There is a bodega on Delancey with a cat named Simba and I would take a bullet for him. This is my morning routine now and I refuse to feel embarrassed.
My commute changed this month, so I take the J train from the Lower East Side now instead of the 6, and honestly the J is an underrated experience. It comes above ground and for two glorious minutes you feel like the main character in a film nobody's making.
But before the J there's the bodega. There's always the bodega.
My morning routine is embarrassingly simple: bacon egg and cheese on a roll, salt pepper ketchup, a coffee that tastes like coffee's rumor, and thirty seconds of paying respect to Simba, who sits on the newspaper stack like a tiny orange king surveying his kingdom.
The man behind the counter knows my order now. That's the real New York milestone, forget the lease, forget the visa. When the bodega guy starts making your sandwich before you speak, you live here.
Back home in Ahmedabad my morning was chai and the newspaper and Mumma's radio. Here it's Simba and a foil-wrapped sandwich and a stranger saying have a good one, sweetheart. Different loves, both real.
Some mornings the Lower East Side is glamorous, all galleries and dumplings and people who look like they've never once been tired. But my morning routine happens before all that wakes up, when it's just delivery trucks and shutters going up and one very serious cat.
The J train pulled in as I finished my sandwich. Simba didn't wave. He never does. Respect.
A good morning routine isn't about optimizing. It's about having three small things that are yours in a city of eight million.
Mine are a train, a sandwich, and a cat. That's enough.
Love,