There are days when you wake up to perfection—blue-sky days that sound like Stevie Wonder on “Sir Duke” or the Eels rockin out on “Saturday Morning.”



Days like that, you take a walk through NoLIta and end up, at lunchtime, in the garden out back at Bistrot Margot with Schmio. Today, the fuzzy green caterpillars are shy. The waitress brings lentil soup and crusty bread, a croque madame, a dark macchiato.

(The fuzzy green caterpillar story is, the last time I was at Bistrot Margot, a fuzzy green caterpillar fell from an overhead vine onto our table. India picked up the little guy, but then he fell off her finger onto the pebbled ground, where he lay, unmoving. “I think he’s bumped his head,” India said. “Aww,” I said. “Um, which end’s his head?” Then we laughed and laughed and said we’d remember not to step on him. And we didn’t.)



After lunch, Schmio decides she needs to blow a week’s salary in a matter of minutes, so even though she has a job and you a thesis, you both go next door to Sigerson Morrison, with its gorgeous white-tiled floor, where the girl will decide between a pair of purple shoes and a pair of purple shoes and a pair of black shoes. You admire the blatant green patent leather kitten-heels across the room. “Go try them on,” she says. “That’ll make me feel better about what I’m doing.” “No,” you say, “I’m so beyond that. All I care about these days is, uhm, politics.” She barely pauses between admiring the purple-shoed left foot and the black-shoed right one. “Don’t make me laugh,” she says. “Ha-ha-ha.”

You drop by the old office for a hello, and sit on the loading dock with the late afternoon sun sweet and warm on your back. You propose a milkshake excursion to Lars and Tom, but they say, “Milkshakes? More like beershakes,” and, shortly after, reach for the remaining bottles of Brooklyn Lager from last night’s party. Ah, boys.



With a handful of yoghurt candies, you breeze through SoHo pitying the fools stuck in rush-hour traffic, then you take the train home from Broadway-Lafayette to Seventh Avenue, standing the whole way, in heels, reading, and not having to hold on to the pole once.