Who are these gods again, and what kind of sacrifice do they want?

If you take public transportation in New York you know that weekends are a gamble. A train may or may not be running, may be running on a different track, may be going express and not local, or vice versa. Friday night, the rain storm took out the E train I was going to take to the upper east side, as well as the 86th street bus transverse through Central Park that was my back-up. I got where I was going 45 minutes late, but then, so did everyone else.

Last night, I took the 2 train -- normally express, but lately local for maintenance reasons unexplained -- out to Prospect Heights. As long as I have a seat and a book, I can convince myself that it doesn't matter that the trip will take twice as long as it should, and the drunk homeless man, swearing and pouring out his beer on the subway car floor, didn't show up until we were half way there.

At 72nd street, two women got on. They were a mismatched pair, one small, neatly dressed and coifed, quiet. The other, large, blousy boho skirt and shirt, long scraggly hair flying all over the place, and loud. So loud.

"Where did you meet him," the quiet woman asked as they boarded, in Polish-inflected English.

"He just fell from the sky! He just fell from the sky! I asked the gods to send me a big blond curly-haired man, and he just fell from the sky!"

No matter how the quiet woman asked her friend to explain -- was he a friend of her roommmate's, what was his name, where had they met -- the loud woman kept repeating, "he just fell from the sky! I asked the gods..." etc.

She had asked the gods, it turned out, because she had recently broken up with someone else, and she really needed someone, you know? So she asked the gods, and he just fell from the sky!

They got off at 42nd street, to transfer to the N/R, but not before the loud woman told her friend that she'd gotten a hotel room for her tryst with her godsend in Times Square.