Try One Bite: Saving My Life, One Restaurant at a Time

Pay attention, I told myself. This is a day you will remember for the rest of your life.

Everything made me happy. Autumn leaves arched in a canopy over my head, each one as distinct as the snowflakes soon to follow – but I was in the moment without even trying, so no thought of damp toes or numb fingers, not today. A slim breeze kept me not too hot but not too cold, and the sky was an uninterrupted blue. My side street was quiet, respectful of the magnitude of the moment, the noise of Manhattan an irrelevant rumble half a block away.

For five years, my two-income marriage had stumbled along one income shy, but as of the excellent phone call I'd just had, our long soul- and account-draining siege was officially over. My husband had re-invented himself. Let other men of his cohort embark on eighteen holes of retirement. Larry had statewide funding for an education start-up, lots of it, and we were going to be okay. Much more than okay. We could pay ourselves back the savings we'd spent to stay afloat, pay back the friends who'd invested, and have enough left over to be better off than we had been the last time he got laid off. People would invite us over for dinner to hear him tell the story of how he became a tech titan. Lower-case, to be sure, but so much for assumptions about what old guys could learn to do. He – we – had prevailed.

The bureaucracy of it would take a moment, but we could relax. It was all over but the paperwork.

I allowed myself a tiny pat on the back. It hadn't been easy to stay positive, separated from the action by three time zones, dependent on second-hand reports, forwarded emails and texts, and debriefs of phone calls, but we had no choice. The long wait had begun just as I moved from Los Angeles to New York to teach a one-semester journalism class at Columbia University, a lark that became a full-time job I could hardly refuse while Larry got his project off the ground, so here I still was. He had to stay in California to be available for meetings with investors and bureaucrats, but we'd been together for almost thirty years. We could survive a short geographical challenge, even if the finish line kept moving.

And so we had. I walked this block from the subway almost every day, but it had never looked like this before because until today I had to do it. Now I had a choice. I could stop teaching, go back home, and find something to write, or I could teach one class and spend the rest of the year in California. I loved teaching, but the imperative had begun to chafe. No more. As of today, I could be that bicoastal person who had the best of both worlds.

Our life was back on track.

All of what I just said is true. None of it is real.