Now that I am officially writing a book, every interaction with media and humans is potential subject matter. A birthday trip to Provincetown is an opportunity for field research. And as at least seven people have told me, this vacation is now deductible.
Friends P and C, who I have known for many decades--so long, obviously, that we are of an age where I have to take care to avoid calling them "very old friends"--kindly offered to drive us to Provincetown. Instead of taking the train from New York to Boston and hoping that delays wouldn't keep us from catching the only Provincetown ferry that was even theoretically possible with the Sunday train schedule, we would take a leisurely train to Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday afternoon, enjoy a Restaurant Week meal out in that city of gustatory delights, then head to Ptown by car on Sunday morning.
It worked wonderfully--certainly for us. We had a fabulous meal in a restaurant with valet parking--which, like a walk around any supermarket bigger than a Brooklyn bodega, always seems like an exotic treat--and got to stare at C and P's books. (They're academics, so there are walls and walls of them on every floor.) And in the morning, we got to eat breakfast on the screened-in back porch before heading out to the Cape.
P and C take the hard-copy New York Times on weekends. I'm a digital subscriber, but I hadn't touched an actual copy of the paper in years. Over the time we've lived in New York, newspapers have become much harder to get hold of. In 2005, there were at least two vendors selling papers on my four- or five-block morning walk to the subway, as well as several bodegas with papers out front. Now the vendors are long gone, and only one of the bodegas still offers newspapers (and, perhaps reflecting the vastly increased cost, they're now inside the store rather than sitting unguarded on the curb). I probably spend more time with the Times now than I did in those days--it's a lot easier to navigate from section to section on the phone app, and I never did perfect the broadsheet origami that made it possible to page through the paper on a crowded train--but sharing one paper between four breakfasters exposes the slow-grabber to sections she might not usually peruse, like Vows.