Thirty years ago, in Manhattan

Edith is the daughter of a historian, and as such, I want her to understand the subtleties of human continuity and change over the ages. So today we visited Manhattan so she could swing on the same swings her mother swung on thirty years ago. (Well, not quite thirty years ago, since I was still at the hospital resting up from being born.) But we celebrated my birthday together by visiting the old neighborhood, Edith in the baby backpack--as I used to be in the baby backpack on rambles around Greenwich Village with my mother.

This was Edith's second visit to Manhattan and a considerably more interactive one than when she was four months old. In fact, the minute we emerged from Penn Station onto 7th Avenue, she craned her neck to look up at one of the buildings and let out an impressed, "Ohhhh...." Every time I caught a glimpse of her in a glass window, she was craning her head to look at the buildings, the signs, the people. She was fascinated. She kept up a steady stream of chatter about it all day and continued to rehash events for several hours when we got home. My girl's a city girl.

We were accompanied on our celebratory day by my friend Laura and her infant daughter, Julia. At one point in the afternoon a couple of passing men looked at us and the babies and whistled, "When Sally Met Amber, huh?" The Village may be a tamer place than it was in the mid-1970s, but it's probably still the only neighborhood where the logical conclusion about two young(ish?) women with two babies is that they're a lesbian couple and family.

See, Edith, it's worth going to the city--some things are only found in New York.


Outside Mama's first home. There was still a doorman, dressed like the one who used to let Mama wear his hat, but he looked much too young to have been there thirty years ago, so we didn't ask if Edith could wear his.


Headed into Washington Square Park with Edith and Julia.


Edith swings in Washington Square, soaking up the flavor. I'll have to ask Bestemor whether all the other care providers in the park in 1976 were nannies, or whether there were still some mothers among them.


Edith rides a cement turtle that may well still be in the middle of a crawl across the park begun over thirty years ago...