Seasonal Affective Dialing

The other evening I used my stuck-in-traffic time to call a kinky-haired actor I used to go out with in New York. My call was completely out of the blue, and there was no time elapsed between inkling and execution (I handle a lot of decisions this way—dubious). The conversation could have gone any which way—we haven’t seen each other since our last date was pervaded by an icky sense of doom sometime around last December. But it was really, unexpectedly, warm and gratifying.

One night last winter, he and I had met up in Union Square, from where we would walk to dinner on Avenue C. The red-and-white-striped booths that comprise Union Square’s annual holiday shopping bazaar were set up and twinkling with white lights. He took my hand (which for me was a paradise since New York winters were tough for me and I always fantasized about having a bigger hand into which to deposit my cold and gloved littler hand, but most winter days this was just a fantasy). Not more than a few paces from there we’d run into the kinky-haired actor’s father. His family was from New Jersey, and still lived there, except for his brother who was a lawyer in Midtown. And here was the dad, planning to go to the movies alone after work (since the mom was in Europe on book publishing business, if I recall), offering instead to take us to dinner (which we—or he—appropriately declined).

The kinky-haired actor lived in a city where he had these roots and this potential to run into a parent—and I had nothing more than a few years’ worth of roots in town. No family and only one friend who knew I existed before I turned 25 and went off to grad school. (And only I knew that I’d had a lot of more confident, more carefree times before I materialized in New York).

I think I was incredibly jealous.

So flash forward to our phone conversation on Thursday night and he’s asking me about L.A. and I’m saying it’s great and I’ve got so much history here, and all of my old friends who knew every detail and nuance (and who knew all about the happier times, and who where there as they were happening)—and my parents too. And I told him how I thought it was really enviable that he ran into his father that time, and how now I live in a place where I can just go get a carton of milk with my mom if I need milk, and that I’d just done that today. He said he’d just done that with his mom too.

I wonder if he knows I wouldn’t have left New York when I’d had the opportunity if we’d stayed together a little longer.

Then my phone beeps low battery, and I’ve got to go anyway, so I tell him that even though I meet lots of people, I don’t easily forget the people with whom I spent the kind of time that I spent with him. He echoed that sentiment emphatically. And he said he hoped it was reasonable to think we might get a drink or a coffee when I’m in New York in November—right around the time of year when we’d met last year, and had our marathon first date, during which we’d sat in Tompkins Square Park and talked about being Jewish and falling in love while leaves fell on our curly heads and we brushed them away.