The Countdown

When I was in elementary school, I had a principal with two defining habits: he got to know every child in the school, and he loved to sing. In fact, he tended to make up individualized songs for us (mine was adapted from "Carolina in the Morning" after he discovered that my last name is German for "morning"; my best friend Marissa got a version of "Maria"--but both were stripped of any romantic overtones, of course). He also came on the intercom every first of the month to tell us that he hoped that the first words that we had said that morning had been "Rabbit, rabbit," to ensure good luck for the rest of the month.

I always forget.

January ended with a whimper: I spent the day at my fake job, except for the lunch hour during which I raced over to my real job. I explained this schedule to Nick, except apparently he doesn't retain information all that well at 4am, so I stopped running for five minutes to talk him down. I picked up dry cleaning and got Jim and Kate's Christmas present (finally!--and it was lovely) from the post office, cooked a late dinner (an Asian sort of steamed thing), and January was over.

Now it is one month for real (the fateful tickets arrived tonight via a pissed-off UPS guy who rang the bell like a teenage punk and said "UPS" to sound like "Julio's," so really the fact that I refused to buzz him in for so long is just his very own fault). What can a person do in one month?

I have planned my very last NYC dessert party, aiming to accommodate people who have not been able to make any of the previous ones. Next weekend (next-next) I will butter my ramekins and start cooking up as many Winter-Spiced Molten Chocolate Cakes with Rum-Ginger Ice Cream as people can eat, and that is also approximately when Glenn will haul off my couch. My stepgrandmother will get my computer (my old one, Nick; yours is sketchy), I am hoping that Andrea will take my TONY subscription as well as my bookcase (which realistically will never make it out of here in one piece), and I am allegedly booking a full slate of doctor appointments for the transition week (I am thinking about it--I swear).

I am trying to make it to every place that I have loved, and to every place that I have always meant to go, and to make sure that I get to say all of my goodbyes. I am waxing nostalgic--that crazy first New Year's Eve with Melissa, Andrea's dedication to Restaurant Week, hauling Mary into a coffee shop when our professor almost caught us gossiping on the street, and Kevin (aside from that whole summer in the park) the number to The Place that you gave me to impress Nick on our first date (it did). Kevin, I have the new number, if you need it. Kevin, we should go before I go.

Everything, now, is "before I go."