One Morning In May...

How is it possible that I’m awake at this hour? No matter how late I go to bed, it seems I can’t sleep in. Maybe my age really should be calculated in dog years but I’d like to think of it as a sign of good health and an amazingly infallible internal clock.

The coffee shops haven’t even opened yet. Though I desperately need my daily dose of caffeine I am enjoying this incredibly perfect morning. I love this time of day when I’m up before everyone else…when I can walk around the streets in the quiet that is so rarely New York. The sun is shinning, warmth and crispness are perfectly blended and all the flowers are in colorful bloom on every street corner with a bodega.

Most in the neighborhood don’t wake up to mornings like this but rather go to bed to them.

I don’t really belong here. The East Village is rarely up before 8am on a Sunday. I love this neighborhood for it’s daytime grunge and grit that still barely exists on Second Ave. between Houston and 4^th street…For the guy just waking up and sitting on the steps of a church you’d never know was a church unless you read Spanish, a 40 delicately placed in between his barely limber legs spread out in front of him- not for the ever growing nightlife or the drunken students that cause me to sleep with earplugs which in turn causes me to worry that the earplugs will eventually create an irreversible expansion of my ear canal.

It is in these quiet moments I feel more connected to this little part of Manhattan than ever. In it’s clarity where you can’t hide the shame of life’s disappointments, of dreams that are unfulfilled and prayers by a church left unanswered and yet it’s still spectacular, life…and New York. It’s as if I’m on a closed set. The light traffic, strategically staggered by the first AD and directed to pass me only when cued and the extras, the bodega owners that have no lines but are given physical direction, “wave as she passes, smile and nod as you see her approach”, exist only for me and to set the mood.

I wish I didn’t have to wake up so early to enjoy it but, then again, if I didn’t wake up so early I’d never get my laundry done.

Yes. I've Burned Rice.

I am not a foodie. I definitely enjoy a nice meal out, Nobu's ok. But the other day at the grocery store I passed by the taco aisle. Ah taco night. Who didn't have taco night on occasion as a kid when mom didn't feel like cooking anymore? Now that I'm older, I can't say that I blame her. I hate to cook. Lucky for me, I have had the good fortune of being in relationships with men who were gifted in culinary arts.

Years ago, on the set of an independent film you've neither heard of nor will ever see, I picked up a few recipes from the chef on set. Shortly after the film wrapped, I tried a few of them out and had much success. Cut to- years later where I attempt to impress my Ex with a home cooked meal. Being a good Cape Cod-er of sorts, I thought he'd appreciate the crab cake recipe that had been a hit many years ago. How hard could it be to remember how to make crab cakes?

I had the idea while enjoying happy hour at Haru on 19th and Park, a favorite pastime with Jessie, who is a fabulous cook. She wished me luck as I ventured out of Haru and headed towards the Whole Foods at Union Square with only half an ingredient list in my head.

Needless to say we ended up going out for dinner that night. Who would have remembered you needed eggs to keep the crab cakes together, I thought that's what mayonnaise was for. Ever since, my lack of culinary skill was a point of hilarity. Except for the time when I burned the rice and he rushed to the kitchen to see what had happened and ended up losing a large video assembly he had been working on all day. It was infact the fault of the harddrive but I couldn't help feeling somewhat responsible. That wasn't so funny, but usually I didn't mind being a kitchen catastophe.

Thank God for a mother who teaches you the importance of being able to laugh at yourself. This same mother has also relentlessly suggested cooking classes.

My Ex not only was a good cook but was also OCD enough that he didn't like the way I cleaned or did the dishes. A man who cooks and cleans....I seemed to have hit a love jackpot. He did however, tell me I needed a fastball as he called it- that one meal you could whip up on a moments notice designed to impress. Really, I still needed one?

Mine became oatmeal, surprisingly, something he loved to have in the morning but never quite got right. It was a small cooking coup on my part which he said was a very sexy fast ball, “I can't cook you dinner but...I can make you breakfast.”

Before the oatmeal had been established, I had decided to bring back a childhood memory and successfuly made tacos. At fist, the reaction I got was “TACOS?”. “It'll be fun,” I prompted, Tacate already poured. I was right. We had taco night more times than I thought two grown adults would and they were as delicious as you remember them being.

More recently, on the set of another film you will never see nor hear of, one of the actors was heading home to his fiancé for...that's right...taco night.

