A Perfect Day in New York City

“I don’t want to go to New York,” my older son vehemently vetoed our plans to visit the City after the holidays. “It gives me a headache.”

I knew exactly what he was talking about. Our last trip to the Big Apple was a mid-summer day’s nightmare. Our sightseeing revolved around shade and landmarks like air conditioned indoors that served ice water.

“This time it will be different,” I said. But what I thought was: yep, it will be madness.

We had visited the City around the holidays before and it was freezing and crowded with freezing and angry people, who, like us, didn’t know any better and decided to experience New York at its busiest. I’d better pack Advil.

Or maybe we should consider our son’s veto and not go indeed? As the saying goes, first time is a mistake, second time is a choice. Why should we choose to do something against our better judgement? Maybe we should learn from our experiences, and come to the City during a more agreeable season?

And I wished we had. I wished we had listened to our son for the entire one hour and forty minutes of our bumper to bumper drive to Manhattan. But as soon as we emerged from the Lincoln tunnel and located a parking lot, I was beginning to wonder if perhaps we were not wrong, or at least lucky, by refusing to learn from our past. It all started with Samantha.

We met Samantha at the Rockefeller Center. She was in charge of checking the tickets to the observation deck. We were running late, and a part of our group was still on the way, which was a problem since we only had one group ticket. When we saw the long line we were sure that we would either be pushed to the back or not allowed to enter at all. Samantha could easily do that. Instead, she went out of her way to print us individual tickets so we could enter promptly and she held on to the two remaining tickets for my husband and his brother-in-law. They just had to find Samantha, she told us.

The same positivity radiated everywhere else we went that day. The guys at the street food stands sang as they sold us pretzels. The waiters at Pomodoro, a neighbourhood treasure, hooked us up with a basically private room. The dinner, which I expected to be overprized and underwhelming was one of the better dining experiences I had had in a while. And then Mike Birbiglia and his “The Old Man & The Pool” stand up made me laugh so much that my cheeks hurt. And when I thought that our day in New York could not get any better, this happened.

We were lingering by the exit of the venue because once again, our party split up. Another group was waiting next to us. Suddenly a door in the hallway opened and a man in a hooded jacket, carrying a backpack, sneaked past by us.

“Do you mind taking a picture with us?” I suddenly heard someone in the other group ask the man. It was Mike Birbiglia.

And guess what? Just like Samantha, Mike had all the right to refuse to be bothered. Clearly, he must have been tired after the show and was probably rushing to get home to his family. Instead, he joined the group for a picture and a chat.

As we were driving back to New Jersey, which luckily took only twenty minutes, I thought about all those things we decided not to do again because our prior experience had been encoded in our brain as a bad memory: all the foods we never tasted again, people we never reconnected with, places we never revisited. In many cases, it was probably a wise things to do. But I’m glad that this time we took a risk. We turned a bad memory into a good one.

We all agreed it was a perfect day in New York. And no one got a headache.