Too Far.” If it were a television game show, it would be “The $4 Billion Question.” Instead, it's a timely real-life, stranger-than-fiction answer to a decades-old anomaly: Why did New York State build the Tappan Zee Bridge at one of the wider points on the Hudson River?

The question is more than a mere historical footnote. It is integral to why the planned replacement for the decrepit 56-year-old span that connects Westchester and Rockland Counties is expected to cost more than $4 billion and why visionary state officials are now stuck with what may seem like a short-sighted political decision made a half century ago.

At roughly $250,000 a linear foot, the difference between a three-mile-long-bridge at the gaping mouth of Tappan Bay and one farther south where the river narrows to just a mile or two in width is apparent.

Because the bridge is already stretched beyond its projected 50-year lifespan and carries 40 percent more vehicles daily than the 100,000 originally anticipated, the Cuomo administration is accelerating its replacement.

On Monday, the state's Thruway Authority voted to accept a $3.1 billion bid from a consortium called Tappan Zee Constructors. Another $600 million or so will be spent on managing and financing the project.

“The old Tappan Zee Bridge simply wasn't built to last or serve the growing region around it which is why Governor Cuomo is building a 21st century bridge that will ease congestion, include a path for pedestrians and bikers, be mass transit ready and be built to last over 100 years without major repair,” Brian Conybeare, a special adviser to the governor, said.

A new twin-span, to begin construction in 2013 and completed about six years later, will have eight traffic lanes (instead of seven), shoulders and an emergency lane.

Since the Pataki administration announced plans for a replacement in 1999, Mr. Cuomo's office said, the state has held 430 public meetings, explored 150 concepts and spent $88 million without agreeing on a final plan, much less beginning construction. Building a replacement bridge or tunnel further south where the river narrows was not considered a practical option for two reasons.

First, it would leave the existing two links of the New York State Thruway, in Tarrytown and South Nyack, dangling fecklessly at the shoreline.

And, second, it might prompt a jurisdictional dispute with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - just the sort of conflict that resulted in the original decision by Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, to build the bridge at Tarrytown, the river's second widest spot after nearby Haverstraw Bay.

Actually, the debate can be traced to 1890 when Congress chartered a private company to build a toll bridge across the Hudson. It never happened. The company's proposal to span the river from West 57th Street was finally abandoned in the 1930s after objections from Manhattan property-owners and from the Port Authority, which argued that it would obstruct navigation and compete with revenues from the new George Washington Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel.

In mapping the proposed Thruway less than two decades later, transportation planners had several options and a more sparsely po pulated canvas than they do today. They could go due south from Albany and connect with the New Jersey Turnpike, or cross the river into Westchester to link with the New England Thruway. Dewey favored the New England connection.

Meanwhile, the Port Authority was mulling another bridge of its own near Dobbs Ferry, just across from the New Jersey border and where the river is only about a mile wide. The Dobbs Ferry site was within the 25-mile radius from the Statue of Liberty, which defined the authority's domain.

Thruway engineers asked the authority to waive its jurisdiction, but were told that its bondholders had been promised that the authority would have exclusive rights to construct a Hudson River bridge or tunnel within its own territory.

Dewey was not inclined to share toll revenue with New Jersey and wanted all the tolls from a new bridge reserved to help finance the Thruway. He vetoed the Port Authority plans to build a span of its own, and decided to place the new bridge as far south as possible, but just outside (by less than a mile) the authority's turf on a site that 14 years before had been deemed too expensive and “beyond any self-liquidating possibility.”

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times The Tappan Zee Bridge will be replaced by a new span that will be wider and will accommodate a much larger volume of traffic.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 18, 2012

In an earlier version of this post, the length of the Tappan Zee Bridge was mistakenly given as 3.1 miles long. It is three miles long.

5 Rare Turtle Hatchlings Progressing at Healthy, Slow Pace

Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society One of five Chinese yellow-headed box turtles that hatched at the Bronx Zoo.

