I love coffee, and when the weather gets particularly warm I make the switch over to iced coffee — never mind the fact that I have been told for years that you should drink hot drinks when it is hot outside and cool drinks when it is cool. I prefer a cold drink. For the most part I have almost always gotten both kinds of coffee from Starbucks, which is quite easy when you’re in Manhattan — there is almost always one or five within a few blocks of your location.
I work on the Upper East Side in New York City, and as part of my job take a walk — sometimes twice a day, when necessary — to the main building of Weill Cornell Medical College, to pick up and drop off mail at the mail room and to pick up and drop off any deliveries that may be needed among the various departments of the College. It is quite a pleasant walk, chiefly because of all of the sights that I am fortunate to see, and the beautiful architecture I can enjoy daily.
Heed these words well, for you never know who may be knocking at your door — be very careful when you get strange visitors that claim to be there for your benefit but really have their own profit in mind. The following is something that happened to my family recently that woke us up to this reality.
Imagine the following — my wife, my son, and I were enjoying the Peter Pan ride, one of the featured rides at Walt Disney World which gets extremely lengthy lines and was considered worthy of getting the Fastpass feature. As our carriage came around to the end, the Walt Disney World cast member spotted us, smiles on our faces. He looked at my son and made eye contact and then asked, “How’d you like the ride, Princess?” I quickly chimed in, “Actually, he’s a prince.” He quickly apologized, but my speed in response came because he wasn’t the first person to mistake my son for a girl, nor would he be the last — although I thought we had done a good job of “boying” him up by putting him in blue jeans, R2D2 sneakers, and an R2D2 hooded sweatshirt.
Toward the end of the Passover holiday, I was out at dinner with Chaim and Elizabeth at a friend’s home and was in the middle of telling Chaim that he had to wait only a little bit longer before food would be served, and someone decided that it was the perfect time (mid sentence) to ask me why it was that I chose to speak to Chaim only in Romanian. After I got over the initial shock that he could not seem to wait until I was finished with my sentence (perhaps he thought it was okay to interrupt because he didn’t understand me) I responded, and as I explained it occurred to me that it might be prudent to explain it here as well — for the record.
During the first two days of the holiday of Passover, my family was invited to a lunch at a friend’s home where we have been numerous times — the family positively loves Chaim. We have been going there so long that we have gone from being the ones who are invited to being the parents of the actual person who everyone wants to see. After everyone eventually got settled around the table, there was a latecomer to the meal, someone whom we had seen before, and though he did not seem to recognize us we immediately recognized him.
Two and a half years ago, when my former office moved locations from midtown Manhattan to the DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) area of Brooklyn — which increased the length of my commute from about twenty five minutes to nearly an hour — I had to find a new place to pray in the morning so that I would make it to the office on time.
For months, my wife Elizabeth and I had discussed going to Orlando and taking our son Chaim Yosef to Walt Disney World so that he could see Mickey Mouse and his friends as well as Lightning McQueen from his favorite movie — Cars. We spent quite a lot of time working out finances and started putting the plan in motion when we saw that the airline JetBlue had announced a sale — only $89 each way, quite a discount. I called my mother and told her that we were thinking about going to visit Chaim’s pals in Florida and she lovingly started asking me if we had the money to go and how it was possible that we could afford it.
When a company does you a disservice, they most often if they are a decent company offer an apology and then try to do something to correct the error. When Elizabeth, Chaim Yosef and I were in Florida recently, we encountered a sort of bad customer service that just kept on compounding itself until I had to stare at the offending party and think to myself, “How is it possible that this person was given a job like this?”
When our friend Chad lived with us for a while, one of the big pieces of unexpected decoration that he brought with him was a lime green suitcase. I remarked to him on one occasion that it was by far the ugliest suitcase that I had ever seen.
“I know,” he said, “Isn’t it great?”
I told him that I didn’t understand what he meant by that and he went on to explain.
Akiva and Ahuva Lewin were with their father at the Lakewood Cemetery to honor their grandfather, as it had been ten years since he had passed away.
Their father had held off on taking them until this day because he had felt that they were too young to understand what it meant that their grandfather had been gone for so long.
Since the day that I read the article The Mechanist on Not Being an Artist, I have often thought back to it, particularly when I am walking to my office and I pass what I consider to be the most elegant yet dangerous mode of street transportation — the motorcycle. I have given it much thought because every time I see a well designed and built motorcycle, my first thought is that I am lucky to have come across it and that it is as if I have entered a museum — only that I am clearly the sole visitor to the museum, and there is no admission fee.
Recently, I came across a motorcycle that was so lovely that I had to take a picture of it with my phone to share with you. Here it is in all of its glory.
I don’t know who it was that told me about the unwritten and unspoken rule of the road — if you saw a police officer sitting and waiting to catch people going quickly in the opposite direction, and you saw people coming in that direction that you were encouraged, if not obligated, to warn the drivers headed toward the speed trap by flashing your headlights a couple of times.
When the television show Sex and the City had its original run on HBO, I was neither a subscriber to HBO nor particularly interested in the sex lives of four women that lived in New York City. A mere nine years after the show ended and two movies later, there is a new television show called The Carrie Diaries based on the teenage life of Carrie Bradshaw, one of the four women from Sex and the City. It chronicles her life and struggles as a high school student in the early nineteen eighties.
