If you have a plan to pull up your Bay Area stakes and leave wine country, coastal redwoods, and sunny dispositions for New York City and arrive in the depths of winter, let me warn you that it is a bad idea in every way. Take my advice and wait until April, or even early May. Enjoy a few more West Coast months, have a taco, and watch the hills grow emerald as rains return heartbeats to golden grass. And then, when Central Park trees flower and explode blossom fireworks in celebration of lengthening days, take that as your cue to go.
Wintertime in daylight-saving New York, where subterranean tunnel travel moves humans to basement connections through stench passages and up traveler-choked escalators, is a poor greeter. Wind off the Atlantic is compressed and released in avenue canyons. It pushed me uptown and downtown past blackened snowpack piles where the trash of winter waited for spring’s melting release. After many travel days we arrived at this destination, double-parked the car, and unloaded it, leaning into the burning cold and wind as we schlepped the sum of our possessions up five flights of stairs to our new home. Two rooms, two windows, and one air shaft full of pigeons. The song goes, “If I can make it there, I’m gonna make it anywhere.” The lyric seems appropriate and the crux is for each of us to find.
Our alarm, that muezzin of Manhattan, summoning the faithful to work, sounded early our first full day in frozen January, and we stumble-walked trash-strewn streets, sidestepping piles of dog shit in darkness, down into buzzing fluorescent corridors through pinching turnstiles onto overfull subway cars, heading downtown to look for a way to pay the bills while we practiced, auditioned, worked, and scraped our way toward a Big Apple life.
In time we found work at a temporary agency and were dispatched daily across the city to answer phones, type memos, keep a chair warm, or do data entry. But “temp work,” can be feast or famine—on feast days you arrive early, sit in the waiting area until your name is called, and then head to your job. And when famine struck, I didn’t mind playing hooky—I felt better outside, learning the city on foot, than sitting in a windowless office huffing Xerox fumes. In walking and looking, I found places that felt like oases, quiet spaces where the din of striving and surviving could fall away and yield to peace: St. Thomas’s church in midtown, where incense fills the air in Kentucky sandstone arches, rising and framing stained-glass windows; the New York Public Library with endless board feet of dark wood and ceiling murals; Inwood Hill Park, ribbons of dirt trail and soaring tulip poplars; the Cloisters with medieval staircases and gardens. In those spaces I could take refuge; they were a buttress, a shield, a hedge against all the drawbacks of city life.
Every few months we returned to California for voice lessons and sun, and we made a special trip in 2001 to sing a benefit concert for an AIDS charity, lodging with retired benefactors who hot-tubbed every morning in the nude and carried nightcaps to bed. These were our people; they probably existed in New York . . . but not in our walk-up. Their Berkeley breakfast consisted of citrus from their trees, dark espresso, and homemade bagels. Now, coming from New York, a city that defines itself by its bagels, we believed we knew the bagelry gold standard set by H&H on the Upper West Side. H&H’s garlic, onion, or everything bagel, dumped from a hot oven straight into your waiting bag, set a bar high above the mass-produced pucks sold in frozen eight-packs in the supermarket. But somehow, these Berkeley bagels blew the lid off our standards. They had the flavor of wheat and a slightly open crumb, a sign that they were hand-shaped rather than machine-made. The crust was shiny from a bath in boiling water and malt syrup, deep mahogany from the oven, and it tugged against my teeth when bitten. Just before being baked on a hot masonry stone they were garnished with coarse sea salt, dried onion, or sesame seeds. We ate them with rich cream cheese, lox, and fresh avocado. There are times when experience intersects with greatness and all one can muster is an openmouthed, incredulous laugh. If you garden, if you sew or knit, if you write poems, build rock walls, or bake for friends and strangers, you understand the meaning found in this space where making, sharing, baking, and giving are creative and love-filled. Eating these simple, delicious bagels was an act of prayer, a wish, a reminder of how close we are to a miracle—simple ingredients combining to create a space with so much good. I have made changes over the years, drying my own onion, adding seed blends to the outside; but in essence the dark, chewy, flavorful bagels remain unchanged, as they should.
Bagels are a zany, misfit member of the baked goods family. Prone to outlandish ties, wild hair, and loud laughing, they dance comfortably, albeit awkwardly, in front of others while pan bread and soft rolls, baguettes and shortcakes stand on the sidelines, too cool to engage. The process of making bagels may seem complicated—multiple steps spread across two days, a bath in boiling water before baking, what!?—but, once the schedule is understood it can be planned for, and the result is worth the work. On day one a poolish is mixed a few hours before the final dough. The dough rises for a bit and then is chilled overnight, covered, in the refrigerator before the dividing, final shaping, boiling, and baking on day two. If you are tentative, if you fear exposure or risk, I say jump in, put on your dancing shoes or your best ugly sweater, and try moon-walking; you might just be the life of the breakfast party.