March 25th, 2023

I awoke that morning from a hearty sleep, the kind of sleep that gets you walking around with a God-like energy for a few hours. Yet the weather in no way mirrored my upbeat mood.

The sky was misted with formless clouds and slow yet steady drops of rain. The bike path was clear. From the overpass there was a steady drip of water, dropping onto the crossing path. The East River was turbulent, crashing onto the concrete steps.

The front cover of a newspaper was carried violently by the wind toward the Staten Island Ferry. The jazz record, “In a sentimental Mood,” by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane played in my headphones. Traffic that day was light and drivers were riding slower than normal because of the wet conditions.

After trying for fifteen minutes, the delivery app on my phone wasn’t working, so I gave up. I had wanted to stay in the apartment another night to relax but there was no way that I was cooking, especially since there was no food in the fridge.

I started putting together a last minute plan. I was going to sit at the bar of a restaurant on the 60th floor, order a burger, and change out of my sweaty gym clothes.

I put on a grey cashmere sweater quarter zip from Theory, a brown plaid cashmere jacket with one inch black buttons, a pair of black slacks, and a pair of high top Cole Haan black boots. I took my headphones out of my drawer, pulled the cord through my quarter zip and took another walk into the misty New York City rain.

As I was about to cross the intersection on Wall Street, a woman with a long black coat stumbled in front of me. I let the woman pass. She smiled at my kind gesture and kept clicking and clacking her heels up Wall Street.

Usually, when I sit at the bar on the sixtieth floor, I see a beautiful city landscape of high rise buildings, but not that day. The sky was too foggy. I ordered a ginger ale, pretzel bites, and a burger.

“Is there a special kind of burger with cheese?” I asked the bartender.

He stared at me blankly.

“Not that I can think of.”

“Really? Because my friend told me that there is some special burger with cheese that is off menu.”

“Maybe he’s talking about the cheese boards?”

“No, that’s not it. I’ll text him and see what he says.”

My friend texted me back, telling me to ask for a burger with chopped cheese. I relayed the message to the bartender, who finally understood what I was talking about.

“Oh, you mean the burger with truffle and chopped cheese from the side menu.”

“Yes, that is it!” I exclaimed. “Is it possible to switch my order?”

“The bartender looked at me even more blankly than before.

“It’s OK if it is too late. I can try it out next time,” I said.

“Yea, I am pretty sure that the order will be ready soon.”

I sat there at the bar, thinking for a moment. There was no way I can see my friend the next time and tell him that I went to the restaurant and didn’t try the off-menu burger.

“You know what-” I said. “Can you put an order in for the truffle burger? I’ll try both and whatever I don’t eat I will take home for later.”

“Sure,” he said. “Let me just see if we still have truffles.”

As I waited for my food, I turned on the song, “It’s not for me to say” by Johnny Mathis. It is a tune from the late 1950s that reminds me of my grandmother.

The song shifted my mindset. I thought about slow dancing with my grandma alone in the richest, most decadent, Versailles-style kind of ballroom. There was no one else in the entire place, which could have easily fit ten thousand people. My grandma was beaming with a smile, happy to share the song with me on the dance floor.

Our movement was graceful, my grandma slid through the air as light and as smooth as a feather. I did my best to keep up.

The next tune I turned on was, “Something Stupid,” by Frank and Nancy Sinatra. This song reminded me of my girlfriend, Caroline.

Similar to my grandma, this song made me think about dancing in a decadent hall with Caroline. The only difference was that we were in some hot Italian destination, her family was looking on to us dancing together, and she was wearing a white wedding dress with a similar beaming smile as my grandma.

I led the slow dance, guiding us through open space. She was so happy that she had no control over her emotions and neither did I. The moment was much bigger than both of us could possibly handle.

Next, I headed back to my apartment to drop off my burger in the fridge. Then, I crossed the street to a hotel/bar/lounge area. As I arrived, a flock of women were departing the hotel in cocktail dresses, looking like they were going out for a late night.

I sat down in a blue chair in the back corner of the room, not too far away from the bar. There was hardly anyone in the place, which was a little strange for a Saturday evening in New York City.

“What time do you guys close?” I asked the waitress, who had her blonde hair in a ponytail.

“Eleven,” she said politely.

I ordered a bottle of the best wine they had on the menu, although I didn’t realize that until after I paid the bill. I pulled out the notebook from my bag and started recounting the highlights of my day. As I reached the part where I sat down in the back corner of the hotel, a young boyish looking man with a long sleeve red button down shirt and a faded haircut, which looked a few days old, interrupted me.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said timidly. “I saw you writing and you remind me a lot of me.”

I turned my attention to him and put my pen down for a moment, careful to be polite and not appear as if he was bothering me.

“Can I ask what you are writing about? Is it fiction? Nonfiction? Are you a writer”

“Oh, uh — ” I said, thinking about which question to answer first. “Just writing about my day. I just do it as a hobby.”

“That is very nice. I just want to say to keep it up. You remind me of me. I used to go to a bar/place like this, grab a drink, and start to write. That’s how my business started. I started the same way you did. Just writing things down and then eventually I turned those writings into books. Then I had a few books published.”

“Really? What’s your name? I will look you up.”

“Oh, my name is Joe Puma, but you probably won’t find me on the internet because I was published and then the book went out of print. So we are waiting for it to go back into print, so it will be back on the internet.”

“Honestly, this is the first time that I have done this, but I’m definitely going to start doing this more often.

In that moment my vibrations with the universe were higher than they have ever been. People were looking over, smiling. Joe Puma went back to his seat where he was sitting across from his wife. I went back to writing. Before long, I drifted into the city night.