Scroll

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Scroll
Scroll

Through the Looking Glass

posted Saturday June 6th, 2009

sweetie-cage2

I am home. I mean it.

And that’s saying something, considering I spent the last 2 and a half days in New York City, the place I always assumed I’d call home, from the time I saw Sesame Street — followed by a life-long barrage of manufactured scenes set in a city far more glamorous than my own hometown.

New York is a dangerous place for me. Ray and I brought the girls in 2007 and before that, I don’t think I’d been at all since 1999. Going alone was a big deal — it meant staying not just at a funky hotel but inside my own funky head. I didn’t have a choice. The boss ordered it. It was very nice of him; one of my writers won a big, huge journalism award and the boss sweetly acknowledged the importance of editors by asking me to attend.

So I picked the risotto (or was it orzo?) from around a big piece of salmon (no one at the Yale Club got the memo about my fish phobia, obviously) and made small talk. (And lamented the fact that in just a short year, my newspaper has shorted the commitment to telling long, hard stories and focused instead on blogging, which for me has a place — right here. But not right there, not in the Yale Club with the NYT and the WSJ and a bunch of other serious journalists. That’s a topic for different day.)

The luncheon was fine, as I knew it would be. It was the rest of the trip I had worried about. Would I have a breakdown in the Village, swoon on 5th Avenue, disolve into a puddle of tears at Columbus Circle? I padded the awards luncheon with a day on either end — of course, I was flying across the country! psyche be damned! — and topping my alterna-agenda was meeting Maya, my fellow mom blogger, mother of Leo and Ellie and a real kindred spirit.

The meeting was terrific. Maya did what I meant to do — she grew up across the country, moved to New York for grad school, and now she works in the city, even with two kids (one with DS) and all that entails. (The story’s longer than that, but that’s basically it.) But I didn’t hate her, not one little bit, and if you know her, you know why. That is one cool chick.

I spent time with another cool chick, Amy, my best friend from second grade. (And no, this is not a coy reference back to the in-my-head thing. Her name really is Amy. Another Amy S., in fact.)

Amy also vowed to move to New York after college, but she made it stick. She was my welcome wagon during my brief time in the city — I’ll never forget the image of her walking her fast NYC walk up Broadway, carrying a little house plant to welcome me in 1990. I was scared shitless, which is probably a big part of why I was gone by 1991. All talk, little action.

Not Amy. She is as fabulous as any character Candace Bushnell could conjure (and hey, at the moment, she’s single! The most desirable bachelorette in the city, so let me know if you know any eligible men) and just as complicated — in a good way. She got the last good job in finance and a breathtaking (seriously, I was drooling) office view of Central Park and the roof of the Plaza and, as it turns out, she lives around the corner from a kiddie restaurant with a bar called Sweetie Pie. Which is how we found ourselves on a Tuesday night, sitting together in a gilded cage, eating teeny tiny ice cream cones and talking.

So sad but true: My “to do” list for New York pretty much consisted of stuff I’d read about. That’s not to say it wasn’t worth the trip. Papabubble, a candy store I saw in Martha Stewart Living, was sooooo cool, and so was I, for locating it (with some advice from Amy). Even the American Girl doll I had to get for Annabelle was Rebecca — the new Jew on the AG block, was featured in the Sunday Style section a couple weeks ago. (Sophie got one too, Chrissa; so far she’s only talked about giving her a haircut.)

I was craving Chinese, since I was in the middle of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which I highly recommend, so we hit an Empire Szechuan. (And it was there that we got all-too telling fortunes. Fancy Amy’s said something about pleasures to come, and her Chinese word was “wait”. Mine read, “Hugs are life’s rainbows.” My word was “friend.” We had a good laugh.)

But it was Sweetie Pie, featured in a recent issue of Elle, that really took the cake, or, rather, the bite-sized, perfectly appointed lemon cake on Amy’s fancy mismatched china plate. Menu aside (I really didn’t look at it, except for cocktails and dessert) it’s my all-time dream restaurant: All fuscia banquettes and white wrought iron, an Alice in Wonderland “Open Me” faux door to the bathroom and the aforementioned cage.

sweetie-bath

We felt like idiots and people kept staring in, but what better place, I decided later, to face the truth of one’s obsession with a fake existence, than in a gigantic bird cage in the West Village?

sweetie-cage11

Of course, for Amy, it’s not fake at all. It really is her life. Walking to the theater the next night (August: Osage County — it was terrific) I sighed and said, “I wouldn’t do this if I lived here, right? You don’t go to the theater every night, do you?”

Well, she admitted, she goes pretty often. And she’d already been to the bar at Sweetie Pie, even before I hit town with my magazine clippings. Amy lives the life. Maya lives it, although I know she doesn’t get to the theater as often as Amy. Still.  The couple I saw walking through the East Village with a carriage holding what was unmistakably a baby with Down syndrome, they live it, even though I always tell myself, “You just can’t think about living in New York, not with your situation.”

Ray is the one who didn’t want to live there, back when I still had the guts to do it. Now he brings it up from time to time. But you know, despite my concerns about breakdowns beforehand and maybe a tear or two at Central Park South, while on the phone with my mom, it turns out I really was okay with saying hello — and goodbye — to my favorite city. At this point, I’d almost rather enjoy it through the media, though I vowed to return much sooner next time, with a new to do list.

I came home to to a beautiful card from Annabelle, who doesn’t know a thing about my struggles with New York — except maybe by osmosis. 

“Welcome Home” it said in big letters, and in smaller script below, “Home is Where the Heart is.”

(I keep telling you, Annabelle’s become the adult in our relationship. And don’t you think her art –below — belongs on the walls of the Sweetie Pie bathroom, along with the piece at the top of this post?)

Next up: a family trip to New York City. That birdcage seats four.

home

Did you enjoy this article?
Share the love
Get updates!
Tags: Filed under: Uncategorized by Amysilverman

4 Responses to “Through the Looking Glass”

  1. Jake has become the adult in our relationship as well. We’re raising children to live the final copy of the rough drafts we’ve created.

  2. Great story and such a familiar one. It is tough to get to the point when those things that always seemed to be out there as a possibility no longer seem realistic -or even desirable.

  3. With the past experience of having lived in New York, I look at you and I think, “What a cool girl that Amy Silverman is! Look at the life she’s creating….” Thanks for the wonderful post. Just getting caught up.

  4. [...] ate teeny tiny chocolate mint chip ice cream cones at Sweetie Pie, quizzed the clerk at Mood about each season of our favorite show, fell asleep at the planetarium [...]

Leave a Reply

My-Heart-Cant-Even-Believe-It-Cover
My Heart Can't Even Believe It: A Story of Science, Love, and Down Syndrome is available from Amazon and 
Changing Hands Bookstore
. For information about readings and other events, click here.
Scroll

Archive

Scroll
All content ©Amy Silverman | Site design & integration by New Amsterdam Consulting