SOLTuesday: Not a Christmas Story

            This is not a Christmas slice. I traveled this past weekend, which only was only tangentially because of Christmas. My daughter, the librarian, had a four-day weekend, having last Saturday off and Christmas Eve as well. She decided she wanted to go with her husband to New Orleans, where she had never been, and asked me if I wanted to join them. Why not? I had only been there once before, last winter, for five days, and loved it.

            So we reserved rooms at the same B&B I had stayed at, Monrose Row (which I strongly recommend; Cindy, the proprietor, makes fantastic breakfasts). I made a dinner reservation for Sunday night at Commodore’s Palace, supposedly the best restaurant in New Orleans. Christie made reservations for dinner at a Brazilian steakhouse, one of those places where they bring large skewers of many different kinds of meat to your table, and slice off whatever you want. I made reservations for a walking tour of the French Quarter, and Christie made reservations for a tour of a local whiskey distillery.

           But that isn’t the story I was going to tell. That happened today, as we were getting on the plane to come back home. Christie and her husband were sitting some rows ahead of me, so they got on first. Then I boarded and was busy putting my bag in the overhead and tucking my other bag under the seat when there was a tap on my shoulder. I thought someone wanted to get past, but when I looked up, I recognized the young man. He was a colleague from the magazine where I do free-lance work. I knew his family was in New Orleans, but what a coincidence that he was on the same flight returning to New York. And he was sitting right behind me as well.
            So we chatted about the city and our holidays, and we shared a taxi into Manhattan from the airport. It all rounded out a very lovely four-day holiday weekend.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

 

SOL Tuesday: Small World

I love Flax brand clothing. Their linen pants and jackets are my summer wardrobe. And oddly, there seems to be only one store in Manhattan that reliably carries their stock. So, when my white pants wore out in the seat a couple of months ago, I went online to see where I could buy a replacement.

            I found a store in Charlottesville, Virginia. (This was before the white supremacist rally.) Ordered two pair via the Web site (so I’d have an instant replacement if/when my replacement pair wore out), had a problem about the size, called and talked to a human being, who easily fixed the problem—and I got my pants in a couple of days.

            A week later, after the horror of the white supremacists and the death of Heather Heyer, I e-mailed the store to ask if they were all okay, and they replied that they were. I felt I had a connection to this city I’ve never been to, just because I’d bought something over the Internet.

            A couple of weeks ago, my black Flax pants wore out. I couldn’t remember the style of pants I’d ordered in August, so I called the store. The woman who answered was in the midst of trying on a pair of pants for another caller, so she asked me to hold. But she continued to talk, and we chatted some about how when you’ve asked someone to hold, you feel compelled to keep talking so the other person knows you are still there, even as you are doing something else.

            When she looked up my previous order and saw I lived on Riverside Drive in New York City, she said, “Oh, I grew up at 98th and Riverside.” She added, “I went to Ethical Culture and Fieldston” (two private schools), so I added, “My daughter went to Bank Street and Columbia Prep.” Some more chat about the weather and that the windy side streets off of Riverside Drive had sent her mother out of the city.

            It wasn’t a true small world story; we didn’t talk long enough to find out whether we knew any people in common. She did have to get back to her work selling clothes. But it was still a human connection, over many hundreds of miles. 

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOL Tuesday: Small World Story 1

My daughter and I are on a road trip north, through the western edge of New England, visiting friends, and ending up in the tiny village in central Vermont where my aunt Nita and uncle Ben lived and my husband and I visited every summer, until my aunt died in 1997.

            Today’s stopover was in Williamstown, Mass. After spending last night with a friend, we went to the Clark museum and Mass MOCA before moving on to East Dover, Vermont. At Mass MOCA we experienced one of James Turrell’s light installations (if you don’t know his work, please look it up and visit anything that is near you). I usually don’t use “experience” as a verb, but that is the only way to describe this particular work at Mass MOCA, Perfectly Clear: you stand in a large room painted all white and over the course of several minutes, the walls, floor, and ceiling subtlely change color. You feel like you are standing in the midst of nothing, surrounded only by color, and if you look behind you, the wall of the room you just left has turned some totally different color simply from the ambient light coming from the room you are in.

            As we are leaving this exhibit, we are standing by a couple with two preteen-age children. The woman asks me if I’m from New York, and she thinks she knows me, but she can’t think how. After some back and forth of how we might know each other, we realize that she was my student in the late ’80s in an undergraduate Copy Editing class I taught at NYU. When she told me her name, I remembered her instantly; in fact, I’d noticed her name on the masthead of Scientific American some years after I’d stopped teaching full-time. She was one of my best students, too, and I am so glad she ventured to ask how we might know each other.

            I’m calling this Small World Story 1, because there have been many more and will be many more. We are all only a few degrees from knowing everyone in the world.

Tuesday Slice of Life

I love small world connections; they make me feel like I am part of a community wherever I go. Two of them happened yesterday evening in one place.

     I’d gone to an author reading and interview at a bookstore in Brooklyn. Shortly before it started, a black woman sat at the end of the first row; she looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her. And just as the author was being introduced, a woman with curly blonde hair sat in the empty seat next to me. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t say anything because the author was beginning to read.

     As soon as the event was over, we turned to each other and almost simultaneously said, “Were you at the Voice?” Then she said, “Are you Sonia?” I nodded, and said, “I remember your last name, but not your first,” and she said, “Barbara.” She had been an intern for one of the investigative reporters, more than 30 years ago, and we hadn’t seen each other since, though it turned out she’s later been hired by the husband of a college friend of mine.

     And the woman at the end of the first row? We’d met at a writers’ event a couple of weeks earlier and, we learned last night, she’s a colleague of a good friend of mine.

     So, yes, we are no more than a few links away from everyone else on the planet, and only one or two from those in our own city.