Home?

This is a photo of St. Vincent's Hospital, located on West 12th st. and 7th Ave. in New York. I was born here, which was weird because my parents lived way up in the West 70s. All their friends were having babies at Lenox Hill and Sloan Kettering, but none of those places had a midwife program like St. Vincent's, and my mother absolutely insisted on having a midwife help deliver my precious little baby self. It sort of makes sense that the downtown hospital would have something as decidedly unconventional as a midwife program, come to think of it. So that's where I was born. My dad likes to make jokes about a Jewish mother pushing her Jewish baby out in a bed with a cross hanging over it.

Anyway, I'm not going to tell the story of how I was born, even though it is a good one. I'm going to tell the story of how I was walking in downtown Manhattan the other day, going to my favorite restaurant, Tea and Sympathy at 108-110 Greenwich Ave. I love this place because not only does it have a wide array of teas and pastries and British foods (because say what you will about British cuisine, I adore a good ham and cream cheese sandwich with sticky toffee pudding for dessert) but it's one of the few places I know where a lady can have a meal by herself and not feel like a complete loser doing so. Also, I have a fond appreciation for the waitstaff, who all have authentic British accents, and the decor, which is a bunch of kitschy, British memorabilia. It makes my Anglophile self just chuffed to bits.

But this is all related. As I was walking to Tea and Sympathy, I walked by St. Vincent's Hospital. Feeling like it was just too big a coincidence for my favorite restaurant to be a stone's throw away from my place of birth, I started to walk a little more slowly. I looked around. There were bodegas with flowers being sold under the awnings, smoke shops, boutiques, pharmacies, and above all these places were apartments. Apartments that I suddenly felt I needed to inhabit. Because my perfect home is one that makes me grow. I want Greenwich Avenue to grab my ankles and West 12th street to take my wrists, and I want them to pull me until I'm ten feet tall.

But with my birthplace and favorite place on either side of me, I felt like where I came from finally felt like a part of me. All the gritty particles surrounded me and made the air fit me like a glove, and even though I didn't hold the keys to any of those apartments, I was home.

Peace, Love, and Semicolons,
Lisa