meet me at our spot

Well.

We are well past the point of summer’s cute onset: The moment you feel the sun on your legs for the first time, the day I realize that I don’t have to wear sleeves until at least September, the week where we all remember that cooking is useless and the only thing we can possibly eat is fresh tomato sandwiches.

August always feels, as it approaches, like it’s going to be a long stretch of calm before a storm. The city empties out for strange periods of time; people get slower at responding to email; your rich friends are in the Hamptons and your broke friends are in the Rockaways. It feels like it’s the time when you might start to take a breath, somehow, for some reason, until you realize that it’s 90 degrees every day and the air quality is bad and so in turn is breath itself.

And that’s the moment when you remember what August is really like: It’s a slow exhaustion, a swirling around in your mind of everything that’s bothering you. You take each of those thoughts and press into them slowly like a bruise. You consider everything that you might have been wrong about. You do these things while you’re sweating constantly from tits to tail, trying to manage your commute and your emails and your however many plagues we’re up to now.

And you don’t think too much about cooking or eating at all, until it’s Sunday night and you’re alone in your apartment and you remember that the reason half of your relationships - and this newsletter - exist is because you love food. And the “you” in this sentence is very specifically me, and one of my colleagues today said, “You know, don’t take this the wrong way, but I want to come over to your house.”

I cocked my head.

“It just seems like you always have a vibe going, and I could sit on your couch and you’d make me food and it would be nice.”

And that, of course, is the thesis I’ve built my life around, and suddenly there it is: A thing I have that I am good at, a thing that is wholly me and that I bring to the table, and then I can catch a breath again even in the August heat, even in the germ-statis of the office air conditioning.

As we speak, I am completing one of my main virtues/vices as a human, which is ensuring there are at least four kinds of cheese, two kinds of sausage, and plenty of olives and crackers in my home before a guest arrives to visit for the week. I know what kind of milk she takes in her coffee (oat), how she wants said coffee (drip), and what I can have for her for breakfast that will make her smile (bagels with cream cheese, which is what everyone wants when they’re coming to New York.) The last time we saw each other was January 2020, and at the time she brought face masks to my house because she’d had a cold and didn’t want to visit a friend’s baby while sick.

And then two months later, I was the only person I knew who had access to face masks.

I’m still in this nebulous space in the world of Covid 4.5, or wherever we are, where I think you’re probably fine but also you’re probably not and I make plans and then cancel them quietly. I don’t think about how many of my relationships live, at this point, inside of my phone, and that I have still-wrapped Christmas presents sitting on my desk that still haven’t made its way to friends I thought I’d see in person months ago.

I’ll wing it this week, a little bit. I made reservations at Gage & Tollner because I’ve wanted to go there for so long and food is joy and when you have a friend in town who eats like you do, you take advantage of it. You get the steak and the seafood tower and the dessert that your pastry-chef friend recommended. I want us, too, to eat our way through my neighborhood, because the fact that we can get ice cream on my block and the best breakfast burritos in the city on Saturday morning and melt-in-your-fucking-mouth omakase around the corner is important to me. These are all, in their small ways, the things that have kept me going over the course of the last few years, and they’re certainly the things that are going to keep me alive through August.

And in between those moments at restaurants and in bookstores and in backyards where we’ll laugh and eat and talk our shit, my brain will slowly relax - if but for a short while - and remember that in the words of one of my favorite dead literary boyfriends John Steinbeck, “now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

I will leave you with a real non-recipe of a recipe, which is this perfect August salad: Get a pound of patty pan squash (they’re so fucking cute!) and a bulb of fennel, grate them together, and toss them with your favorite vinaigrette recipe (go here for direction if you need it.) I made this on Sunday with steak and mushrooms and sea beans, and it made me feel at least three percent more alive.