My old boss is coming to town next weekend to promote a film that she co-produced. She is still the editor/publisher of the gay paper in Chicago that was my first job out of college. She friended me on Facebook earlier in the year, so we're having coffee while she is in NY. I haven't seen her since probably 2000.

Those were lean years -- straight out of school, my first apartment was next door to a crack house, and periodically the police raided it. When my roommate and I moved in, between us we had a fork, my aluminum camping mess kit, one plate and a cooking pan. We foraged a bench from the alley and I bought a used futon. We had an armchair that had neither arms nor feet -- you just sort of wobbled around 3" off the floor. To make extra money, I borrowed my boss's battered Ford Escort and delivered the newspapers that I wrote, ducking in and out of bookshops and bars and bathhouses every Thursday. I ate a lot of ramen. At the time it was all just sort of normal. It's two weeks past Thanksgiving, but high up on the list: I'm thankful it got better.

Holiday countdown time: 18 days til Christmas, with five holiday parties, two special occasion dinners out, one dinner party in, one old boss in town, two tree trimmings, one flight to NC, one session of glassblowing, and a sneaking suspicion that there will be other holiday obligations I don't yet know about that just show up. On the upside, my tree fits into my foyer as long as I don't try to put any coats away for the next month.

One of my NY pals and Thankgiving guests commented recently that he rarely thinks home cooking is as good as restaurant fare, although he kindly suggested last Thursday's dinner was an argument to the contrary. He lives in the right place. New York is a restaurant town, or at least a town where it is very easy to outsource your food preparation duties.

I'm in the minority of New Yorkers in that I like to cook and actually put together most of my meals. I got an inkling of this about six months after moving here when I went to a potluck at which a sizable percentage of the dishes were store-bought. I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

It's understandable. New York apartments tend to be tiny. The kitchens moreso. If you want a full-size fridge and stove/oven, you have to actually pay attention when apartment hunting. Bonus points if you find a place with a dishwasher. Which some people use to store their shoes/books/etc. It's also pretty hard to find the large-scale supermarkets you grew up with. We have several branches of Whole Paycheck, where the food is very pretty and very pricey, and a number of Gristede's and a smattering of other chains, but our groceries are on the whole small and cramped and trying to be all things to all people and you have to really watch for wilted lettuce. Then you have to shlep it home, with the double plastic bags cutting into your fingers, or plan your Saturday around a Fresh Direct delivery.

Also, it's New York. There are so many things to do other than cook. Like drink. The number of restaurants per square mile is exceeded only by the number of bars. Who has time to cook when you could be trying to live out your down-market Sex and the City fantasy life or watching the latest tortured off-off-off Broadway production? Or berating the tourists. Don't forget that. Everyone has to put in at least 5 hours a month. It's part of the tax code.

And then there is the food. In most of Manhattan you are hard-pressed to go a block that does not have a deli/bodega/chicken stand/pizza joint/kebab dispensary/Chinese take-out. They all deliver. I ordered Chinese tonight that might well have been halfway out the door and on a bike speeding toward me before I hung up the phone. You can eat a different nationality's cuisine every night for three months. I remember this whenever I'm ogling the latest international cookbook. Two books came out this fall that caught my eye -- one is a technique-based Chinese cookbook and one is on Asian dumplings of many nations: potstickers and samosas and springrolls. I love both and it would be great to know how to cook them better. But then I remembered: I can pick up the phone and have them delivered, better than I could make them, all at the same time, and for a fraction of the price. It would take me three hours to make what Ollie's can rush over in 20 minutes.

Even so, I cook. Give me a Sunday afternoon and a package of short ribs and I'll make you weep. And in that case I can do it for a fraction of what you'll pay at Gramercy Tavern, plus have leftovers. It's decidedly cheaper. When I'm reining in the household expenses for a month or two, meals out are the first thing to go. A vat of soup made for $15 (and that's with the good turkey from DiPaola's) nets at least four meals, bringing it down into practically McDonalds-ish economy. Also, it's relaxing. Many frustrations can be worked out by pounding the living crap out of a schnitzel. Also, it's a good outlet for my control-freak tendencies, and the kitchen is a great place to lurk during parties. And further, chicks dig cooking skills. Just sayin'.

Inside my head on the subway this morning:

207th St: Ooh, nice and quiet. Will I get the Downtown A Experience conductor? Nope. Oh well.

181st St: Not too crowded. I'm not that late. Must be a lot of people taking a long weekend.

145th St: Wow, no one sitting next to me yet. Awesome.

125th St: Someone sat down. Hmm.

124th St: Is she singing?!

123rd St: Seriously. Singing. To herself. Will she be doing this all the way down?

122nd St: Yes, apparently she will.

121st St: Maybe if I sigh loudly...

120th St: Nope.

119th St: What the hell? Singing? No one sings on the subway unless they're trying to make some money. Perhaps if I widen my eyebrows in disbelief.

118th St: Nope. Her eyes are closed.

115th St: Does she know any other verse than this? Is she in some sort of trance? Did she go to a concert last night? It's Monday morning. What the hell. Stop. Please.

110th St: Is she crazy? She's dressed fairly normally. She doesn't smell.

108th: Dammit. This is the problem with express trains. You're hostage to whoever gets in your car for 60 blocks. What. The. Hell.

79th St: Still singing.

59th St: Finally. Maybe she'll get out.

58th St: Nope.

50th St. That guy across the aisle also looks irritated. It's not just me.

42nd St: She got up! She moved. Across the aisle. Still singing.

34th St: Thank god.

Inside Penn Station: What the hell, slow walkers, are you out of your minds? Move. Please. Move. Do not pause on the stairs. Really. Go. Somewhere. Ma'am, that's a really ugly brocade suit. Someone should tell her. Slow walking people with roller suitcases. %&$*ing Amtrak.