The Bronx Zoo has taken a slow and steady step toward victory in a race to save a gravely endangered turtle from extinction.

The zoo announced Monday that five Chinese yellow-headed box turtles had hatched. The turtles were born at different times during the fall, but the zoo had held off on the announcement until it made sure the animals were healthy.

Zoo-goers can see the five hatchlings, which don't have names, through a window at the Reptile House's nursery.

Chinese yellow-headed box turtles are among the 25 mos t-endangered types of turtles in the world. Fewer than 150 remain in the wild, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo. In China, the turtles have been used as food, pets and in traditional medicine. Pollution and habitat loss have also played roles in the turtle population's decline.

Breeding the baby turtles, which all came from the same two parents, required zoo workers to artificially recreate the turtles' natural habitat - they are found in Anhui Province in eastern China.

The hatchlings were part of the organization's larger plan to replenish some endangered turtle species' populations.

“The success we are seeing in the early stages of this program is encouraging,” Jim Breheny, the Wildlife Conservation Society's executive vice president for zoos and aquarium, said in a news release. “Over time, we hope to expand our turtle propagation work to extend to many of the most endangered s pecies of turtles and tortoises.”

New Inquest to Be Held Into Death of Amy Winehouse

Luke Macgregor/Reuters Amy Winehouse performing at the Glastonbury Festival in England on June 28, 2008.

More than a year since the death of Amy Winehouse, the sideshow surrounding her demise and the investigation into it has yet to subside. Officials in London said that a new inquest would be held into Ms. Winehouse's death next month because the coroner who conducted the original examination lacked proper qualifications, The Associated Press reported. Ms. Winehouse, the Grammy-winning soul singer who performed hit songs like “Rehab” and “Valerie,” was found dead in her apartment in the London borough of Camden on July 23, 2011.

An inquest held in October 2011 said that Ms. Winehouse, 27, had died from accidental alcohol poisoning. But Suzanne Greenaway, the assistant deputy coroner who oversaw the examination, resigned the following month amid questions about her qualifications and whether she had worked the required number of years in her field before assuming her position. Her husband, Andrew Reid, who was the coroner for the area of London that includes Camden and had appointed Ms. Greenaway to her post, was suspended and resigned this month, The A.P. said.

The new inquest for Ms. Winehouse will be held on Jan. 8. A spokesman for the Winehouse family told The A.P. that the family had not requested the new examination.

Musical Moments, Part V: \'La Bohème\'

Last month, in an Arts & Leisure article and a series of videos, I discussed and analyzed some of my favorite moments in music and invited Times readers to send in theirs.

As of this writing, more than 800 readers have replied. In a followup Arts & Leisure piece I reported on and summed up the varied, interesting and personal choices that readers shared. And with a trusty duo of video journalists from the Times (Gabe Johnson and Mayeta Clark), I have made some more videos in which I discuss some of the favorite moments suggested to me and analyzed them at the piano.

So here goes.

William E. Wallace of St. Louis wrote that the moment at the end of Puccini's “Bohème” when Rodolfo, realizing that Mimi has died, cries out her name in anguish “never fails to produce sobs.” The wrenching music in that moment has been heard earlier, though, as I point out in this video.

Britain\'s National Portrait Gallery Buys a Defaced Self-Portrait

The National Portrait Gallery in London has purchased a self-portrait by the highly regarded British artist Craigie Aitchison that is covered with slash marks put there by the artist himself, the BBC reported. Mr. Ferguson, defaced the painting, which dates from the late 1950s or early '60s, in response to a comment that called it “flattering,” and said he would only permit its restoration if the marks were kept visible. He kept the painting until his death in 2009.

“Craigie Aitchison was a highly distinctive artist whose singular vision was rooted in an acute sensitivity to colour and subtle implications of meaning,” Paul Moorhouse, the museum's curator of 20th-century portraits, told the BBC.

He added, “We are delighted that this fascinating self-portrait survived the artist's momentary destructive doubts and can now be seen by future generations.” It will go on view on Tuesday.

