I had a really sour taste in my mouth from those sour grapes I’d been eating. So I went for a run in Prospect Park yesterday around noon.

Oh the utter pleasure of running around the park on a sunny spring afternoon. Heart beating fast and limbs moving through air, many thoughts coagulated in my brain.

I found myself dwelling on the $6.75 million house that Jonathan Safran Foer bought (see Postcard April 28) as I was still struggling to put my finger on why everyone (including myself) is making such a big deal about it.

Sour grapes is definitely part of. That is, the natural tendency of New Yorkers (and other humans, too) to disparage what they cannot attain. The term comes from an Aesops Fables called "The Fox and the Grape:" 

"One hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard
till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which
had been trained over a lofty branch.  "Just the thing to quench
my thirst," quoth he.  Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and
a jump, and just missed the bunch.  Turning round again with a
One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success.  Again
and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to
give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I
am sure they are sour."

But I digress. My run, as it always does, managed to cleanse my mind of all negative thoughts and real estate regrets. I am at the top of my world – in my own private Richard Meier glass apartment (as it were), when I run around Prospect Park alone.

Ah the mastery, the sense of power, the feeling that I am joyfully alive.

After one lap of the park, I ran out of the park on Third Street and ran past the Foer/Krauss residence. And guess what? I saw Jonathan S. Foer standing in the yard talking to a workman who was cleaning the limestone house next store. I gathered that Jonathan was urging the workmen to use more plastic covering so as not to spray debris into the Foer/Krauss garden.

I backtracked a bit and made quick eye contact with JSF who is a small man with dark curly hair and eyeglasses. Not tall, he looks like a hundred brainy guys I grew up with on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Standing there in his voluminous backyard, he looked oblivious to the fact that all of Brooklyn blogdom is a-quiver about his multi-million dollar purchase. And of course he didn’t have a clue that the runner who’d just run by was…

…OTBKB!

When I got back to the apartment, I told my husband and he suggested we bring the Foer/Krauss’ a box of sumptuous chocolates from The Chocolate Room on Fifth Avenue. Send out the old Park Slope welcome wagon. Because none of this is really about them. Personally, I’m glad to have highly literate and interesting people in our midst.

It’s sour grapes, that’s all. And a healthy dose of anger at the rich person’s neighborhood that Park Slope has become.