Transformations

My daughter texted yesterday that she had the day off today, and did I want to hang out. This, as you well know, puts me in my happy place, a spontaneous wander around the city with my girl. She texted me again an hour later and said "I did a good thing at my job!” She then shared that a corporate partner whom she's been cultivating since before the pandemic began had just committed to a very generous sponsorship package to feed New York's hungry. My girl is loving her job right now, even though her millennial brain tells her she's been too many years at one place. Many of her friends have skipped from job to job since graduating college, some have returned to grad school, but she's doing work that helps to secure people in need, has moved up steadily through the ranks, and has a super supportive and fair minded boss, a gift indeed. Not only that, her nonprofit agreed to let her work remotely from another city while her love is in grad school. And when she does come back to New York in a year, she'll only need to go into the office two days a week, and work from home the other three—this is the new protocol at her company. 

My son's fiancee also learned this week that the entire staff of her company will continue working remotely, so now she and my son are figuring out where they can set up office space for her in their one-bedroom apartment. One can't work from the kitchen counter or the couch and coffee table indefinitely. Meanwhile, my husband learned that everyone at the museum who took a one fifth cut in pay during quarantine by going to a four day work week, will be reinstated to five days as of July 1. All scientific staff will return to the building full time soon after. As for the magazine for which I edit, they have now put out more than a year's worth of issues with everyone working remotely, so I can't imagine they'll want to keep paying massive amounts of rent for their Brooklyn open concept office space, industrial cool and airy as it is. 

The city is being transformed in more ways than how people work. Restaurants have spilled onto sidewalks and out into the street, and the change looks to be permanent. Here's a picture of a Mexican restaurant on our block that is now mostly street side dining. The second picture is the view from where the man and I sat inside our favorite neighborhood place when we escaped our dining table co-working situation for a midday lunch earlier this week.

 

 

 

The kettle's whistling, and I've just run out of steam on this post. I need to go get ready to meet my girl anyway. Here's one last photo, taken by my daughter, of a woman going grey. My husband likes the silvering, and jokes that he's responsible for each and every one of those strands. I like that he likes the gray, but sometimes, I tire of it and color over it with perfect assurance that the change is only temporary, the silver always returns.