Blogging NY

When I walked out of my apartment the other day I saw this little boy in what looked like a snowsuit, the kind the kid gets trapped in, in The Christmas Story. He was waddling along behind his father before he tripped on the sidewalk. This snowsuit covered every inch of his body other than his face and his hands. He started to cry.

            When he took the dive I flinched and shut my eyes. Not just because watching kids fall upsets me but also because I know exactly what that impact feels like. Your hands brace for your fall and the cement darts into your palms. Usually when this happens you drag a little bit, causing your skin to tear as it encounters every grain. Each open cut burns with the winter wind. When you examine your fatalities you extend your fingers outwards, stretching the skin around each reddened area. It stings. You quickly curl your fingers back inwards as your eyes start to swell.

            When this happened to me I was usually in front of my friends so crying was never an option. I had to look cool. Tears have never been cool, except as part of the band name, Tears for Fears.

When Razor scooters were all the rage (I think I was about 10) I used to scoot with zero inhibition. This one time my sister and I were scooting in Virginia around the neighborhood. This suburb is quite hilly (I feel like those hills are not natural, they just added them for variety since all of the houses and their inhabitants are identical) and Natalie and I were feeling dangerous. We scooted up this great big hill, our sneakers (probably the black 3-striped Adidas) were thumping against the pavement in rapid succession, and once we got to the top of it we zoomed down. All of a sudden my scooter slid out from under me and I fell forward, my hands and knees bracing my wipeout. My body burned. Gravel remnants were in my hands and in my knee. My jeans had ripped. It was not pretty.  My Razor had held up to its name. When my sister reached the bottom of the hill she started laughing at me. This was the time before YouTube but I feel like if it had happened yesterday she would have caught the whole thing on tape and it would currently be streaming.

It hurts like hell to fall, especially when you cut your skin. When the little boy’s dad had heard his son’s cries of anguish he quickly grabbed him by the elbows and picked him up. Kneeling on the sidewalk he sat his kid on his thigh and blew on the cuts to stop the stinging.

I have learned that life can burn. It can burn badly. If you are lucky, you have someone to pick you up by the elbows and brush you off.   

Until I turned eighteen my dad and I only saw each other during my holiday vacations. Within those four day to two week time periods we hugged each other a lot.

Now, you must know something about my dad, he hates to hug. Most forms of physical affection make him uncomfortable. He attributes this uneasiness to his parents who neither showed nor voiced their affection to him while they were alive.

I usually met my dad in the kitchen downstairs where we waited for my stepsisters and stepmother to finish “getting ready” for our various holiday functions. The three of them have hair and makeup regimens that make the preparation for a colonoscopy look easy.

He would sit at the faded wooden table reading The New Yorker (although he had moved back to Virginia a long time ago he still held onto his New York identity) in an attempt to shut out the roar of blow dryers. When I entered the room he would stand up to greet me. He made the extra effort to give me a great big hug.

            I have always felt robbed of moments like this with my dad. When my babysitter would pick me up after school I would watch on replay fathers embracing their little boys and girls. Within the thirty seconds the two of us stood together on the white-tiled floor time stopped. My watch ceased ticking and the blow dryers disappeared. My head rested on his shoulder as my cheek rubbed up against one of his many interchangeable Costco sweaters.

My dad has this rich and wonderful smell. It’s a complex mixture, quite like his character. It’s Michael Kors cologne mixed with sawdust from his wood shop, printer paper from a draft of his new novel, and coffee ordered online from Zabars.

It smells like love. It smells like heartbreak. It smells like hello. It smells like goodbye.

In a flash we would no longer be standing in the kitchen but now in the Dulles airport. My back would be facing the security check, my eyes flooded with tears, my heart heavy, and my pulse fast. We no longer had all the time in the world. My plane would be leaving in an hour. My life in New York was waiting.

Taking a deep breath in I would embrace him for the last time. Well, until the next vacation of course, but I tend to be overly dramatic. My nose would bury in the wool-blend of his sweater. I hoped during this final hug his smell would become a part of mine. The next moment I would be sitting on the navy blue cushion of an airplane seat exposed to the smells of plastic, bagged pretzels, and recycled air. I would sniff my shirt but there would be no remnants of him.

