Delis will also give you a straw with every canned or bottled beverage you buy. Water, soda, juice … Sometimes they ask if you want a bag. (No. Why get a little bag for one little item?) But always there is a straw. Always. I have a drawer full of unused straws in my office. I keep them with all the extra packets of soy sauce I’ve collected.
Archive for the 'New York' Category
20
Sep
05
New York Lesson No. 326: Straws
20
Sep
05
New York Lesson No. 325: Coffee
When getting coffee from a deli, bear the following in mind:
“Coffee” is two sugars and milk. You have to ask for cream if you want half & half instead of milk. You have to ask for “regular coffee” if you want it black, but regular coffee still comes with sugar. You have to specify “one sugar” if you want less or “no sugar” if you want none. So, what I think of as just coffee is actually “regular coffee, no sugar.”
I used to get a coffee and a muffin on the way to work every morning at the bakery/pizzeria on the corner where I enter the No. 7 train. The first time I did it, I watched the guy behind the counter slosh two heaping spoonfuls into the cup before pouring on the coffee. It was more like coffee-flavored candy. So, started the next day, I became more specific. Then I tried taking no sugar at all, which is now my habit — and not a bad habit, come to think of it
I stopped going to that bakery for two reasons. 1.) They changed muffin suppliers, and the crusty raisin bran muffins I love were replaced by soft, oily shadows of raisin bran muffins. 2.) I just drink a cup of coffee at home in the morning while I’m making lunches.
19
Sep
05
Patience and Fortitude
Today is the first anniversary of my wedding day. Jeff and I celebrated with a quick walk around the environs of the New York Public Library building at Bryant Park, where, three years ago, he proposed to me, and a quiet dinner out in the West Village.
Patience flanks the south side of the NY Public Library front steps. (NYPL.org)
Standing just behind the marble lion on the south side of the front steps, Jeff distracted my attention toward some pigeons or something, and when I turned back, there was a small, gray box sitting in front of me on the low wall surrounding the terrace. What else could it be but a ring? Its sudden appearance was still a total surprise. And the first thing I thought was “Why didn’t I propose to him first?” And then “How long has he been planning this?” I snapped open the lid and looked at the simple white gold band, and I hardly knew how to look at him anymore.
“Will you marry me?” he asked. And wishing I could say something more heroic, I took a deep breath and said “Yes.”
After slipping the ring on and holding Jeff for a good long time and looking back and forth several times between his tearful eyes and the shining ring, we walked away together to explore the city.
Incidentally, as we turned to go, we saw we were in front of a Starbucks and were sort of amused and horrified at once. Had he just provosed to me in front of the Starbucks? Technically, yes. And looking in three directions and seeing three more Starbucks, we realized there was little chance in Midtown Manhattan of not proposing in front of one.
This was two years before we moved to New York. September. Jeff thought the library was simply a good bookish place to propose to a former English major. And I loved him for making that choice.
When I later learned that the two lions in front of the library building are named Patience and Fortitude, the appropriateness of that location was even more clear, whether Jeff intended it or not. After love, what are the most essential ingredients of a relationship? Patience and fortitude: a willingness to deal with not only your own problems, but also the challenges someone else brings to your life; and the strength to do it again and again.
And again.
Jeff and I got into a stupid fight the night before our anniversary. We were drunk, and I was being stupid. It was not the way either of us wanted to start our second year of marriage, but there it was — poorly timed, but when is a good time for an argument. I slept in the second bedroom and woke up clear headed enough to remember almost everything from the night before.
We’ve had some spectacular fights in the last eight years. Nothing physical. We don’t duke it out. We just suddenly snap and bark at each other like young dogs. Once I slammed the bedroom door so hard it I broke the door jamb. Once Jeff threw a brick of sharp cheddar on the floor. Broken plates. Overturned ashtrays. Nothing that can’t be swept away.
And we still enjoyed our pilgrimmage to the library today, albeit after sleeping in until mid-afternoon and sheepishly tip-toeing around the apartment. We visited our little sacred spot behind Patience and kissed and held on to each other like our lives depend on it — because they do. We still had our dinner out at his favorite place, Good (which was not-so-good tonight, as it happens). We got dessert at a café with a few friends and had an early night in watching a movie and teasing our cat.