Bill Clinton Documentary, Directed by Martin Scorsese, Coming to HBO

Doug Mills/The New York Times Bill Clinton, a day before a rally with President Obama in Concord, N.H.

As a director of nonfiction features, Martin Scorsese has chronicled artists like the Band and George Harrison. Now, in his next documentary film, he will take on the life of a famous saxophonist, albeit one who is better known for his work in other spheres of American life.

Bill Clinton will be the subject of the new film. Mr. Scorsese is directing and pro ducing it for HBO with Mr. Clinton's full cooperation, the cable channel said on Monday. No title or premiere date for the project was immediately announced, but in a statement Mr. Scorsese described Mr. Clinton as “a towering figure who remains a major voice in world issues” and who “continues to shape the political dialogue both here and around the world.” Mr. Scorsese added, “Through intimate conversations, I hope to provide greater insight into this transcendent figure.”

Mr. Clinton said in a statement: “I am pleased that legendary director Martin Scorsese and HBO have agreed to do this film. I look forward to sharing my perspective on my years as President, and my work in the years since, with HBO's audience.”

Mr. Scorsese, whose fictional films include “Taxi Driver” and “The Departed,” has also worked with HBO on documentaries like “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” and “Public Speaking,” about the author Fran Le bowitz. He is also an executive producer of the cable channel's period crime drama “Boardwalk Empire.”

Staten Island Landfill Park Proves Savior in Hurricane

During Hurricane Sandy, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island absorbed a critical part of the storm surge. Its hills and waterways spared nearby neighborhoods like Travis, Bulls Head, New Springville and Arden Heights much worse flooding. The 2,200-acre site, which closed a decade ago and is being turned into a park, was also temporarily reopened as a transfer station, helping officials and relief agencies clear debris from around the city.

If many New Yorkers, Staten Islanders included, still can't help thinking of the place as a mountain range of stinking trash, that's understandable. But since its closing, Fresh Kills has become a model for landfill reclamation around the world, having been transformed into a vast green s pace full of wildlife. Now it is also demonstrating the role of wetland buffers in battling rising waters.

Maybe this will help push officials to ready what is known as Freshkills Park for visitors. James Corner, the landscape architect who helped design the High Line and heads the firm Field Operations, won a competition years ago to transform the site and imagined a decades-long, evolving earthwork of different grasses, grown, cut and replanted, creating a rich new soil and landscape.

It's a visionary plan. But regulatory and financial hurdles, along with the usual bureaucratic conflicts, have stalled progress. The state environmental agency wants to make sure the site is safe, which makes sense. At the same time, the price tag - by some estimates, hundreds of millions of dollars - has clearly daunted city leaders and led officials to pursue a piecemeal transformation that could undo Mr. Corner's concept.

Considering the unconscionable $4 billion (or more) that is being squandered on a new PATH station at the World Trade Center site for perhaps 50,000 commuters, the cost of Fresh Kills doesn't sound quite so crazy. Now there's word that the Metropolitan Transit Authority may need to spend $600 million to restore the South Ferry subway station, which opened just in 2009 and was flooded by the storm. It's hard to say which is more scandalous, that the authority's planners hadn't anticipated flooding at a station on the water's edge, or that subway fare increases will partly go to pay for their shortsightedness.

By comparison, Fresh Kills has come out smelling like roses.

I recently paid a visit and shot a video of the site with my colleague David Frank and Eloise Hirsh, administrator of Freshkills Park for the New York City Parks Department. No wonder Mr. Corner discovered such potential in what has become a timely research post for climate change and ecological restoration. Once it is opened to the public, the park also promises to repay long-suffering Staten Island residents who endured generations of stench and anger, and more than that, to give the entire city an immense, bucolic urban playland - a 21st-century postindustrial landmark rising from mounds of 20th-century waste.

Who knows? In its shift from blight to boon, it could become a park as unexpected and transformative for the city as the High Line.

Follow Michael Kimmelman on Twitter, @kimmelman.

