New York, day 15

Today was perfect. Went to the Frick Collection—so, so beautiful. The Lautrec paintings, 18th century period rooms, ‘ginger jars’... the whole museum is stunning, not just the art but the building itself. The door handles! The windows! The ceilings! It reminded me a lot of Downton Abbey. As I looked around what was especially striking was the idea that someone lived there. A beautiful location overlooking Central Park, with one of the most ornate interiors I’ve ever witnessed (though apparently Frick had his house designed to be restrained, simple and unostentatious!). It also made me really eager to read Edith Wharton. The audio guide is excellent (and free!); T. S. Eliot did a poetry reading in one of the rooms!

After the Frick collection Mom and I went to Ladurée to buy two macarons each, which we ate in Central Park. I had ‘incroyable strawberry candy’ and vanilla. I’ve never had the vanilla before because I thought it was too boring—it’s not at all! One of the best I’ve had. We went to the Plaza for a tartine and ended the night with Sprinkles Cupcakes and Sofia Blanc des Blancs. Delicious, and just the kind of girly luxuries that are so characteristic of New York.

New York, day 14

An overwhelmingly wonderful place is the Harney & Sons shop in SoHo. I wish I’d thought to go there sooner—I got my favourite loose-leaf Organic Assam, plus a cup of tea to go. I tried Paris because it’s their most popular, and it was amazing. And it smelled delicious when I walked in because they were baking scones.

And Kate Spade. Neither the SoHo store nor the Union Square location are very big, but I feel like I could spend hours in there just staring. Love, love, love.

In the evening I took a ballet class at the Ailey Extension (as I was waiting outside after class the cutest little puppy jumped up on me; I miss my Lexie so much!) and went back to The Hampton Chutney for dinner. My favourite order, the one I get every single time (though I do vary between the dosa and uttapam) is the #14 seasonal, with roasted butternut squash, beets, goat cheese and pumpkin chutney. They are only going to have it for another month or so. So glad they’ve always had it while I’m here!

New York, day 13

I love Tom Hanks, and Nora Ephron and You’ve Got Mail contributed in a major way to my falling in love with New York, and the combination of all of these things was an experience that is beyond words.

New York, day 12

I could not have imagined a more perfect birthday. A rainy Tuesday that started at Ladurée choosing macarons (rose petal, Marie Antoinette, fleur d’oranger, coffee, pistachio, raspberry) and finished at Rockefeller Center in the audience of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. How lucky is it that I just happened to get tickets for Timberweek? The whole time I was watching him perform I was having flashbacks of my nine-year-old self listening to *N Sync on my CD player on the bus home from school (hoping the batteries didn’t die). As a child I never tried to imagine myself at twenty-two, but if I did, none of this was even remotely in my consciousness. Today was better than anything I could have dreamed. It would have been more than enough just to wake up in Manhattan on my birthday, but somehow I got so much more. I am so grateful.

New York, day 11

“Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went ‘but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,’ and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” – Joan Didion, ‘Goodbye to All That’

I’m going to be twenty-two tomorrow! When I was browsing in Little Marc Jacobs this weekend, one of the employees kindly informed me that their sizes went up to age fourteen, so if I wanted to try anything... Needless to say, I myself am in a bit of disbelief about what my real age is. It is hard to know how to feel in a city where you could legally be drinking but most people assume you’re newly in your teens. Last year when I went to get tickets to go to the Central Park Zoo, the woman asked if I would be buying a child’s ticket. The first year I ever went to New York I was nineteen and boarding the plane by myself at six in the morning, and the custom’s officer (jokingly) asked if I was running away from home. This city makes me feel both really young, and in some ways older than I am.

For my last day of being twenty-one I decided to take a ballet class at Steps. (Ironically, seeing as I went there after I wrote the first part of this post, the woman at the front desk asked how old I was. The minimum age for their open drop-in classes is twelve. I’m afraid she believed there might be a chance I was not yet twelve.) What an amazing place! I wish I’d gone sooner. (That’s always how I end up feeling when I put things off because I’m nervous then realize that there wasn’t really anything to be nervous about and that worrying about it only meant depriving myself of a fantastic experience. Life lesson?)

New York, day 10

“New York is bliss, again. The stores are selling all sorts of aspirations to all sorts of possibilities and being here in a land of so much promise―and so many promises―is to live in a dream.” – Zelda Fitzgerald, 1938
(from Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald)

New York, day 9

Finally, the weather is sunny and beautiful! Coffee at Abraço, one of my new favourite coffee places ever, then Washington Square park—an amazing piano player who played Claire de Lune—and West Village. Walked the High Line from the Meatpacking District to Midtown. In the afternoon, the Plaza hotel—the food hall is amazing—Central Park (lots of kids out enjoying the weather, and dogs! saw a dog catching bubbles that a little girl was blowing at it, and a dog stalking a squirrel—one paw up, slowly, tracked the squirrel all the way up the tree), Lincoln Center, and dinner on Amsterdam Ave.

New York, day 8

The Metropolitan Museum of Art may be my favourite place in the world. Spent about an hour with Degas. The European paintings, a day is not enough to admire them! A lot of amazing exhibits: William Eggleston, ‘Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity’, and Matisse. Fabergé and Louis XIV interiors, the American wing... too beautiful for words.

New York, day 7

Perfect music for today (or really any day): The National, especially this song and this one, and my favourite.

Had the most interesting taxi driver today. He told us how he moved here from Ghana in the ’90s, when rent in the Bronx was $400 a month, and how he moves people into their Manhattan apartments that are no bigger than his taxi and there’s barely enough room for the television sets they bring with them. He talked about how different his sons’ lives are from his, that “they think it’s a crisis when they run out of Captain Crunch” and how he tells them to work hard because he went to school for the first time when he was fifteen and they have so many more opportunities than he did. He talked about studying Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats—he said “I may not be pronouncing them right” (he was), “but I studied hard”. He didn’t mention exactly why he chose New York, but he said that he loves this country, that the first time he saw a copy of Reader’s Digest he was so excited, but that he’s afraid to get old here because people don’t take care of old people the way they do where he’s from. He encouraged his sons to “adopt a grandparent”; he thinks that’s the greatest idea. He said Manhattan’s a place for young people—that the appeal of it is how easy it is to blend into the crowd, how you can become a new person here because no one knows you. He was just an incredibly fascinating person. I’ve never had the experience of wishing my taxi ride could go on longer, but I wanted to keep hearing his story. I wish I’d gotten his name at least. He told me that his first day on the job as a taxi driver someone asked to go to Northern Boulevard, but he didn’t know that it was in Queens and they had to explain to him how to get there.

The weather is a bit miserable—half-rain, half-snow, falling sideways—so I didn’t do much aside from trips to Duane Reade (for composition notebooks, film for my camera, Fig Newtons, and to smell the Demeter Fragrances) and a foray into the stormy evening for warm, delicious apple crumble, then back to the room to watch HBO’s Girls.