Because we can.
With patience and fortitude all this marvelous mundanity can be ours.
The Starbucks is no longer on that terrace in front of the library. The lions aren’t so easily moved. Those marble guardians stand against time and the elements. And in a way, so do we. We stand against a legal system that is only reluctantly starting to accept us but still doesn’t recognize my marriage, a population that pendulates between misunderstanding and ignoring us, and patterns of self-destructive behavior that threaten to divide us from our friends and family and each other. Witness last night: We can clearly stand against each other. But even in doing this, we do not stand apart. In the end, we always settle in to a soft, close, quiet place and sigh and take a moment to look around at the leather-bound volumes of our years together and find a sense of pride and accomplishment and relief. We remember how important it is to stand together, guarding this little relationship of ours.
P.S. We’re now looking for statues named after “wisdom,” “beauty,” and “financial responsibility.” If you have any leads, let me know.
28
Aug
05
Not an Animal
I’ll start with a story.
I take the F train from Jackson Heights in Queens all the way through to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to get to work. Most mornings I’m stuck right in the thick of bridge and tunnel rush hour. Those trains are packed. And you have to be pretty aggressive to get on sometimes, or those passengers will rush right past you — business men, little old ladies, moms with strollers.
Shoving is a way of life in the New York City subway. You give up apologizing for it after a while. And you put up with it from other people as long as you can until you want to scream. Sometimes it goes too far, and people lose all dignity and act like idiots to get on a subway car. Some people get close to the breaking point, I’m sure. One midwinter morning, I saw someone boil over.
I was crammed into one of the end cars, which are usually less crowded than those in the center of the train, and we were stopped at 21st Street/Queensbridge on our way out of Queens. The car was so full, there was no hope of getting anyone else in.
A man standing at the edge of the doorway began to react to a woman who was pushing him from behind. There was nowhere at all for him to go. There was no room for an other single person, and her pushing was totally useless. But she kept pressing herself against him, as if she were desperate to get in that car.
“Please don’t push me,” he said, sounding tired and annoyed. “I’m not an animal.”
Usually on the subway everyone is so quiet that when someone speaks up, everyone not lost in an iPod-induced haze hears it. Most of the passengers began to surreptitiously watch what was happening near the door. It’s an unobtrusive curiousity, a banal form of entertainment — anything is better than reading the same shampoo or community college ad for the 900th time. This is what mass transit reduces us to, sometimes.
Evidently she continued to push him, because he repeated himself. “Please stop pushing me,” he said more insistently. “There’s no room.”
She kept pushing, muttering something in a soft voice.
The man turned around and shouted, “There’s … no … room!” And emphasized the last word and shoved her back onto the platform with both hands.
The quick, painless, but somewhat violent action got everyone’s attention. Some people gasped. Some just looked nervously back and forth. And what should we do? There really was no room. The man ws clearly right, and the woman was clearly going to have to wait for the next train or try her luck at another door.
Undaunted, she leapt back toward the car and began pleading. She must have gotten a running start, because she managed to get slightly further in to the car — but not far enough to let the door close.
“Please. Please, just move in a little. Please — “
“There’s no room for you!” the man shouted. But she kept pushing.
He grasped the relatively small woman by her upper arms, lifted her up, pivoted and dropped her back onto the platform. It was not a particularly violent action, but it was certainly odd to see some one stranger laying hands on another and physically removing her from a subway car.
The woman sort of staggered back. And the doors closed, and the train lurched into motion.
Some people looked indignantly away from the doorway. Others shot dirty looks at the man. He ignored everyone but a woman who was evidently standing next to him. She began to argue with him and he would argue back. The atmosphere was tense and uncomfortable. But all the rest of us pretty much went on about our business.
I wasn’t sure how to feel: A man had just forcibly removed a woman from the subway. It felt like a fight had just occurred. Was someone calling the police right now? Would there be officers at the next stop waiting to arrest the man?
Then I remembered my headphones in my pocket. I nestled them into my ears, turned on my iPod and clicked around to my “favorites” playlist. “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey fired up, and I began to daydream about a city boy born and raised in south Detroit.
... but enough about me 