Walk This Way...I Think

I don't always deserve the confidence I walk with in New York. 

Once, while trying to get my mom to the airport, I hurried us onto not one, not two, but three trains going in the wrong direction because we were so deep in conversation. By the time we got to the last train, which would take her on her own from the subway to the terminal, she was so late we hardly had time to hug.

"Go!" I urged, pushing her toward the turnstile.

She looked back at me, bewildered.

"I don't know where the f*#$ I'm going!" she cried.

"The train only goes one way!"

On an outing during her most recent visit, I changed my mind twice at one above-ground intersection, trying to decide which way to cross a street. Oblivious to my uncertainty and trying to finish some thought or another, my mom mimicked my every move like a shadow so that a crowd of people stepped back to watch. I think they thought we were some sort of pop-up vaudeville act. They don't know that's just how we are.

Anyway, being in charge of logistics in Manhattan can be exhausting, but it's more exhausting if the people you are logisticating don't feel like they can trust your decisions.

Last Saturday, Tiffany and I led my mom and five other members of my family and friend-family from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side and back up the middle to join throngs of other people for photos in front of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. Of course, they could have found the way themselves. But they were deferring to us as their hostesses.

"Do you think they can tell we have no idea where we're going?" I whispered to Tiffany as the group trailed behind us through an underground subway passage. 

"No," she said. "Walk confidently, and they never will."

This worked perfectly until we walked with confidence into an exit barricaded with a metal gate.

But I'll tell you what, you have never seen a U-Turn so masterfully executed.

Packing a Pumpkin

I packed a pumpkin in my carry-on for my friend-family's Thanksgiving in Florida this year. First, I packed my cowboy boots, and then I put in my jeans and my one nice outfit, and then I made a little hole in the layer between my running clothes and my pajamas, and I put the pumpkin in the hole.

"You know they have pumpkin in Florida?" my friend Teresa asked. "In cans?"

Yes, of course I know it's possible to buy pumpkin. It's the reason I left my sweet potatoes at home (also, a several-sweet-potato-sized hole proved difficult to find in my small wheelie bag, and Tiffany said if I insisted on making pumpkin and sweet potato pie from scratch, "You're on your own.").

Anyway, it didn't seem ridiculous at all to me to bring the pumpkin until we got to the airport and I began to wonder if the squash in my carry-on was going to look like a bomb in the security x-ray. After all, a pumpkin does look a little bomb-ish, if your bomb reference is from old cartoons: a ball with a sizzling wick on top. My pumpkin's stem didn't sizzle, but still...

Would my pumpkin be confiscated?

No.

Years ago, my friend-family slid down hills in turkey pans for fun. Now we are a little more mature. On Wednesday night, we went to the bar where everyone but me downed lemon drop and Fireball shots (when I kissed Tiffany she tasted like a piece of Big Red gum.). We danced and debated whether any of us could twerk and learned pretty quickly that I, at least, cannot.

When we got home at midnight, most of my friend-family went to bed, but I went to get the pumpkin out of my carry-on because I knew there wouldn't be time or oven space to bake it in a few hours. For a minute, I regretted the whole endeavor, but then Little Rebecca and Sam and Tiffany and I started slicing pumpkin and scraping out seeds and talking and laughing. Soon, Tiffany went to bed, and Little Rebecca and Sam and I moved on to sweet potatoes, checking the oven often enough to slow the baking process down even further.

I'm not sure our homemade sweet potato and pumpkin pies were any better than the canned kind. But, in my mind, you can't beat cooking from scratch. If all I had to do was wield a can-opener, I never would have stayed up until 2 a.m. with my friend-family, scooping soft sweet potato and pumpkin into bowls.

And if you don't stay up until 2 a.m., you don't learn certain things, like the fact that Little Rebecca, the former bald-headed baby, can twerk. Upside down against the wall, standing on her sticky pumpkin hands.

With a Little Luck

The first time I played horseshoes with Tiffany she got a shoe stuck in a tree. I've never seen someone aim so carefully and miss so completely. Her u-shaped piece of iron didn't make it even halfway to the pole across the way. Instead, it went straight up in the air, shooting through a leafy oak until it came back down to ring a sturdy branch.

"How did you do that?" I asked her, after I had removed my hands from my head and stopped laughing.

"I don't know," she said. "I held it just like you did and then I let go."

We weren't even dating at the time. Lucky for her, I wasn't looking for a permanent horseshoe partner.

Still, it turns out I found one.

Over Thanksgiving, the grown-up boy I used to play time machine with brought a set of shoes to keep us busy on the beach. When he and his mom ended up on one side with Tiffany and I on the other, I had a moment of preemptive competitive panic, visions of horseshoes being accidentally hurled into the ocean off to our left.

"You sure about your partner choice?" I called.

Tiffany glared at me.

"Remember to let go a little earlier than you did that one time," I whispered.

But it turns out the four of us were pretty evenly matched. We all hit the pole and we all missed it, and if Tiffany sometimes missed it more than the rest of us, well, a zero score is still a zero score. After we were tied for a while, we called sudden death. The first team to ring the pole would win. None of us had done so yet.

"Oh, so close!" we yelled back and forth until it was Tiffany's turn.

"Guys," she said, "I've got this."

And, would you believe it, she was right.

We all walked over to look down at the winning shoe in the sand as the sun began to dip into the water.

It was so lucky-looking and pretty that I had to take a picture. It felt like a sign of anything good to come, even if all that means is better hand-eye coordination.