ghosts of Sleepy Hollow

Since I haven’t had nearly enough fun this month, I went to the gynecologist today. Standard operating procedure, nothing major. I take a half-day off for appointments as I’ve kept my doctor in Westchester, but I like my doctor – a good thing when you’re wrestling DNA and the specter of heredity. Plus the train line out of Grand Central to Tarrytown runs right along the Hudson, mere feet away from the river most of the trip. It’s a gorgeous commute – you get to sit on a nice train and look out across the Hudson at the bridges and the Palisades. It’s almost like taking a vacation to a scenic locale. You know, where you pay for someone else to feel you up, and then it’s not good for either one of you.

My reading choices for 45 minutes in the waiting room consist of 50 copies of the same issue of Parenting and one copy of Glamour (which by the way, ran the same damned article on Smart Things to Do with $50 a few months ago almost word for word). After flipping through way too many pages with that stupid “Don’t!” feature they run with the black bar across some poor fashion perpetrator’s face and reacquainting myself with the fine art of foreplay (really? men like oral sex? that is indeed a newsflash!), I go in and say hi to Ingrid. Ingrid’s great; total Birkenstock doc. We discuss homeopathic treatments for muscular back pain and the new ways the insurance companies have found to screw us over. This is all avec speculum, of course, which by the way, is kinda like having the jaws of life rip you in half. How does this feel? Fine…Fine…Oh, right there…That’s great…Man, that’s awesome…Could you do that again? Kidding.

So after the fun and games are over, I wander down the street into this little tea room that I like for a late lunch, where they’ll forgive me for wearing sneaks with slacks (commuter couture). My timing is unfortunate as 4:00 p.m. is apparently when every senior citizen within a 20-mile radius wants tea service and they all want to know which dessert has less dairy. Does the apple have very much dairy? Do you see all those apples? Do those come from cows? Very curious. Lapsang souchon, tea-marbled egg salad sandwiches (trust me, it’s better than it sounds), a warm blueberry scone with crème fraiche, the works. I wrestle the blue-hair brigade for the frazzled server’s attention, bundle up and begin my walk against the wind down the hill of Main Street, passing the dusty stores.

The dusty stores are antique stores, vintage, merchants with all matters of stuff. All of it fun, junk and hidden treasure; all of it dusty. I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window and for a second I think it is someone else, and really it is. I am not whom I was when I lived a mile away, six years ago. That girl’s there in the back room somewhere, trying on a vintage dress from the 40’s, looking like an old photo of her grandmother and laughing at a boy making a face, and it’s like a snow globe. You take it out, shake it a little bit, it’s dusty, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. It’s five seconds of magic and then you put it back in the box, wait for another cold-assed day walking down Main with ghosts to take it out and shake it again.

It’s Sleepy Hollow out here. Yes, that one. Washington Irving lived about a ¼ mile down in a cute little house called Sunnyside. It's a landmark now - candlelight tours at Christmas, a bonfire out back. You can see his world in the January trees as the sun sets across the river, you can hear it in the wind over my headphones. I sing along with Jamie Cullum louder than I usually would.