Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Pop in one of his more conservative outfits. It's 10PM and I know where my pop is. He's studying his Garmin watch checking how many stairs he has yet to climb to achieve his goal for the day. Inevitably, he's 1-4 short in the "floors climbed" category. And so, because I'm the most amazing daughter ever, I head out of the apartment with him to rectify this dire situation. They live in a retirement community and their building has three floors. But sometimes when you climb up a floor it doesn't register. So, if you need to climb, for example, four floors to meet your goal, you might have to go up and down in the stairwell of their building two or three times. Or maybe Pop is trying to achieve a margin of error, who knows with him. Anyway, we clatter up to the top floor. There's a sign up there that says Third Floor and underneath, it says, allegedly, Third Floor in Braille. Pop runs his fingers over the Braille and proclaims "Third Floor." Ok,

  Happy Tom with his Birthday Cake You know they're good friends when somehow the conversation takes a left turn from "Ghost in a Shell " to "Ghost in the Mouth" and everybody just goes with it. We were up in Hudson at Helen and Matt's along with Wanda and Derek. "Ghost in a Shell" if you aren't familiar, was originally a manga series that became a Major Hollywood Production starring Scarlett Johansson. The Ghost in a Shell means basically a cyborg with a tiny bit of human left in the brain. "Ghost in the Mouth," as per the committee around Helen and Matt's table, is when you get a tooth implant with a bone graft. The "bone" in "bone graft," should you not be up on such things, refers to the bones of dead people.  That's right.  When you get a bone graft they grind up the bones of cadavers into powder and stuff it in your jaw. Sorry for making you choke on your coffee if you didn't know that already. I

  Lemme tell you, it was not merely raining the other night. It was a torrential downpour of epic proportions. When the monsoon started, Tom and I were outdoor dining a couple blocks up 8th Avenue. We thought we were clever because we'd brought umbrellas. It was like bringing one of those tiny metal screwdrivers you fix your eyeglasses with to a gunfight. Luckily, there was a pretty sweet set up inside the eating cabin. Full overhead cover and pretty substantial walls. We were only wet I'd say on one extremity. Like my right leg was definitely on the damp side and Tom had a left shoulder problem. The waiter, on the other hand, had more of an entire soaked head and torso situation ongoing. He dashed back and forth over the exposed sidewalk many times on our behalf. We left him a superlative tip.  Meanwhile, we and the scattered other diners who had never met before discussed our evacuation strategies. First we all decided to delay our departure until the rain stopped. Except the