Up the stairs and into the sun ricocheting off the melting snow on Christopher Street. Cross Sixth and head towards MacDougal and all at once I lose that Rizzo Ratso-"I'm waking here" mentality and begin to stroll like a drunken sailor. This is the effect the Village has on me. An apt analogy as I have actually been down here twice during fleet week, but that's a story for another platform. I pull off my long leather gloves and trail them in my hand like a new bride after the dance. It's warm for the first time in living memory which does not go too far past November, when the brain sinks into bundled up hibernation, hydrating itself only with cognac. I am going to Cafe Reggio for breakfast, a favorite Sunday excursion that I haven't taken, for some unaccountable reason, in over a year. Turn the corner at the park on MacDougal and two blocks down it sits, as it has sat since 1927.
I was a lucky dog to come across this place on one of my first trips to New York, but if I hadn't found it then, it would have been only a matter of time as it contains almost everything that drew me here to begin with. One of the most distinct memories I have still scuttling about in the curlicues of my gray matter is having my three year old nose pressed against the car window as we drove past the distant glowing mass of New York City in the middle of the night. My Dad was of the ilk, which many Dads of the time were, where you pile the kids in the car and drive like a bat out of hell until you're there. On this fateful trip back home to a place where kittens lolled on my lap as I sat in the quiet of the old tobacco shed breathing in a musty, earthly scent that would forever bind me to things that grow and die in the slant of the rain and sun, I sensed that there was something else, something quite different that I might just cotton to. I gazed out upon this thing, too far away to even see the silhouettes of skyscrapers; until it was swallowed up by the dark and the hum of the radials replaced the buzzing in my head. Finally closing my adorably gaping little maw, I turned my head and looked at the mass of my sleeping siblings beside me and the rigid back of my fathers neck at the wheel and thought, "So long folks, I'm goin there." It pleases me to think, that even then on that ancient night, Cafe Reggio was filled with the ill begotten finger snapping youth of the day.
I was a lucky dog to come across this place on one of my first trips to New York, but if I hadn't found it then, it would have been only a matter of time as it contains almost everything that drew me here to begin with. One of the most distinct memories I have still scuttling about in the curlicues of my gray matter is having my three year old nose pressed against the car window as we drove past the distant glowing mass of New York City in the middle of the night. My Dad was of the ilk, which many Dads of the time were, where you pile the kids in the car and drive like a bat out of hell until you're there. On this fateful trip back home to a place where kittens lolled on my lap as I sat in the quiet of the old tobacco shed breathing in a musty, earthly scent that would forever bind me to things that grow and die in the slant of the rain and sun, I sensed that there was something else, something quite different that I might just cotton to. I gazed out upon this thing, too far away to even see the silhouettes of skyscrapers; until it was swallowed up by the dark and the hum of the radials replaced the buzzing in my head. Finally closing my adorably gaping little maw, I turned my head and looked at the mass of my sleeping siblings beside me and the rigid back of my fathers neck at the wheel and thought, "So long folks, I'm goin there." It pleases me to think, that even then on that ancient night, Cafe Reggio was filled with the ill begotten finger snapping youth of the day.
This morning there are no bongo's or berets but there is Canario Voltaire--poached eggs on a bed of yellow rice with Italian cheese and of course, cappuccino. There is opera music and oil paintings so darkened by age and I suppose the grand old days of smoking inside, that you can only guess at the expressions of the subjects. There are marble topped cafe tables and heavily carved wooden benches lining the walls, and endless conversation. And as long as you're eating or drinking something, you can pretty much sit there forever. But this being the first day you can walk outside and not consider moving anywhere south of the equator, I decide to take a stroll in Washington Square Park.
Not long after I enter the park I hear "Hey, Tall Girl!" and one of the chess players is beckoning me over. There was a time when every Black man on the streets of New York called me Slim. "Hey, Slim." "How ya doin, Slim?" Or sometimes just a polite nod of the head in passing and simply "Slim." Now it's most often "Hey, Red." but today it's "Hey, Tall Girl" and I don't mind the evolution. I walk over to him and he's interested in imparting his knowledge of Chess, which I would love to gain, but it don't come cheap in the Square and payday's around the corner and down the block on the calendar. I promise I will bring my daughter down to the square when she comes home as she has beaten my every game since she was ten and he grins at that. I sit on a bench for a while watching people go by carrying their children or their dogs, many of both specimens dressed in pink puffy coats. Eventually the tuberculin hacking of the guy across the way gets to me and it's time for Tall Girl to head back uptown. It's odd how insular we become in our own little neighborhoods when it's so easy to get out. So easy to shoot through a tunnel in the ground and find yourself in a place you promised you’d be, a million years ago.
