How Convenient
Dear Diary:
In the late 1980s, I was an assistant to a best-selling nonfiction writer, Aline Griffith, the Countess of Romanones.
To publicize one of her spy memoirs, the countess was booked on “Late Night With David Letterman,” where she demonstrated — to the hilarity of the host and his audience — how to roll a newspaper into a rapier sharp enough to stab a man to death.
While arranging her appearance in those pre-internet days, I had several phone conversations with one of David Letterman’s assistants. It emerged that she, like me, was in her mid-20s, new to New York City and living on her own.
We had such a good rapport that, after the countess’s appearance, we decided to meet for lunch on a weekend.
Now: Where to meet in vast Manhattan? To our mutual surprise, it turned out we both lived in Kips Bay. Convenient!
I was on East 27th Street; incredibly, so was she. Between Second and Third Avenues. My block!
I lived at 222 East 27th: a fifth-floor walk-up in a tenement building with four studio apartments on each floor. Her address? 222 East 27th Street. We occupied two of the building’s 20 studio apartments.
I can’t fathom the odds of that coincidence any more than I can explain how she and I had managed to climb the same slanted stairwell for more than a year without laying eyes on each other.
Lunch was easy: We met on our stoop and walked to Albuquerque Eats, on our corner. After that, we ran into each other often in our building until she got engaged and moved away.
We said goodbye the day she left, carrying pillows and luggage down the steps of our stoop as she headed off into her future.
I can’t remember her name.
— Jennifer Egan
Ms. Egan is a writer. Her most recent book is “The Candy House.”
Screen Time
Dear Diary:
Most weekday mornings, I take my 6-year-old son to school on the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan.
As anyone who rides the F in the morning knows, it can be about as pleasant as trying to walk through Times Square, only with people’s armpits shoved in your face.
Add to that trying to make sure a 6-year-old doesn’t step on someone’s foot or have a meltdown because you forgot string cheese and you have a sense of how fraught this trip can be.
So the video ads that now fill the cars are very important. I have conned my son into thinking he’s getting to watch TV, which isn’t allowed at home, on the train.
One morning while we rode a crowded F, my son noticed that none of the video screens in the car were working.
“Why are the screens not working?” he asked.
“Well, they might be broken,” I said.
My son looked up and down the car.
“All of them?” he asked.
Then he shook his head, sighed, pulled his hand out of his pocket and held it to his face. He started pressing imaginary buttons on his hand, and I realized he was pretending it was a cellphone.
He put his hand up to his ear and spoke into it loudly.
“Mamdani, Mamdani,” he said. “The videos on the F train are not working.”
He waited for a response and then spoke again.
“What do you mean he’s not there?” he said. “Where is he? Well, go get him.”
Even in my son’s fantasy, the bureaucracy was giving him the runaround.
A moment later, our stop arrived, and my son wrapped up his call: “My Dad says we have to get off the train now, so please give him the message.”
— Aasif Mandvi
Mr. Mandvi is an actor. He recently completed a run in “Fallen Angels” on Broadway.
Small Sushi Counter
Dear Diary:
One night in December 2012, I slipped into a small sushi counter in the West Village and took a seat.
I’ve always been drawn to Japanese cuisine, to the discipline and restraint it involves. Sitting at the counter, you surrender. The chef sets the pace, and communication is wordless.
And then there is the singular pleasure of being alone in New York. I think it’s the opposite of loneliness. When you’re alone, you can really listen to the city in a way that it sticks to you.
“The ebi is insane,” the man next to me said. He was slim and wearing a black suit and Vans. “Winter is when it’s best.”
We talked about food, the pizza at Lucali and music. We both loved Radiohead.
I told him about moving here from Switzerland, my first year in New York, trying to build something at Eleven Madison Park, trying to find my place.
We exchanged names: Daniel. Daniel.
Near the end of the meal, he mentioned that he was a musician.
What kind of music? I asked.
I play guitar, he said. I write songs. I have a band.
What’s the band called? I asked.
Interpol.
I stopped.
“‘Turn on the Bright Lights’!” I blurted out. At that moment, I had zero cool.
That album carried me through the exact years I had been describing, my first in America. Thinking of it also took me back to Switzerland — to being a teenager, playing bass in my own band, not yet knowing who I was.
You made that album? I said.
He nodded.
We’ve been close friends ever since. For a while, I stopped listening to the record. It felt strange to be a fan of someone you love.
Inevitably, I put it back on.
It’s that good.
— Daniel Humm
Mr. Humm is a chef and owner of several restaurants, including Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan.
On Delancey
Dear Diary:
I was walking home from dinner on Delancey Street on one of those magical December nights on the Lower East Side where the city is all amber light and steam rising off the corners, very “Inside Llewyn Davis.”
As I passed the Bowery Ballroom, I noticed that Jon Batiste was performing. Jon and I go back to my Juilliard days, when I’d pretend I was also a jazz musician and sit in on some of the most intense jam sessions.
Completely on impulse, I bought a ticket.
The concert was electric. Jon has a way of making people feel part of the same fabric, and the room swayed like it shared a single heartbeat.
At the end of the show, instead of saying, “good night,” Jon grabbed his melodica, jumped offstage, walked through the crowd and out the front doors
Instinctively, everyone followed. Looks were exchanged, but feet kept moving behind the second-line band pouring onto Delancey Street. Suddenly, hundreds of strangers were dancing impromptu through the Lower East Side together.
Police officers smiled and waved us through intersections. Drivers rolled down their windows and surrendered to the moment. One delivery biker trapped at a crosswalk threw his hands in the air and started dancing too.
People leaned out apartment windows, waving towels, napkins, anything white enough to catch the light. Others came down onto their stoops and folded themselves into the parade.
I had seen Jon lead these “love riots” before. But that was during Covid, when New York felt strangely fragmented. This night felt different. Necessary, even.
For a few blocks, the city paused. Just music echoing off brick buildings and strangers moving together in the winter air.
And then, as quickly as it had formed, the crowd dissolved back into the city’s tapestry.
I’ve never forgotten the feeling.
— Corey Hawkins
Mr. Hawkins is an actor who appears in the movie “The Odyssey,” which will be released this month.
Bryant Park Lawn
Dear Diary:
Shortly after my wife Dawn and I moved to New York, we attended a summer screening of “The Sound of Music” on the Bryant Park lawn.
As newcomers, we hadn’t yet learned the delicate etiquette of claiming space with a blanket and how to save enough room for yourself without appearing to annex part of Manhattan.
The veteran New Yorkers around us seemed to know exactly where that line was and weren’t shy about pointing it out when others crossed it.
Then the movie began.
We had rightly anticipated that the audience would come to life with a singalong of each familiar song. What we didn’t expect was how vocal everyone around us would be when the Baroness appeared on the screen. Each time, a chorus of hisses rose from the crowd.
It was our first summer in New York, and in a single evening we learned two things: New Yorkers have strong opinions, and they don’t keep them to themselves.
— Pat Kiernan
Mr. Kiernan has been an anchor of the morning news show on Spectrum News NY1 since 1997.
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