Angela and I lived around the corner from each other in Brooklyn Heights, a few years apart. We both worked at a financial publication in the Financial District, The Bond Buyer, at different times several years apart. Her apartment on Montague Street was small and cold in the winter, mine on Atlantic and Henry was small and too warm in the winter. Our paths never crossed in New York back then, but it seems they were destined to.
With hindsight, it seems only natural that Angela and I should have chosen to live in that Brooklyn neighborhood. Down the street is St. Anne’s School, and restaurants of all sorts, by the hundreds, are a short walk away. Sahadi’s is there, and BAM is nearby. It’s a wonderful place, with fine views of Manhattan — Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, among other great writers and artists, called it home, and I sometimes think about all the adventures Angela and I would have had there if our lives had intersected earlier.
Our meeting had to wait a few more years. It was 2008, and I had been in the United Arab Emirates since February, working at an English-language daily based in Abu Dhabi. Angela arrived in December, having accepted a job on the business desk. I knew the ins and outs of what it took to get settled in the UAE (driver license, mobile-phone and bank accounts, social courtesies and etiquette, bureaucratic idiocy, etc.), so offered to help her get settled.
Early in 2009, we decided to move to Dubai. I was spending a lot of time in that emirate because my friend James lived there (it’s about an hour’s drive from Abu Dhabi straight through the desert), and our employer had dropped the ball regarding Angela’s promised Abu Dhabi lodgings. We settled on a large apartment on the 34th floor of a new high-rise complex with impressive views of the Arabian Gulf.
Here’s a photo gallery of some of the people, places, and things that mean the world to us:
New friends (too many to mention here), old friends, dinner parties, excursions to Barracuda (a liquor emporium in the Ras al Khaimah desert) to stock up on wine and spirits, trips to Beirut and Oman and Umbria and Barcelona many other places, job changes — Angela and I departed the newspaper for which we moved to the Gulf, she to freelance for The New York Times, Time, and other publications, I to work at Al Arabiya — arguments, smiles, misunderstandings, the sadness and joy of love and life, human frailties … we experienced it all.
Then a farewell to the Emirates for both of us, after nearly five years, and adventures in Europe and India and Russia and Hong Kong and Japan and reunions with friends and an award for Angela in her parent’s ancestral homeland and work in several restaurants in Europe and so much more.
Our journey continued in 2013, back in the U.S. Angela had accepted a job as Texas editor of Xconomy; I spent February of that year in Hong Kong with my friend Dean Cox, then a week or so in Tokyo before heading to New York and a reunion with friends and visits to restaurants and places dear to me (Babbo, Palo Santo, Le Bernardin, the Met, Prospect Park, et al). I flew down to Florida to spend some time with my parents and ailing grandmother. Angela met my parents, and she and I gathered with friends at a lake house in North Carolina, and at The Kentucky Derby (our stay in a haunted bed and breakfast overseen by an eccentric woman was full of spirit). Angela returned to Houston, and I to Florida, where we soon buried Ida, in my mother’s family cemetery next to my grandfather James.
I had begun searching for employment in Houston, and drove north and west from Florida, stopping along the way for a few days in New Orleans (a culinary sojourn, where I dined with a friend at Brigtsen’s, a friend whom I had not seen for years but whose distinctive voice had led me to him from across a crowded room in an artist’s Paris atelier a few years before our New Orleans dinner).
Angela’s parents were kind enough to put me up in their home while I looked for an apartment in Houston, and she and I renewed our adventures in Texas’ Hill Country, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, St. John, California, New Orleans, Berlin and Prague and Puglia. We started The Brockhaus, and took it to Nantucket, where I was hired by Constance and Alison to cook at their wedding (just two of the fine people I’ve met through Angela). I got to know Angela’s family, we celebrated Indian and American holidays, and we travelled with friends (individuals full of art and spirit and soul and grace and love) and spent time with my family and adopted a cat. And we never stopped journeying.
A moment 10 years in the making.
In September of this year, Angela and I finally walked the streets of New York together, the city I love and lived in for 15 years, where, 60 floors above Liberty Street, at the close of a long meal at Manhatta, she said yes.
Where will we venture next? I don’t know, but we can’t wait.
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