Participant Media Plans Its Own Cable Channel

Participant Media, the production company behind films like “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Food, Inc.” and “Waiting for ‘Superman,” said Monday that it planned to start a cable channel of its own by combining the assets of two obscure channels, the Documentary Channel and Halogen TV.

Participant said it was aiming to start the yet-unnamed channel next summer. Evan Shapiro, a former president of IFC and the Sundance Channel who joined the company last spring, will run the new channel.

“The goal of Participant is to tell stories that serve as catalysts for social change,” said Jeff Skoll, the founder of Participant. “With our television channel, we can bring those stories into the homes of our viewers every day.”

The channel could be a destination for documentaries made by Participant and other producers. Participant said it would also have original programming and named several people who are involved in making it, including Brian Graden, Brian Henson, Davis Guggenheim, Meghan McCain and Morgan Spurlock.

The channel will target viewers under the age of 35 - those, as Mr. Shapiro put in a news release Monday, that cable and satellite distributors are “most at risk of losing.” In other words: Participant might try to gain carriage for the channel by pitching it as a way for distributors to retain young subscribers. Distributors, however, are generally reluctant to carry new channels.

When it starts, the newly rebranded channel will already reach 40 million homes, Participant estimated, thanks to the channels it is acquiring. The company said Monday that it has completed a deal to acquire the Documentary Channel, which is available in about 25 million homes, and is working on a deal to take over Halogen TV's channel position in about 15 million homes.

The terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Among the many documentaries distributed by Participant was “Page One: Inside The New York Times,” a feature about The Times that was released last year. (Several reporters from the newspaper's media desk, including the one writing this article, were featured in the film.)

Debut Poetry Collection Coming From James Franco

Martin Tessler for The New York Times The artist, author and actor James Franco.

Perhaps the only way that James Franco could surprise us now with his unpredictable creative pursuits is if he simply chucked them all to spend more time splitting rocks at his local quarry. And yet Mr. Franco, the artist, author and actor (whose films include “Milk” and “127 Hours”), continues to add to his eclectic résumé, announcing plans on Monday to publish his first book of poetry.

Graywolf Press, the independent Minnesota publisher, said that it had acquired a new poetry collection by Mr. Franco called “Directing Herbert White,” which it plans to release in April 2014.

The collection takes its title from a poem Mr. Franco composed about his work on a short film that he, in turn, adapted from the poem “Herbert White,” by Frank Bidart.

Mr. Franco said in a telephone interview on Monday that this poem was “about my relationship to that poem, Frank's relationship to the poem as I have learned about it from knowing Frank and the adaptation process,” and “how Frank puts so much of himself into the figure of this psycho necrophiliac.” The other works in the collection, he said, were “a way to blend film and poetry and performance and persona - all the things that I think are related to that poem and that process I went through of adapting that poem.”

Mr. Franco, who has portrayed poets in films like “Howl” (which cast him as Allen Ginsberg) and “The Broken Tower” (in which he played Hart Crane, and which he also wrote and directed), is not simply an admirer of well-crafted verse: he also holds a master of fine arts in creative writing from Brooklyn College in New York and an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. His previously published writings include a short story collection, “Palo Alto.”

Jeffrey Shotts, the poetry editor of Graywolf Press, described Mr. Franco's new poetry collection in a statement as “a frank and illuminating set of scenes from inside filmmaking and fame.” He said that these poems “are, in part, a series of portraits of American successes and failures from within Hollywood, as a young actor comes of age.” He added, “But they are also smart and highly aware notes of caution of what can happen when the filmed self becomes fixed and duplicated, while the ongoing self must continue living and watching.”

\'A Christmas Story\' Climbs the Broadway Box Office Charts

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Johnny Rabe, left, and Dan Lauria in the Broadway musical “A Christmas Story.”

