I love Sundays because you get to do absolutely nothing should you be struck by that particular urge. My roommates and I will often spend an entire Sunday prone on the couch eating chocolate, drinking red wine and watching inane movies on STARZ. Racially charged banter between say, a Queen Latifah and a Steve Martin seems so much more palatable viewed from the better part of a bottle of cabernet.

Sundays are also great because most people are doing the same aimless dicking around that you are. In the city everyone’s nice and mellow (the possible exception being harried and exhausted servers working the brunch shift at some trend-of-the-moment eatery). You’re more likely to have a completely New York moment on a Sunday, and actually I had two today.

I woke up at 8:45AM with a class 3 headache, one of those tenacious little buggers that’s not nasty enough to incapacitate you but won’t go away no matter how much Aleve you throw down your gullet. I popped four plus a vitamin pill and dozed through four episodes of Living Single and two Roseannes on the Oxygen channel until my alarm went off at 12:30. After standing slumped under an icy shower for ten minutes, tossing on my clothes and enough makeup to lose the drained corpse look (yes, black folks can look like death in the morning too, y’all) I felt human enough to sally forth to my favorite Southwestern restaurant, Agave, for a late brunch with the Tonys.

The Tonys have been an integral part of my life through college and beyond. I met Tony M my freshman year, and then Tony V a few years later when they started dating. They are sensible, witty, bitchy, charming, and both terribly dear to me. They do all the things I mean to do but never quite manage to find the time to, like take in art installations at MOMA, be first in line with tickets to the latest Broadway show, dine at swank restaurants (okay, I do find the time to do that), read the Sunday Times, and just be total fabulous mos-in-the-know. Tony M is a superb cook, and I’ve spent many a night assed-out on his couch filled to the brim with chocolate cheesecake or some such orgasmic creation. I see them infrequently, compared to my other friends, but enough so that it comes as more of a shock than I’d expected that they are moving to Maryland at the end of the month. Tony M has hit the big time—he will be working as a federal prosecutor in D.C. It didn’t quite sink in until today, my self-proclaimed “good day,” while we were mid-brunch, when I looked across the table at Tony M’s beautiful hazel eyes and felt a sharp pang that had nothing to do with my headache. I don’t like to miss people, in fact I tend to tuck them away in my head once they leave and rarely visit them again, but I don’t see myself doing that here—it is just too nice and easy and lovely being with them to let them slip away from me. Everywhere I turn these days, little things remind me that I’m growing up, and man does it suck big floppy donkey dick.

ANYWAY, we left the fierce Agave crew (Dez, Robert, Chris and Theo—go some night and ask for any of them, they will take excellent care of you) and went up to the Basics furniture store on 15th and 7th, after a quick stop in the Pleasure Chest, where we giggled like sixth-graders over a pheromone cologne spray that basically smelled like sweaty balls, a horrible and nightmare-inducing birthday card with a picture of someone poking their finger up the Pillsbury Doughboy’s bum (the caption reads, “Hee hee—let’s make S’mores!’ Say it with me people—EEEEEEEWWWWWWW!) and a bullet vibrator connected to a phone that lets you “buzz” your lover via text message. What will they think of next? Scratch that, I so do NOT want to know. I bought a small cup of low-carb coffee ice cream at Emack and Bolio’s and then we wandered into the furniture store, for a therapy session henceforth referred to as “Pearls of Wisdom from Grampa Harvey.”

Grampa Harvey is a salesman at the Basics furniture store, or maybe he’s a manager, or maybe he owns the store, I haven’t a clue. He has white hair, is completely adorable, and is the grampa, or possibly older dad, I wish with all my heart I’d had when I was growing up. I thought they would make me wait outside with my ice cream in order not to spill any on the furniture, but Grampa Harvey positively began to wax lyrical about the delights and joys of ice cream when he saw my E&B cup. We both agreed on the sublime simplicity of a Haagen-Dazs vanilla popsicle smothered in chocolate. Harvey also loves great big, sticky caramelly dates, and remains convinced that Queens is the best place to go for all sorts of creamy, fruity treats. Also Grampa Harvey maintains that all of these delights are best shared with someone you love. I agreed wholeheartedly and then repeated my stock line about there being no fish in the sea quite yet.

