A Little Bit of Chaos & Magic

Each year, my wife and I usually fly from the West Coast to meet her family for Thanksgiving in NYC. I haven’t lived there since 2017, and so the first couple of days navigating the city makes me realize how much I’ve forgotten.

But once I’m back in the swim of things, it’s exhilarating.

The flip side is that keeping pace with the city on these visits often manifests as an intense desire to NOT be mistaken for a tourist (Sorry I slowed down and blocked the sidewalk! I swear I used to live here!). In retrospect, this feeling clearly informed a silly comic I made while teaching my Food & Comics “Fiction” unit around the same time:

Early in the trip, we spent time visiting our new baby niece and local friends—and I purchased way too many books at The Strand for someone who is moving internationally in a month—before hopping on the train to Long Island for Thanksgiving. The napkin holders on the table inspired me to enlist my 7-year-old French niece in teaching me various insect words in French.

Or so I thought, until I got some helpful etymological context at a dinosaur exhibit we saw at The American Museum of Natural History:

The Latin word libella means balance or a carpenter’s level, probably used for dragonflies because of their ability to stay level while hovering / flying (!).

Once we were back in the city, I met my friend Rachel Kurtz at Liberty Bagels, a place apparently known for their radioactive-looking rainbow bagel and birthday cake cream cheese combo. I snapped a picture for my “birthday cake flavored items” camera album (a reflex from my grad school thesis on the history of birthday cake). And I couldn’t help thinking that while piles of gelato look delicious, piles of cream cheese look…to borrow a phrase from Arthur’s Muffy:

After bagels, Rachel, her husband, and I went to the Society of Illustrators to see “Something Else Entirely: The Illustration Art of Edward Gorey.” I was really excited to do this with Rachel—we’ve been meeting online regularly since 2023, but this is the first time we’d met in person! She came in all the way from Massachusetts and we had a great time.

The most fascinating thing I learned about Edward Gorey at the museum is that he was OBSESSED with the ballet. Like, attended 39 performances of The Nutcracker in one season obsessed. He made a lot of ballet-centric work, but after I read this, I really noticed how the poses and gestures of his figures have a very dance-like quality to them, even when they’re still. Or when they’re floating vampires.

My in-laws very generously put us all up in a hotel in Midtown when we’re with the family in New York, but traversing Times Square / Rockefeller Center / 5th Avenue around the holidays is sensory overload x 1,000 for me. This year in particular, I thought I was crazy because…

Apparently there’s a perfume company that’s been “scenting Fifth Avenue from 47th Street to 59th street” for the past three years! Supposedly they pipe it in through little tubes hidden in the branded tree planters (if you look closely at the background image above, you’ll see one behind us).

Seeing the holiday windows along 5th Avenue is one of my mother-in-law’s favorite post-Thanksgiving traditions, and this year we really took our time walking around. Honestly, it felt pretty magical! It was also a nice change to have some IRL clothes shopping options (something San Francisco does not excel at); I found a great jacket for our going-away party at Zara, plus some cute ornaments with Rach at Saks.

Our little adventure culminated in a stop at the St. Regis hotel, where we unexpectedly became involved in a daily hotel ritual, which is the most Titanic-like thing that’s ever happened to me in real life:

It was the perfect literal top-off to an already fantastic day.

On that note: I hope you all have an equally magical and memorable end to your year—