Wow, it was real. Taco night made us a real couple the way the velveteen rabbit became real because the boy truly loved him. Taco night came to represent something more than a cheap dinner. It was family, it was intimate.

In a small New York City apartment, two adults often cooked a nostalgic meal together (he'd taken to cooking the meat the way he liked it...I chopped) and sat on stools at the eat-in counter top in his small but nicely laid out and very functional kitchen, literally inches apart from one another and rehashed the day.

It's hard to get that kind of closeness at Nobu. Besides, in these tougher economic times, I'm also reminded that somehow, the two times we went, I ended up with the bill.

Go Molly Go!

This morning having woken up around 6am, I took a walk to my favorite neighborhood spot on the corner of First and First- Little Veselka. On this corner you find the most eclectic group of New Yorkers- those with the tattoos, those in the suits, those trying to be more fashionable than they can really get away with and the crazies that still have hospital bracelets on. I did, as my Ex would say, the “walk and coffee”, which for some reason, in his mind, meant my age was to be calculated in dog years. I am admittedly a huge fan of the “walk and coffee”, especially around 8am when I’m wearing sweats and Ugg slippers and get to watch the suit wearing East Villagers, a paradox unto themselves, rush to the F train on that very corner.

While flipping through my AM New York paper, I read that Molly the cow, who had escaped from the Musa Halal slaughter house in Queens, was now to live out the rest of her days peacefully in a Long Island sanctuary. Yay Molly- you did it, you risked head on traffic and busted through a fence to go after the life you deserve to live… A sanctuary on Long Island?

I often had the thought, when I lived at Columbus Circle and would commute from the 1 train to the Shuttle at Times Square that would take me finally to Grand Central where my office was located, that we commuters on the Shuttle train seemed oddly reminiscent of cattle being herded for slaughter. By the looks of the Shuttle passengers’ faces, I think I was right. No one on that train seemed happy to be going wherever it was they were going to. And, at the end of the day, they looked even worse. I grew to abhor Grand Central and the Shuttle. It was indeed so awful that Holly and I would wait to leave together so that neither one of us had to ride alone.

As I sat there on the corner drinking my coffee and listening to my Tom Petty channel on Pandora- which rocks- I felt a kinship to Molly. I had in some way escaped the slaughter house. I have to wonder though, if there’s a sanctuary waiting for me somewhere.

Honestly?

So I spent all that time thinking about the moment. That inevitable moment when I'd run into my Ex for the first time after our break-up. If you've been reading you know how that ended. In an instant on a subway platform as he rushed by to avoid a confrontation I had no intention of offering. The incident, however brief, was now in the past and thankfully no longer something to worry about. However, I had completely overlooked the fact that a second unintentional meeting was at all possible.

There's a rude awakening when it happens! And yes... it was. Again on a subway platform waiting for the F train that seems to never come when you're actually in a hurry to get somewhere, HE appeared. Not at all what I expected since he moved out of the neighborhood. We both, as before, stole glances and tried to focus on the uninteresting patch of ground a few inches in front of our shoes, hoping that it would with time become more interesting, as he rushed by. Honestly, could he really not face me- The One, the one thing he did right in his fucked up life? Oh yeah...I am, I have that in writing.

Knowing his schedule and haunts I also I knew that we'd be transferring at the same stop. We were of course by design at 2 opposite ends of the train at this point so all should've been fine-over and done with.

But, I guess it really ain't over til it's over. He, who twice purposefully avoided me was deliberately planting himself 2 posts away from me. This was beyond an accidental proximity and at this point, considering he seemed to be waiting for me to make a move, beyond adult. There is no reason to be that close to someone on a subway platform who used to be your lover and isn't anymore unless you want to be. Again I bemoaned the fact that the train never seems to come when you really need it to and not just when you're in a hurry to get somewhere but when you're in a hurry to get out of somewhere as well; when you feel the heaviness of a man debating to apologize for things past and hoping you're going to make it easy for him by extending some olive branch, offering a smile or just acknowledging that he is indeed there...2 support beams away.

Though I had made a lot easy for him in the past, I did not this time, offer any olive branch, smile or acknowledge him or his presence other than perhaps by my body language that may or may not have ratted out my inner confusion about what I would and should say if he actually sacked up and said something.

Luckily or rather finally, an E train pulled into West 4th, a train that would take him to his office but wouldn't get me to my meeting (read therapist). My meeting which started with, "You"ll never guess what happened to me on the way over here.."