Adorable Grampa Harvey then says, “What, with your personality? There’s a guy out there for you, of course there is. He just hasn’t been reeled in yet.” He leans forward, miming a fisherman with a gleaming, slippery, giant prize fish impaled on his hook. “Go slow, sweetheart. Reel him in. Patience. You have to be patient and he’ll come to you meek and gentle as a lamb.” In that moment I am his, utterly. I listen raptly as his voice drops a bit, as the rest of his advice veers towards the subject of S-E-X, and you can’t discuss that topic with the freewheeling loosey-gooseyness of say, Haagen-Dazs ice cream. Everything is food with Grampa Harvey, as I learn momentarily.

“Sex is like a cookie,” Grampa Harvey says, and my fingers tighten slighty on my ice-cream spoon. I look around nervously for the Tonys, currently downstairs browsing lamps. Lord, wait until they get an earful of this. “You’ve got to hold on to your cookie, dear.” Eek! It’s like the Pillsbury greeting card all over again!!! “You know, when a guy eats too many chocolate-chip cookies, he doesn’t want them anymore. No one ever talks about this stuff, you know.” Well, not in a FURNITURE store!! “Hold on to your cookie. Make him wait. Even though it’s the last thing you want to do, you both want to eat that cookie more than anything in the world, make.him.wait. until he can’t wait another minute.” Where’s the couch, I’m feeling a bit faint.

The Tonys return from upstairs and hang back, studying me curiously—what on earth is this gentleman talking to her about?? I look at Harvey, his solid salt-of-the-earthness, and know almost instantly that he and his beautiful Chris will be celebrating their silver or possibly golden anniversary soon, that he comes home every night with a bouquet of flowers, or a book of poetry, or maybe just a container of delicious dates for her to nibble late at night in her dressing gown, that he holds her close to his heart when they dance together and sings the words of the song in her ear, and she is the most dear and important and precious and irreplaceable thing in his life. Because she wouldn’t give up the cookies when they were courting? Don’t know. But maybe they’re not to be counted out, those girls that force a man to get to know them, and perhaps don’t bother giving the time of day to those that won’t. Perhaps personality does make up for a lot. Who knows? I certainly don’t.

What a completely unexpected and head-shaking development, all on a lazy Sunday that promised the very best and most fascinating in human interaction. As we say goodbye to Grampa Harvey and meander back down 7th Avenue, we are suddenly and alarmingly accosted by a shrill Keebler elf-woman clutching a jumbo cup of coffee that she has obviously refilled some six or seven times, caterwauling in our general direction, “Who was that guy?! Did you see that guy?! You know, that guy, the one with the wife, who sings the R&B songs?!”

Ahem. I presume she is referring to the time-traveling dude I spied strutting past us in, I shit you not, pegged jeans, looking exactly like Rick James except thinner and less dead, who with his lovely wife Valerie Simpson graced us with such classics as “You’re All I Need to Get By,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and “I’m Every Woman.” (I had to Google this information because I had NO idea who these people were except that the TV show In Living Color made fun of them in the late eighties.) Yes, I am talking about Nick Ashford, people, international superstar! He of the bushy but immaculately coiffed goatee and drippy Jheri-Curl! You betta recognize!!!

Screechy Keebler lady follows us down the street reeling off names of every B-list celebrity she has seen lurking outside of St. Vincent’s Hospital with her Magna Cuppa Joe. Clearly it’s a day for spotting those lurking on the periphery of fame, because even as we finally manage to ditch her by the other sex emporium on 7th Avenue and 12th Street, Tony V spots a quasi-famous face from VH1’s Best Week Ever, wearing oversized Lil’ Kim sunglasses and totally derivative jeans. Don’t ask me WHY they are derivative. They Just Are.

Later, as we ponder the whole day over glasses of wine and chocolate fondue at Aidavi, a wonderfully chill wine bar on Christopher Street, the day takes on a faded and comfortable aura like an old pair of (pegged and derivative) jeans, so so familiar and pleasurable to slip on. I know this whole entry has sounded like one long advertisement, but anyone who knows New York knows that it’s all one gigantic strip mall, and that’s what you do on a lazy Sunday, shop and eat, and if you’re very lucky, meet a Grampa Harvey or a Keebler Elf lady and consider yourself better off for the experience.

To quote (well, directly crib from) one of the most ferocious, innovative and and cutie-patootie rappers of the last quarter-century, Ice Cube:

Today was like one of those fly dreams
Didn’t even see a berry flashing those high beams
No helicopter looking for a murder
Two in the morning got the fat burger
Even saw the lights of the Goodyear Blimp
And it read Ice Cube’s a pimp
Drunk as hell but no throwing up
Half way home and my pager still blowing up
Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K.
I got to say it was a good day.

Yours in hagdom,

Jamielah