beautiful day

So here we are. 

Not to be so clichéd that I have to resort to quoting a legendary tourism campaign, but I love New York. I adore it. I even heart it. Especially on a beautiful day. Oh, there is nothing like a truly beautiful day in New York City. There are beautiful days in other cities, it’s true, but the ones in NYC are special, due in part to their rarity and in other part to the fact that the not-so-beautiful days are so horrendous to slog through that the beautiful days are magnificently amplified by comparison.

You know the kind of day I’m talking about. Blue sky. 68-72 degrees. Sunshine. Humidity barely registering. The barometer’s high as an elephant’s eye. Just enough breeze to caress your hair. The buildings sparkle, the trees pop. Even the pigeons smile. When the weather gods pat my dear city on the head and kiss the summer stench away, it’s a glorious place to be. 

Today is not one of those days. Oh, it’s a perfectly fine day. But it’s more than a few beads of sweat above perfection. 

For you see, this post is not actually about weather. It’s about chicken.

New York City is fan-flipping-tastic. 

But it doesn’t have a Chick-Fil-A.  

That January day in St. Louis was bitter cold, with slush lining the side of the road and the pavement ashy with salt. The sky was gray, the trees were gray, the grass was gray. 

I was a hazy shade of winter, more pallid than my usual pale, and so lonely away from home. 

An arduous but necessary journey lay ahead: bundle and zip, warm up the car, pump the gas, roll to the mall, park and lock and scurry, up the escalator, to Heaven. 

It was just a chicken sandwich in a food court in the dead of a Midwestern winter. But man, that was a beautiful day.

Yes, indeed. Welcome to me.