ESB means something different in Seattle (East Coast Trip part 9 of 9)
Mothers are good for a lot of things. Many of those things are obvious, but both my wife and I were reminded of yet another terrific use for our mothers as we spent our last day in Manhattan: They remember what we did when we were too young to form lasting memories ourselves.
Case in point: My wife has been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on two occasions. Apparently, she was there when she was about nine months old, but she clearly didn’t remember this visit when we went back earlier this week. Her mom took significant delight in telling me about this previous trip, which I think is understandable because it sounded like such a great memory for her, carrying her very young daughter past all of the incredible art on display at the Met.
I thought about my own mother as we took the cramped elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. Signs everywhere within this building refer to it as the ESB, which I have long associated with Extra Special Bitter, a type of beer I enjoy. I guess for me, the bitter beer face that Keystone Beer advertising used to lament isn’t entirely bad.
Anyway, one of the buildings I looked for once I got to the top of the ESB was the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. My mother worked there during the 1970s, one of many things about my own family that seemed normal to me when I was 5 years old, but that now seems totally incredible. The fact that my parents saw Alice Cooper perform in Europe in the early 1970s fits into this category as well, along with most of my mother’s hairstyles from the 1980s and my early taste in music.
So as my summer vacation drew to a close atop the ESB, I thought of something my friend Tom told me: “I like to do three things in New York City - wander, eat, and gawk.” I have to agree, and I think my wife is a believer as well now that she has had a proper bagel, a black and white cookie, and a bit of a slice of pizza. The pizza and bagels in Seattle are about as good as the Mexican food in Finland. Black and white cookies, in particular, are impossible to find on the West Coast. When you do stumble across a few, they are always frosted with icing rather than glazed with sugar as they should be. And the cookie itself is more like birthday cake than any other typical cookie. You’d be surprised how few people know these things in Seattle.