The new Broadway musical “A Christmas Story,” based on the 1983 movie, jumped at the box office to become the fourth-most-popular Broadway show last week, behind the traditional blockbusters “Wicked,” “The Lion King” and “The Book of Mormon,” according to ticket sale data released on Monday. Its $1,377,131 gross put “A Christmas Story” ahead of two shows that beat it the pr ior week - the Al Pacino-led “Glengarry Glen Ross” and the super-hero spectacle “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” The high gross for “Christmas Story” was partly the result of its producers adding a ninth performance last week; most other shows had only the usual eight.

With music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and a book (which hews closely to the film) by Joseph Robinette, “A Christmas Story” has been edging out the other holiday musical on Broadway, “Elf,” itself based on a 2003 film starring Will Ferrell. “Elf” grossed a healthy $1,137,915 last week. The production's ticket sales are undoubtedly slower because “Elf” was on Broadway just two winters ago for its first holiday season run, when it was an even bigger seller than “A Christmas Story” has been now. The other major holiday shows in New York thi s winter are “Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical” at Madison Square Garden and “The Radio City Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City Music Hall; spokeswomen for the two shows each declined to discuss their box office data on Monday.

While ticket sales are strong for “A Christmas Story,” it will have nowhere near enough time to recoup its $9 million capitalization costs, given that it is running for only about eight weeks. Most popular Broadway musicals with a $9 million capitalization need roughly a year to recoup. But a spokesman for “A Christmas Story,” said that its producers believed that their investors “will be getting a return that will significantly go towards recoupment.”

“The projections are holding true: not a long enough run to fully recoup during the short holiday season, but future productions and licensing will create long term profit for the investors,” said the spokesman, Keith Sherman. He said that the producers would not discuss the financial details of the show, such as its weekly running costs that influence the timetable of shows turning a profit. Only about one-quarter of Broadway musicals ever make money, but some others go on to do so later on with touring productions and licensing deals.

Holiday shows have become a staple of Broadway entertainment in recent years, with “Irving Berlin's White Christmas” and “Donnie & Marie: A Broadway Christmas” also in the mix.

Over all last week, Broadway musicals and plays grossed $23.5 million, compared to $23.8 million the week before and $24.3 million for the comparable week last year. David Mamet's new Broadway play “The Anarchist” closed on Sunday, a considerable flop after just five weeks of performances, in spite of its starry cast of Patti LuPone and Debra Winger; the play took in $268,824 for the week, or just 35 percent of its maximum possible gross.

Looking Up at the New Whitney

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times See a larger version.

The final beam was lofted into place Monday atop the Renzo Piano-designed building in the meatpacking district that will serve as the new home of the Whitney Museum. The museum is leaving the Upper East Side for the downtown location in 2015. The top of the structure included an American flag, which was flown at half-staff to honor the victims of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

Homeland\'s Season Finale, With a Twist

The season finale of “Homeland” on Sunday had a surprise ending, all right.

It was surprisingly good.

The pace wasn't frantic, the plot didn't turn preposterously farfetched, and the rekindled love affair between the C.I.A. analyst and the P.O.W.-turned-terrorist was sundered not by treachery or boredom, but by a calamitous terrorist attack that made it impossible for them to stay together.

The ending brought closure and still managed to stay open-ended.

Carrie (Claire Danes) helped Brody (Damian Lewis) go on the lam because he convinced her that he was framed for the bombing of C.I.A. headquarters. He could be telling the truth, or perhaps only half of it. A mole in the intelligence community must have helped the terrorists pull it off, or maybe not. But Carrie is back in the spying business with a new terrorist mastermind to hunt down. Better yet, some of the more tiresome characters and subplots - including the hawkish vice president an d the angst of the vice president's son over a woman he killed with reckless driving - are gone.

The blast brought the narrative closer to what Carrie wasn't sure she really wanted: a clean slate.

And that's perhaps the most unpredictable element of all. After so many detours to the implausible, there was every reason to expect the season finale to be a letdown, and even downright silly. The Showtime series that became an overnight hit in 2011 because it was so different from most television espionage shows lost some of that novelty in the second season, listing too often towards the kind of preposterous twists of “24” and still more ordinary television shows, from the medical miracles that allowed Brody to recover after having a knife plunged straight through his hand to killing off the vice president by tinkering with his pacemaker by remote control.

