Our Town

There are two things that can make Manhattan feel like a small town: the first is when there is a huge snowstorm--school is cancelled, not a car moves down the street and you look out the window and inevitably there is one guy with a knapsack cross-country skiing down Second Avenue. The other is when there is an Avenue street fair.

The avenue street fair is a Manhattan tradition which I would like to compare to a country fair, except that it is nothing at all like a country fair, except for the grilled corn. The "Avenue," which is hosting the fair, is closed to traffic for about twenty blocks; vendors of every ethnic background materialize with their white stands selling, among other things, Persian rugs, Peruvian embroidered kids' clothing, French perfume (well, it does say "Coco" on the bottle), African print skirts and South African world cup jerseys--okay, that particular vendor only shows up once every four years. And, oh, the smells: the chicken, beef and onion shish kebabs on the grill; the sizzling of the deep fried zeppole dough before it is rolled in sugar; the spicy pan fried Thai noodles with peanut sauce.

I wasn't thinking about a street fair when I looked out the kitchen window onto Third avenue this morning. Since on Father's Day this year I will be closer to "the Father" in Rome than "my father" in New Jersey, I invited my dad and assorted relatives to my apartment for an early celebration. This is the first Father's Day in fifteen years that will not be celebrated at our former home in the suburbs with a gourmet barbecue and a game of one on one soccer between my step-brother and one of the kids. Despite my worries that it wouldn't live up, the bagels and lox and chocolate babka were great, as was the company. As it turns out, there was still a barbecue, but it was only the smoke that came wafting up to my seventh floor window.

As soon as the last guest was out the door, so was I. Downstairs and onto Third Avenue for my small town, hometown, warm weather street fair. The kebabs were still smoking, the rain hadn't started yet and there was still plenty of grilled corn and fresh squeezed lemonade for the crowd that was leisurely walking down the middle of a city street.