Dear Reader - A Letter from 2012
Or "Why I Pulled Out My Old Paper Calendar" 🗓️
Dear Reader, 📚
Floodline (the conspiracy thriller I’m working on) is set in New York City in 2012. And lately, as I’ve been deep in revisions, I’ve found myself trying to remember what life was actually like then. Not the history. Not Hurricane Sandy. But the texture of daily life. All those small things we forget over time.
So I did what any reasonable person would do. I dug out my old paper calendar.
Paper. Because in 2012 I didn’t have an iPhone yet. I had a hot pink Motorola flip phone and a calendar I carried in my bag. I wrote in it with a pen.
Flipping through it was a time warp..
First thing to jump out: A standing Friend Date Night almost every Friday, week after week: Stephanie. Central Park. Levain.
Here’s how it worked. My friend Stephanie (legend) and I would meet after work on Friday about halfway from each of our offices, putting us at 6th Ave and 53rd Street. We’d walk up through Central Park, go to our regular pizza and wine bar, and then at some point around 8pm, realize we needed cookies. Specifically Levain Bakery cookies. 🍪 There was only one location then, on the Upper West Side.
One Friday we got there too late. The door was locked. A janitor was inside, cleaning up, and wanting to be left alone.
Stephanie knocked anyway.
He shook his head. Closed.
She knocked again. Open, open.
This went on longer than it should have but he opened the door! Stephanie pointed at the cookies sitting on trays, ones that hadn’t been sold. She asked if she could buy some.
He said they were heading for the trash.
She gave him a $20.
Reader, we got our cookies! 😋 Dark chocolate peanut butter. Chocolate chip walnut. They were, obviously, the best cookies we’d ever had.
That’s Stephanie. She also got me into biking in the city that year, which opened up New York in ways I didn’t expect. We’d pick a destination from Time Out New York (e.g. a century-old Italian pastry shop in Astoria La Guli, if you know you know), in a neighborhood we’d never been to and map out our bike route.
She also made me bike across the Williamsburg Bridge late at night with all its graffiti and pink cables. Well let’s be fair, I wanted to do it.
Me and my bike (That’s the Verrazano in the background.) No regrets.
What else was going on?
I was working in finance at the time, sitting on a trading desk, watching Occupy Wall Street play out on the news. I took the 7 train to Flushing on a random Sunday with Pauline and Missy just to explore. I was going to NY Tech Meetup, quietly building the first version of a mindfulness app called Got Ennui (more on this soon). I was sweating through Soul Cycle classes at the original UWS studio, where people were changing outside because there wasn’t room inside. I was doing Bar Method and meeting friends at Cafe Lalo on the Upper West Side. ☕
There was also a breakup, a work conflict that ended with me resigning from my job, and in October, Hurricane Sandy. That storm is the ticking clock inside Floodline.
What I didn’t know in 2012, was that I was going to leave.
In 2013 I sold my apartment and walked away from New York. Something I thought I would never do. I often miss NYC since I came into my adulthood there, but will be at ThrillerFest next week where I’ll be pitching Floodline to agents and getting in quality time with the Big 🍎.
This is the city where Floodline lives. I wanted you to feel some of it. 🌊
— JM Blooms 🌸
Love the memories of a time before smart phones!