The bodega cat on Steinway Street has finally decided I am acceptable, and I want to be very clear that this is the highest honor Astoria has bestowed on me in two years.
Her name is Biscuit. I did not name her. The whole block named her, collectively, the way neighborhoods do, and now Biscuit sits on the newspaper stack by the register like a small orange dictator surveying her kingdom of Takis and scratch-offs.
Sunday morning I went in for a chopped cheese and an iced coffee, moving at the specific speed of a person with nowhere to be, and Biscuit looked at me, and then — this is the part — she headbutted my ankle. Voluntarily. In public.
Hamza behind the counter saw it and said, "She likes you now. Took long enough." And I felt more welcomed by that sentence than by half the fashion parties I've begged my way into in Manhattan.
This is how a neighborhood becomes yours. Not the day you move in. The day the bodega cat headbutts your ankle and the guy at the register knows you take it with less mayo.
Astoria on a slow Sunday is my favorite version of New York. The Greek bakeries, the aunties gossiping outside in three languages, the N train rattling overhead, the smell of somebody's grill already going at 10am. Nobody's in a hurry. It's the closest thing to my lane back home in Ahmedabad, where you couldn't walk ten feet without someone knowing your business.
I took my chopped cheese to the little bench outside and ate it while Biscuit supervised from the window, and I thought about how long I resisted calling New York home because home was supposed to be somewhere else.
But home is just the place where the bodega cat knows your ankle. That's the whole test. That's the whole thing.
Go make friends with your bodega cat. She's judging you either way.
Love,