I had a completely empty Sunday and did the most radical thing possible in New York: nothing, but slowly.
Took the F to Delancey and wandered up to the little greenmarket near Forsyth in the Lower East Side. September markets are the best ones. The last of the tomatoes, fat and misshapen and honest, sitting next to the first apples of fall. Summer and autumn shaking hands at the same table.
I bought too many tomatoes. I always do. There's a specific joy in the last summer tomato, the way it apologizes for the whole year of sad grocery-store ones. I ate one like an apple standing on the corner and I regret nothing.
A woman's dog, some enormous fluffy thing, leaned its entire body weight against my legs while she chatted with the flower vendor. I let it. We had a moment. This is my whole social life some weeks and I've stopped being embarrassed about it.
The Lower East Side on a slow Sunday morning is one of my favorite versions of the city. Before the brunch crowds, when it's just old-timers and market people and the light coming down between the tenements. You can feel how many lives have passed through these streets.
I thought about Sunday mornings at home, the smell of my mom making aloo paratha, the radio, the general uselessness of a good day off. I don't have that here exactly. But I made myself chai when I got back and cut up the tomatoes and it was close enough.
The thing about a slow Sunday is you have to actually let it be slow. Not scroll it away. Not fill it. Just let the hours be long and boring and yours.
I carried my tomatoes home on the F, a bit smug, a bit tired, entirely content.
Go somewhere with no plan this week. Buy something you'll eat too much of.
Love,