The first season offered a perfectly balanced set of contradictions. The second was more uneven. Even the show's most creative step, the twisted psyche of its heroine, lost some ground in season two. Carrie's bipolar affliction was fascinating last season, because it was both her greatest weakness and her strength. Her mind worked differently from everyone else's; she detected buried patterns where everyone else saw only fog.

This season, Carrie emerged from electroshock reasonably sane, and that was in some ways diminishing. She went from being a fascinating head case to just another headstrong heroine, the kind who on a series like “Rizzoli and Isles” goes into an abandoned building alone, armed with a crowbar, to capture the terrorist who almost killed her while she was tied to a pipe, “Perils o f Pauline” style.

Until the finale, that is. Carrie wasn't bipolar this time round, but she was definitely of two minds, torn between having Brody and her C.I.A. career until, a little like Rick in “Casablanca,” she realized that she had to trick him into leaving so she can stay behind and fight the good fight. The last frame showed her mentor, Saul, (Mandy Patinkin) seemingly stunned with relief and joy that Carrie was actually alive - the continuation of a beautiful friendship.

The secret of the finale's success was that it didn't borrow from “24,” it paid homage to classic movie thrillers. The scene where Estes, (David Harewood) the slimy director of counterintelligence, returns home and is shocked to find the agency's black ops hit man Quinn (Rupert Friend) waiting for him quietly in a corner arm chair was remarkably like the denouement of “Three Days of the Condor.” Quinn's decision to disobey Estes' order to kill Brody â€" call it a mome nt of clarity â€" was reminiscent of “The Bourne Identity.”

And Brody's desperation when he sees that he is being set up to take the fall for the bombing attack with his own confession tape, the one he made before aborting his suicide mission in season one, had more than a trace of the panic felt by the Soviet sleeper mole in “No Way Out.”

Sunday's episode opened with a warning to viewers that in light of the Sandy Hook school massacre, some scenes in the last episode might be disturbing. It wasn't the bombing, however, that brought the Connecticut tragedy to mind. That looked too much like Sept 11. It was the scene where Brody's family, holed up at home, under surveillance by camera crews and government agents, watch television and realize that Brody is being held responsible for the death of so many innocent people - a sin of their father's that will stain the children forever.

The fact that Brody may be innocent this time round isn't the only unexpected twist.

For much of the second season, the writers had built up low expectations, giving even devoted viewers reason to feel cheated. The finale proved them wrong.

Season two didn't address all the unexplained mysteries or tie up all the inconsistencies, but it did leave fans in the mood for a third season.

Like an overload of love, money or fine dining, more of a great show sometimes can be a little too much. The only thing worse is less.

A Gift of Flowers

Victor Kerlow

Dear Diary:

I had an unusual experience recently.

The morning seemed like a run-of-the-mill weekday. I had just dropped off my daughter for school on Flatbush Avenue in Park Slope and was waiting for a friend and fellow mom to emerge from her car to chat when a man came out of DNY Natural Land. He was carrying a bouquet of roses.

Feeling a bit playful, I addressed him. “Oh, for me?” I asked, expecting a smile and a polite brushoff.

But something entirely different occurred: The man looked me full in the eye, grinned, and said, “Yes. For you!” then handed me the roses.

“Ha, ha!” I laughed and handed back the bouquet. Or tried to. He refused to accept them.

“No, no, you can't mean thi s!” I screeched.

“I do,” he insisted, and walked back into the store to buy a second bouquet.

What could have precipitated such a generous act? Had the love of his life just accepted his proposal? Had he snagged a new job or promotion? Or was he simply glad to be alive on this beautiful wintry morning? I'll never know - only that a stranger on the street initiated an unexpected act of kindness. And for that, lovely, anonymous man, thank you.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.