There are times when I walk in New York City and smell my father. Just as soon as I recognize it the aroma vanishes. My heart pulls. I’m back in the kitchen. I’m back at the airport. I’m back in his arms.

I wish I could insert a quarter into a machine somewhere so I could replay those scenes again. 

I have a lot of friends who have Martha Stewart moms but because they live in Tribeca they wear black instead of pastels.  They seem to forever be in the kitchen making baby shower coffee cakes, birthday brownies, get well soon muffins, and holiday pies. They wear tool belts that hold spatulas and whisks and they whirl around their brightly lit kitchens like I imagine Mohammad Ali whirled around his competitors.

My mom is nowhere near Martha Stewart. When the two of us lived alone she made tea, toast, and Kraft macaroni and cheese “by hand.” I never saw her hold a whisk until a few years after she married my step-dad (the son of a Martha Stewart mom).

As I write this blog I am six days into a terrible flu. There are only so many Ricolas a girl can have. I am missing my mother’s homemade remedy tremendously. Although she doesn’t bake she makes the most incredible hot chocolate. Whenever I had a tough day at school or was under the weather she would always brew me a hot cup of coco to make me feel better.

I would kill to have her in my dump of a kitchen uptown.

To make my favorite drink she pours non-fat milk into a black saucepan (no heavy creams, butter, or whole fat foods used in my house, this is New York after all). She then dunks chunks of Black’s dark chocolate bar inside the pot along with two spoon fulls of cooking coco powder, the unsweetened kind. It takes about five minutes to melt the chocolate and get the milk nice and hot.

Chocolate is my kryptonite. If I were asked the question, if you had to live on a deserted island with only one food what would it be? I would respond without hesitation, chocolate.

The consistency of this drink is thick. You almost feel like you’re drinking a chocolate bar (one of my favorite things to do, of course). As I write this I find it hard to articulate how it actually tastes. I think that’s because it’s not really the drink I love but what it means. I get fifteen minutes of my mom’s undivided attention. We both sit on stools at our kitchen’s island and she listens to me. She hears me. We get lost sometimes. With the two dogs, my six-year-old sister, and my step-dad we don’t get that alone time we used to get when it was just the two of us— when she was making tea and toast by hand. 

Why doesn’t anyone give eye contact while riding in an elevator? This afternoon I took Schermerhorn’s elevator down from the 9^th floor to the 4^th floor after my art history discussion section with a few of my classmates. I, along with everyone else, instantly looked down at the ground. I studied my shoes intensely. Why? I know what they look like. In fact, I spent a lot of time picking them out. Why this instinct to look down?

If you think about it, a group of people simultaneously staring at the ground in a very small space sounds a bit odd. If we were all at a Persian carpet store or a funeral service I could understand the need. Or even if we were at a gallery in Chelsea where the artwork was beneath our feet then it would be appropriate to look down (I feel like this scenario would be more likely since these people were from my 19^th c. art history class). Instead, when we’re in a drab elevator that looks strikingly similar to the panic room from the movie, “The Panic Room”, we gaze at the metal floor as if it has the answers to our upcoming midterm.

I can equate this impulse not to stare with the internal battle I have when a homeless man walks into my subway car. His yellowed tethered clothes and beat up sneakers scream out at me for help but I disallow myself to look at him.  My mother has drilled into my head that I shouldn’t, “don’t give him your attention; he just wants your money.” If you are someone who has not had a similar battle or has not had the pleasure of experienced what it is like growing up with a Jewish mother, how about when someone has a monstrous pimple on his or her face? You want to look at it. You try to sneak glances at it, but you’re really not supposed to. It’s rude. That’s what I feel like in an elevator. I am not supposed to be looking at these people even if I know them!

This new revelation worries me. What if the elevator breaks down and we are stuck? Would the etiquette quickly dissolve? Could we look at each other? Would we even speak? I feel like the answer is undoubtedly yes. My real worry is what happens when I’m stuck in a broken elevator with a homeless man who has a huge zit? I will be so fucked.