Once New Yorkers

I like New York in June...how about you? I like a Gershwin tune...how about you?

There was that temping summer, the summer of 1991. We were two students of life (and love) on a break to find work and make some money for the school year - playing house in the cramped quarters of a studio basement apartment on the Upper Westside with a garden view (and sometimes, the legs of the gardener landlord!). I made do with three "work" oufits and took the subway to various points in the city - at one point, the HBO building by Bryant Park, at one point SAKS Fifth Avenue, and for a good month and a half, the ANA office at Rockerfeller Centre. And in between, I wrote stories on a laptop computer and diskettes that we shared and sometimes quarrelled over. There we tasted prociutto for the first time and cherry cheese streudel from Zabar's and mostly window-shopped at Fairway and saw Shakespeare in the Park, and browsed at the now non-existent Shakespeare & Company bookstore. We had slices and hotdogs, dimsum in Chinatown, coffee in Greenwich village after movies at the Angelica, and three-berry pie whereever we could. And we borrowed books from the public library...

The summer ended when we packed our belongings into a U-Haul and made the drive, first to Ohio, then to Michigan. We left in the wee hours of the morning because the landlady said if we left our stuff in the truck overnight, there was a chance it would disappear by morning. And we stole away from the city we had grown to adore, driving in the dark. An hour or so into the journey, somehere in Pennsylvania, we were mystified by massive, towering dark shapes on either side of us. We stopped at a Howard Johnson's for what remained of the night, and in the morning, discovered that the frightening shapes were the Poconos mountains.

And then, there were the years of 1993-1995. We were husband and wife and chose again to make the Upper Westside our home, and found a studio apartment with a loft bed and an eat-in-kitchen two blocks from Central Park. We moved there with the proceeds of a bright red Nissan Sentra, and a whole lot of hope in a very tough job market. I followed the advice of a personnel agency to strike the graduate writing degree off my resume and step up my typing speed so as to be able to for an executive assistant job, instead of a true career-path publishing job which would have paid me very much less. We kept house and saw friends and found a great many not-so-expensive places to eat. I worked at 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and the iconic Flatiron building, and in between, I tried to write.

Here we are, more than 13 years later, about to bring K and C back to the greatest city in the world. We will take them to all the old haunts. We will walk the streets and savour the flavors. And we will happily watch them fall in love with the city - how on earth can they not?