I really have no words to describe what a soulless place I find Battery Park City to be. 

Piggy, repulsive parents who cross the street to approach me to tell me that the mere fact of me having a dog is hazardous to their child?  A building that prohibits deliveries of food after 10pm and has a list of rules and regulations so long that the dorm rules at the Christian colleges that my friends once attended look lenient in comparison?

Sterile, thoughtless design.  Ticky-tacky buildings that seek to replicate the suburban upbringings of the yuppies spawning relentlessly; semi-professionals bumbling and confused now that they have lost their high paying jobs and cannot afford their credit-card leveraged life-styles and BMW SUVs parked in the $600/month lot downstairs, while they maneuver their $900 strollers over people's feet and prattle endlessly about their summer beach rentals and how they don't care that they can't afford things.

This place is a hellhole with Hudson River views.

Keep your opinions about the mere fact of my having dogs to yourself.  The fact that you felt the need to cross the street and tell me that I am a bad person for having dogs, in front of your 8 year old child, makes you a bad parent.  A bad example for your child.  That I did not say anything horrible to you in response makes you...lucky.

Living in a building with rules, where the doorman and the management office are constantly ringing me up, telling me that I am breaking rules, like I am some kind of college student being called to standards council; some kind of high school girl being yanked into the dean's office for a skirt too short or for skipping class?  Disgusting.  Because I order food late or because I have guests?  Because I pay a fortune in rent and I expect my food to be delivered to my door instead of me having to leave my apartment at midnight to retrieve it at the front desk?

I'm over it.  I'm over the People's Republic of Battery Park City. 

I love getting my nails done.  I have loved it since I was a little girl (yeah, my mother was one of...those mothers).  I find it to be the most relaxing thing in the world.

The place I get my nails done is in Union Square, and I've gone there as long as I have lived in Manhattan.  It's across the street from Grace Church on Broadway, and as I get my nails done, I look out the plate glass at the spires and I feel like I'm in a Candace Bushnell-meets-Edith Wharton story.

There are a few things my closest friends know about me: I watch television with the sound off.  And I love Vivaldi.  This nail salon plays movies--classics, Disney-Pixar movies, Christmas movies at the holidays--with the sound off.  And the soundtrack they play instead is Vivaldi; opera; Haydn; Holst.  It's like the owner lives in my head, and plays to my personal preferences.

I didn't start going there because they did what I like, rather, over time, I noticed how everything was just...right. 

Yes, it's a little expensive.  ($13 for a manicure, when the place across the street charges $8).  But no one talks to me just for the sake of filling space and time.  No one pressures me--if they ask if I want a spa pedicure and I say "no," then they don't ask again.  But if they recommend a treatment, I've been going there so long, the relationship is such that I know enough to know I could probably use it. 

It's clean, and nice, and they always remember me, and say hello to me, and they know my routine and I know theirs. 

When I was out of work, and going through the worst of things, I made going to Iris Nail a part of my "routine."  It helped center a world that was literally--truly--falling apart.  It was--and is--a safe space in the middle of chaos; an hour of Shrek with adagio molto from Autumn substituted for words.

There is nothing particularly special about this nail place.  I am sure there are others like it; others that do fancier things, or provide special services, or are even cleaner or nicer, or what have you.

But this place has been a safe space for me; has been a place I have retreated to.

You should go there.

In a world of chaos, it's a safe space.  And if you still haven't experienced the pleasure of watching television and movies with the sound off and any one of the four seasons blasting, then you have no idea what you are missing.

I don't even know what to say, really, other than that I have to go to Orlando and I am dreading it.  Real, bone-dread.  Not because of the company necessarily, but because of the thing itself.  And the company is such that any weaknesses are pounced upon, seized, amplified into reasons for greater, other failures.

The last time I was in Orlando was in 2006, and I swore I'd never go back.  I stood in the airport, dazed, looking at racks of candy, salt-water taffy, nut brittles with pictures of reptiles on the packages.  My mother asked me if I wanted anything, and I said I had a headache.  I remember buying a bottle of water, a packet of Excedrin, and buying a packet of one of those Crystal Light things to put in the water.  They were new, then, those flavor packs.  And I remember leaving Orlando, then, smelling like the soap from the store out in the concourse--the same store they have in Soho and Herald Square--with my bottle of flavored water, and thinking that it would never be the same place ever again.

Orlando was where we flew into to visit my grandparents, after they'd moved from the Philadelphia suburbs to Florida; a stop-over en route to the wilds of the central part of the state.  We weren't really a Disney type of family--in fact, I hate most Disney things, much to the chagrin of my in-laws, who fetishize their annual trip with their mid-twentysomething daughters.

In 2006, my grandmother died.  We'd gotten warning a few days earlier, while I was out visiting my parents in California for a wedding.  My mother and I had left the central coast of California to go to the central coast of Florida on a moment's notice to do the work of mothers and daughters.  To wait. 

And I waited.  I sat and I held her small hand, and I watched the ministrations of the LPN, caring for my grandmother's small, precious pinkness in her last days.  I watched my mother clearing her things; touched the curves of the deco bureau I loved so, so much.  I lingered on the last of the physical remnants of the house outside of Philadelphia, then the house in Florida, then the small apartment--chairs, tables, lamps--and then finally, the things left in small room she was sleeping in, resting in, dying in.

The night before the end came, the series finale of Will and Grace was playing on the TV, and some one of the characters played, "Unforgettable" on the piano.  The sounds of the piano on tinny TV speakers echoed through the emptied room...mother, daughter, grandmother, strains of significance on an otherwise insignificant program vibrating through the room on a Florida night in May.

She died the next morning.

And we left that day.

That was the last time I was in Orlando.  And I had no desire to ever go back.  To be in that airport; to see the happy Disney families and sad adult children coming into town to do the work I once did with my mother, or leaving dog-faced from having done the thing people always come to Florida to do.

I'm sure it will be fine.  I'm sure I'll walk through the airport, not noticing the same things that once struck me; that the gift shop will somehow be in another terminal; that the soap store will have closed down.  I am sure things will be different.  Things are always different.

But in these moments--these tender moments, in particular--I miss my grandparents.  And I wish I were going to Florida to see them, not for any other reason.  I wish I were going to pick up a car and drive to the middle of nowhere, and I wish I were going to be greeted with those terrible pancakes in a package that my grandfather used to force feed me.  I wish my grandmother were going to tell me about how scared of the world she was, and demand I drink a glass of orange juice.

I had these thoughts just the other day--on Friday--as I was driving the turnpike.  I thought that things would have been so different these last few years if my grandfather, who I called Bop, had been alive.  He always had strong opinions, and even if he wasn't always right, and even if he interfered, at least he set a boundary.

No sooner had I thought that than a car passed me with the license plate, "HI BOP"

Sometimes, it is hard to miss them.  But the greatest thing, I suppose, is knowing that they are always there.