Dinner with my beautiful girl

She comes into the city to be in person in her office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, working remotely from her home in Brooklyn the rest of the days. In New York, “the city” generally means Manhattan. All other boroughs are called by their proper names. Anyway, since she was already going to be in the city, we made a plan to meet up for dinner in Battery Park. Her office windows overlook the reflecting pools where the two World Trade Center towers used to be. It’s a fairly fancy part of town, with wall to wall cops on every block because of what happened there 22 years ago now. Everything has since been rebuilt. It’s all even shinier than before. My girl and I sat in a cozy round booth and ordered our usual margaritas and also scallops and mussels and she was as radiant as always, even though she’s working through some hard life stuff. She also doesn’t love her present job, but she’s doing well there anyway, managing corporate tech crises like the boss she is. Her old boss from her last job reached out to her and said, “Let’s start a business together. But seriously.” They’re actually going to meet to brainstorm this week. They had such a good connection when they worked together, and they’ve forged a full friendship now that they’re no longer in hierarchical roles. We agreed one can make new and true friends throughout life, as evidenced by how close I have become in the past couple of years to a neighbor whose son and mine played together growing up. We were fellow parents then. Now we’re irreverent besties who don’t have to mince words. My daughter and I also raised our spicy margaritas to toast the fact that I’ve completed the three chapters I need to turn in to the publisher soon, phase one of my contracted delivery dates, but first my subject will need to engage with the pages, and give me any changes she might want to make. I’m ahead of the schedule we agreed on (always under promise and over deliver my dad used to say), but I went ahead and told my subject I’d get the chapters to her this coming Wednesday, so I’d have to honor my word and not back out. It never gets easier to turn over a piece of writing and wait for the verdict, but one has to be brave. I’m now twenty-two thousand words into the narrative. Roughly eighty thousand more to go. This is utterly disjointed and stream of consciousness. I’ve been deep in the work trenches, missing you all. But seeing my girl on Thursday evening, that was like all the light in the world breaking through. Just being in her company brings me such joy. She is wise and complicated and loving. My world spins easily in the sun of her smile.