I go back as often as possible, of course. I love New York. Nothing else like it.

The people who let me sleep on their floor back then let my husband and me sleep on their futon this time. The Nielsen Haydens live in Park Slope, one of my favorite parts of Brooklyn. It looks like my youthful vision of the big city, very A Tree Grows In Brooklyn with its brownstones and churches and polyglot neighborhoods. Lying awake the first night listening to the unusual noises in the building around me I thought about how many times I've slept in their various apartments and houses over the years, and they in mine. 18 years of friendship means we went through our entire young adulthood together. Blackmail material! Oh, the stories of heartbreak and madness we could tell if it wouldn't bore everyone else senseless.

I do marvel at how well the story has turned out, considering the hardships of that summer long ago when we were all broke and fairly desperate but determined to carve out the careers of our choice. They had to do their apprenticeship in New York, since they wanted to break into publishing. I was glad to sort myself out in San Francisco without the additional pressures of an East Coast lifestyle. What's so marvelous is that we still haven't run out of things to talk about.

Determined to take a big sightseeing bite out of New York this trip, which I often forego in lieu of just seeing friends, I got to both the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the day Thursday. I admired the enormous collection of dinosaur bones, chose a fuzzy Giant Squid toy in the DinoStore, walked through the Shakespeare Garden in Central park to the Met, stared at the astonishing collection of ancient Greek art, and inspected the special costumes on display in conjunction with the Ingres exhibit. I didn't see even half of what was at each museum, which made me cross, but perhaps next time.

I then spent an hour and a half getting from 81st to Chambers Street via public transportation in time to meet Kymm, Tracing, and Shmuel for a live taping of Comedy Central's Premium Blend featuring Kymm's friends Lust Pollution. You can read an account of it here. I surprised myself by laughing at all of the comics. I especially liked the fellow who explained Celtic dancing is a fiendishly clever Irish invention that allows them to keep drinking even while dancing. You hold the upper part of your body nearly immobile while the bottom half is jigging around vigorously. Drinks never spill!

Friday was the officially designated shopping day. Teresa took the day off and we did a bit of desultory shopping on 7th in Park Slope. I was saddened to find my favorite rubber stamp store was closed. It's not a lucrative business, and rents have been going up as Park Slope becomes fashionable. We caught the subway into the city and wandered through the fancy shops on Fifth Avenue. I sang the Green Acres theme song under my breath as we walked into Tiffany's and proceded to vet all the jewelry. We didn't like most of it. It was frankly uninspired stuff. I suppose that's what the customers want, but we felt just fine about not dropping thirty grand on vulgarly large rings.

I marveled at the specimens of humanity crowding the sidewalks up in the rarified air of Central Park East. What do you suppose it's like having more money than God? I saw hundreds of women in fashionable outfits with salon hair and big shopping bags on their arms, loaded with goodies from Henri Bendel, and Saks, and Barney's. Oh, what it must be to not care about spending the gross national debt of a small country on a dress! I wouldn't like to live in such a distorted world, I think, but then I didn't grow up with those expectations. We recovered our sense of equilibrium by having drinks at the Algonquin. I never know what to order in bars, but Cosmopolitans are always mentioned in articles about hip watering holes, so I recklessly ordered one. It was excellent, and so my memory of the Algonquin now has the appropriately hazy alcohol-induced glow about it.

As we walked to dinner that evening I mentioned a rather fraught conversation with an acquaintance who was adopting a baby from China. "Adopt a Chinese baby, an hour later you're ready to adopt again," Patrick promptly replied. This led to all sorts of tasteless baby jokes. Are there any other kind?

Saturday was spent almost entirely at the Bronx Zoo, a really beautiful place with a superb collection of animals displayed in natural settings. On the way, Teresa taught us her warding song to pacify the driving gods. As best as I recall it goes like this:

Please don't hit us, random person,
Please don't squash us flat like bugs,
We hope that you will drive safely,
Even though you're taking drugs.

It seemed to work. We certainly saw all kinds of demented driving, including the chap who pulled out from the right parking lane, drove across three lanes of traffic, and then drove over a raised median to head in the opposite direction. It was, er, educational.

Dinner that evening was at Ennio and Michael's in the Village. Good Northern Italian food, I highly recommend it. I invited Kymm, Tracing, and Amanda Page plus her husband Jeff to meet up with me, John, Patrick, and Teresa. The last minute addition of Robert Legault lent a certain air of unreality to my personal experience, but I was thrilled he could come. You see, Robert is someone I met in the late 70's (we were both part of the Seattle music scene) several years before I discovered fandom. We sort of dated back then, and sometime later he moved to New York, and I moved to San Francisco, and I told him to get in touch with these friends of mine the Nielsen Haydens, and they all worked together at Tor, and thus he's been seamlessly integrated into my fannish social life. Talk about blackmail material...! Luckily, he only teases me about my dorky 70's self once in a while.

So everyone got along quite well, and the conversation took several interesting turns, but there was a bit of natural diffidence on the part of the non-diarists when the others were yakking it up about diary gossip. Patrick asked for clarification on the kinds of things people wrote about, and everyone explained what diaries are sort of like, and I mentioned how odd I thought it was that diarists made a big deal out of announcing they were going to talk about other diaries or diarists (getting meta is the popular term) as fanzines (which is where Patrick and Teresa and I all got our start) are entirely meta and this is, in fact, their chief attraction. But the conversation really took off, everyone jabbering excitedly and talking over each others' sentences in their eagerness to express an opinion, when I brought up one specific diarist whom everyone at the table either knew from days of yore, or knew through the world of online diaries. That's right, at a table of Brits, Americans, and Australians, Nigel Richardson was the common denominator for all of us, the land bridge of online diaries and sf.

By Sunday I was slightly grumpy and running out of energy. It rained quite hard as we trundled off to our final social call of the holiday, a dim sum brunch in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. I was especially grateful that Moshe Feder, Lise Eisenberg, Vicki Rosenzweig, Elly Lang, Scraps de Selby, and the others all made the trek in the lousy weather just to have brunch with me. I ate far too much shrimp. This is my usual aim when going out for dim sum, of course. I regret they did not serve taro root with shrimp, a favorite of mine.

Afterwards, some of us wandered across the street to a big Japanese market to look at all the swell imported foods. We bought Creme Brulee Pocky (kind of nasty), mysterious envelopes of dried fungus, Hello Kitty cookies, and a can of Japanese iced cappuccino in a can which proclaimed itself "Italian Style from Hawaii." We went back to Park Slope and sat around the apartment hearing about Vicki's recent sale to Salon Magazine, Lise's Worldcon experiences in Australia, and generally catching up on gossip. Eventually, we caught our flight home, and collapsed onto our very own bed with our very own pets and our very own dirty laundry.

What's interesting, and surprising, about Manhattan now is the result of years of full coffers at City Hall: places that were filthy and dangerous in the 80's are upscale and trendy. It's not just that I've become sophisticated and ditched that hay in my hair; the degraded city I remember from my first summer really has changed for the better. I am happy I got to see new sights on this trip: Times Square (I never really looked before, I was always so busy scurrying from subway to office and home), the Natural History museum, the Bronx Zoo, the Algonquin. I feel invigorated, revitalized, and not in the least bruised by my experience.

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