Yup, back to the grind.

I had been dreaming about a full-scale Thanksgiving weekend for years. All the major elements were in place this year: Menu planned, refrigerator stuffed with food, plenty of time for leftovers in between jaunts around the city with Claudia and her dad. It all went without a hitch until about 7 p.m. on Thursday, when the first skirmishes with a virus rendered both Jeff and me inert and kept us that way for most of Friday and into Saturday morning. We've achieved the sort of intimate friendship in which we can text each other about the relative quality of our anguished stomach cramps, so that's nice. And mercifully I don't think anyone else at dinner was afflicted, so the leftovers continued to be eaten and other people actually left the couch on Friday. I did paint my foyer on Friday. The fumes probably didn't help but the place looks better.

Saturday Claudia took her dad to the Guggenheim in the morning. I felt a little guilty for not going along but then remembered that some people *like* spending time with their parents and don't need to be rescued. Weird. I met them at the Natural History museum in the afternoon, along with every other family with out-of-town guests in the tri-state area, and all of us trooped through the Silk Road exhibit. It's not bad, probably better at off-hours when there aren't 300 other people crowding around the taxidermied canels, but they did have live silk worms and quite a bit of information on ancient glassblowing, plus recipes for trail snacks.

We took the dad unit to dinner at Buceo, a tapas place on 95th that I particularly like. We never did get a table but the bar was lively and we got our bacon-wrapped dates and Galician roasted peppers quickly. It maybe wasn't the best meal to ease back into to normal food after two careful days of mainly rice crackers, but my stomach held up and I am prepared to tackle leftovers tonight in earnest.

Today the sun is out, the dad is on his way to Cape Cod to see an old friend, and there is still a full day of weekend adventure to be had. Also, there are two slices of pumpkin pie left. Not bad.

 

Final drinking glass and a bowl that broke but turned into sort of a little leaf-shaped thingy.

Menu

Spiced nuts

Turkey
Gravy
Mashed potatoes
Cornbread dressing
Green beans, the way grandma made them, simmered to death with bacon
Pan-roasted brussels sprouts
Sweet potato gratin with marshmallows a la Jeff
Fresh cranberry relish
Cooked cranberry sauce
Rolls

Pumpkin pie
Apple/dried cherry crisp with candied ginger

Wine, beer, sparkling juices, seltzer, water
Coffee, tea, port, bourbon, antacid

I'm cooking Thanksgiving dinner this year, with a little help from my friends. Jeff, who lives all the way across the street, is in charge of potatoes both mashed and sweet; Claudia is supplying desserts, her dad, and her dad's favorite cranberry relish; and Christo is supplying his new beau, rolls, and a level of overall sophistication that we would not otherwise achieve.

The coordination among Jeff, Claudia and me has hit a fever pitch: We're trading grocery runs (who has the buttermilk?!), wine pairing tips, recipes and serving dishes. I'm hoping no more than two of us will be jockeying for stove position at any one time on Thursday afternoon. I made what I think was my last grocery foray today at lunch for a small mountain of green beans, returning only to find an e-mail from Jeff asking about the overall number of potatoes for the crowd. Somewhere along the way I started to be concerned about the sheer quantity of food and drink we're about to consume.

I haven't been in charge of a full-scale Thanksgiving in 10 years, and I'm prone to going a little overboarding on the hosting even in mundane circumstances. Having a full four-day weekend at home (also for the first time in 10 years) and a nice roster of 6 people at the table means doing the meal properly and also banking on a certain amount of leftovers consumption over the next couple days. Pumpkin pie for dessert is spectacular, but pumpkin pie for breakfast Friday morning is sheer bliss.

There's not much to do except wear loose pants and hope to do a lot of walking over the weekend as we entertain Claudia's dad. I've proposed an after-dinner waddle through the park on Thursday afternoon, weather permitting, enough to help dinner settle and create a little room for pie. If it's raining, we're doomed.

How do you count an anniversary? Particularly in an era of protracted courtships and cohabitation that might last for years until actual government-sanctioned vows take place (if ever), what do you count as the start date? Your first date? First kiss? First full-fledged lustfest? Exclusive dating? Declaration of love?

Claudia and I met a year ago last weekend and proceeded to have three very intellectually rigorous and extremely reserved dates before the ice finally broke at my holiday party in mid-December. So we're claiming to be 11 months in at this point even though we could conceivably claim an earlier starting point. I think it's reasonable in that it took that full month for either of us to decide we wanted to actually try it out, see where things went, actually declare some sort of interest.

If, and I say "IF" with every possible sort of tentative, hypothetical, devil's advocate, just throwing it out there, not in any way sort of suggesting any binding kind of statement... thing... you know, like in Spanish how you have the future conditional tense which makes it very clear that you don't actually mean this to be taken as gospel ... so with all that, IF we were going to have some sort of binding, public, avowed connection to each other at some point in the really very hypothetical future (and I'm stopping with the hypotheticals only because I think it's starting to be a case of protesting too much, and I just want to be clear: We are nowhere near that sort of thing, for reals, y'all), then that would be the new zero-mark date. "Oh, we've been married/domesticated/unionized for X year." Except just about everyone I know, not having had arranged marriages in which they met their spouse a few weeks before the ceremony, has the "Married for 4 years but together 12" or whatever attached to them. Particularly the gays. And those who were together, broke up for a few years while they sorted their stuff out, then got back together and lived happily ever after, how do you count that? Is there a time when the marriage has just lasted so long that it trumps everything else? Or is a wedding an incidental blip on the radar and you keep counting back to that first tingly kiss, the one long before you found out about the snoring and the congenital inability to clear the lint trap?

What do you count, people?