As a first-year teacher, I am convinced that I have never truly appreciated the weekends until now. This is an ode to kinds of wonderful things I’ve been doing on Saturdays, and a reminder to myself and hopefully you, Reader, that though you may be feeling defeated, there is still so much to be grateful for.
I wake up in an IKEA bed with the wonderful realization that I can stay here as long as I want. I bought my own full-size bed, and it’s the first bed I’ve ever had that is both not in my parent’s house and bigger than a twin. Surely, this must be adulthood. The bus stop is directly below my bedroom window, and the bus exhales loudly as it stops to let people off on its way north to Bedford-Stuyvesant. This makes it difficult to sleep in, but I can also hear my roommates moving around outside my door, switching on the electric kettle, collecting last night’s wine glasses from the coffee table, turning on the Xbox to Hulu the TV shows we missed this week, laughing and talking in the soft way that one does when trying not to wake someone. The air outside is beginning to smell crisp and fresh and autumnal.
***
I am catching up with a friend from my high school because being back in New York means I can do that now. We are sitting in a cafe that sells Senegalese food, but also serves your typical generic weekend brunch, as all of these local cafes have learned is immensely profitable. My friend is an architectural engineer who has a fireplace in his apartment. He teases me about not yet having a credit card. I invite him up to my apartment after our french toast so he can tell me if our apartment is crooked. (Water spilled last week and began running swiftly towards the front door.) It is.
***
We’ve established a route for park-walking that goes first to our favorite ice cream store: Ample Hills Creamery, named after the line in the Walt Whitman poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The next stop is the fountain by Grand Army Plaza, so you can hold your hands up to the mist if your Salted Caramel dripped down your cone before you could catch it with your tongue. Park time includes lounging, walking, looking for fall leaves, and resting romantically with your significant other (if applicable). When the light begins to fade, we walk home, stopping to pick up wine and pizza on the way back to the apartment. We are home by 10:00 p.m. The only thing our Brooklyn apartment is missing is roof access, but my roommate Brandon knows the code to front door of the apartment across the street. Their building has five stories instead of three, and from their roof we can see the Manhattan skyline. It’s still surreal to me when I see it, a reminder that I live here in New York, that bigger metropolis looming just across the river.
***
It’s midnight and my roommate Eliza has convinced me to start watching Orange is the New Black. I’m addicted immediately, her persuasion much more effective in this endeavor than in trying to convince me to like her cat, who makes me sneeze and likes to hide under my bed just as I’m trying to go to sleep. I’m thinking about my long distance boyfriend, and how at least 12-hour separation is better than one of us being incarcerated, when he texts me to ask me if I am sitting on the couch. I respond, “yes,” and he tells me to reach over to my designated shelf on the living room bookshelf and look between Breakfast at Tiffany’s and On the Road. I find what I found in my wallet earlier this week, when rooting around for some bills to use at the cash only Chinese/Trinidad restaurant. A note on a piece of red card-stock: “Don’t worry so much.”
Caroline (Higgins) Nyczak (’11) lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she spends the vast majority of her time teaching English Language Arts. You may also find her at barre exercise classes or playing (and losing) at bar trivia. She continues to be inspired by the energy and diversity of New York City and the beauty of that certain slant of light.
