A recent unusually warm morning found me up and about at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m. Standing on a corner on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I was approached by a dark-skinned fifty-ish man seeking assistance. "Excuse me...please," the rather harried man intoned, in one of those indistinct, hard-to-peg accents that simply say "I am a stranger in your land." He could have been Spanish, Greek, Middle Eastern or Martian. I assumed, as he produced a scrap of paper for my consideration, that I'd find an address written there. I imagined him a messenger struggling to make a delivery or some other such perplexed assignee.

A glance at the scrap of paper he held out for me, however, revealed no address; rather, scrawled in a barely legible hand, I saw the word "elderly." "Excuse me...how do you pronounce this?" the man asked. A bit taken aback, I didn't answer right away. "This word, how do you pronounce it, please?"

"Elderly." I finally came out with. "El...dur...lee?" he repeated. "Yes, elderly." I responded. "El-dur-lee, yes. Thank you! Thank you!" he gushed, obviously relieved of a great burden. He then scunied off, leaving me to ponder questions of my own.

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