New York Nostalgia at Mast Books

A month ago, during winter’s last gasp, Emmett and I went away for the weekend.

I say away because there was a hotel. Because we had a multi-course meal at a romantic restaurant at night and then a casual brunch the next morning. Because we did the things people do when untethered from the demands of their day-to-day lives. We wandered the streets hand-in-hand. We drank complicated cocktails chased by dive bar beers. We went to an exhibition of nudes and managed to mostly take them in maturely, nodding sagely at moments when the early 20s versions of ourselves would have dissolved in laughter.

I say away but we were actually in New York City, our Greenwich Village staycation a mere six miles from our Roosevelt Island apartment and less than a mile from my Fifth Avenue office.

And yet the city seemed foreign, in the best way. It felt the way it used to feel when I’d visit from Toronto, when I’d perch on my friend Amy’s Avenue A stoop, letting condensation from our iced coffees carelessly drip down our fingers. Or when I’d crash on my friend Mark’s couch on the Upper West Side, briefly inhabiting the fantasy that his apartment building was mine, his local bodega mine, his running route around Central Park mine. Neither of them are in New York anymore – they’re renovating houses in Portland and living large in Miami – and that’s strange too. That I’m the local now. And that this weekend with Emmett felt more evocative of a long-gone series of leisure-time memories than of the city I traipse around daily.

I’m reading Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies right now and there’s this line in it – “Everything grows normal after a time” – that the narrator uses to describe how her highly unusual job as an interpreter at the International Court in The Hague comes to feel like “merely the place of my employment.” That’s how I feel about New York. That the city, once so profound and awe-inspirng, has slowly, over time, just become home. And that’s what made this weekend so special: it let me peel back New York’s thick layer of ‘normal life at home’-ness and tap into my sense of wonder all over again.

One of the places where I felt that wonder most keenly was at Mast Books, an East Village bookstore that opened in 2010, just as I was about to move out of my apartment on 1st Street and take the backpacking trip where I’d wind up meeting Emmett. The store is, for me, among those places that recalls a different time in a different New York. And so, after the nudes but before we returned to Roosevelt Island, I asked Emmett if we could briefly drop by. It remains as lovely as ever – light-filled and carefully curated and full of stylish shoppers, it’s very existence proving me wrong. All this time I’ve been thinking about how everything changes: me, the city, and all the things in it. But some places – particularly this beautiful blond-wood-and-creaky-floors storefront, are blessedly as they’ve always been.