Brunch.  The meal that is, in theory, a mixture of breakfast and lunch.  Prior to living in New York, the only brunch I was familiar with was served at hotels and included the typical breakfast fare (eggs, cheese grits, fruit) with fried chicken thrown in to serve as the “lunch” component.  I never had a problem with any of that.  Cheese and fried groups: covered.  Seemed fine by me.

Then I happened upon the New York brunch scene (and trust me, it is just that–more in a bit) and realized what I had been missing.  What New York showed me in letters-writ-large about my life–how much bigger it is than I knew, how much better it can be than I planned–was illustrated on a smaller scale by that one meal.

It’s not just the food, though that is naturally a huge part of it.  Eggs benedict, Italian eggs benedict, omelets, Mexican omelets, home fries, French fries, MIMOSAS.  Some say that New York brunches are just an excuse to get drunk on a Sunday afternoon.  They’re also a way to stuff your face with cholesterol and not be judged.  Because everybody’s doing it.  But more than combining breakfast and lunch foods, brunch in New York is also about pushing the glories of morning menus back a few hours.  In other words, an excuse to eat biscuits at 4 pm.

I’ve had brunch with the gays, girlfriends, boyfriends, and family.  I’ve had pre-theater brunch, pre-travel brunch, post-travel recap brunch, jazz brunch, walk of shame brunch, breakup recap brunch, falling in love brunch.  I brunched with a fashion director at GQ (see: gay brunch) who insisted on taking my friends and me to the Soho House pool where he continued to feed us alcohol until the night ended at a gay bar nearby and the next day I had four new phone numbers and five new facebook friends.  All gay men.  I recovered from the half-marathon at a bottomless mimosa brunch.  I brunched ten feet from Chelsea Clinton (The Smith) and across the patio from Mandy Moore (Pastis).  I’ve waited on the phone for half an hour to get reservations for The Stanton Social’s brunch.  I have nursed a hangover at brunch.  (Many, actually.)  I have found out that brunch does not cure my hangovers.  I have given and received advice at brunch.  I have sweated and frozen at brunch, mourning the end of summer and hoping for the coming of spring and sitting outside regardless.  I have gotten ideas for writing at brunch.  I have realized the guy was a tool at brunch.  I have solidified friendships at brunch.

I brunch, therefore I am.

New York knows how to do a lot of things, and brunch is at the top of the list.  Two free drinks with an entree?  Check!  Replace home fries with regular fries?  Check!  Butter with your bread?  CHECK.  (Butter, fat, and calories do not count at brunch.  Look it up.)

I have formed some of my best memories of life in the city over brunch.  But my favorite brunch is the following: the BF hits the bagel shop and I hit Dunkin.  We meet on the corner and walk to the Loews theater.  We buy our tickets.  We eat and watch previews.  We drink coffee, hold hands, and watch the movie.  Brunch?  Check.

My favorite thing to do in this city is walk around it.  The summer I moved here, when I lived in the no-man’s land of 92nd street and 1st avenue, I would take the subway downtown and exit at Union Square.  Then I’d walk down to Soho (stopping at Bloomingdale’s on Broadway for a bathroom break) and head either east, to Little Italy for pizza and shopping, or–usually–west to the West Village and Magnolia Bakery.  Home of either my breakfast, lunch, or dessert: their buttercream cupcake.  I would take my treasure across the street to one of the benches at the Bleecker Street Park and dive into it while reading a book or watching the kids play.  Then I’d stand up, brush the crumbs off, and walk the whole way home.  Passing through a dozen neighborhoods on the way.  And releasing gallons of sweat onto the non-discount clothes I was wearing at the time (purchased pre-New York, back when I was a student and had tons of money.  From loans).

My more conveniently-located apartment in the Murray Hill/Kips Bay/Gramercy conglomeration of neighborhoods (or Chelsea, if you ask my mom where I live) means less walking to get where I want to go.  But still rich with discrete pockets of life.  So after brunch and a movie with the girls on Saturday, the fifteen-block walk home didn’t take me through double-digits of neighborhoods, but it took me through a few:  Union Square, Irving Place, Gramercy Park, and Murray/Curry Hill.  Where else can you pass through four distinct neighborhoods, each with their own culture and character, on your way home from the movies?  I watched as the scenery changed around me:  tall buildings, businesses and department stores, “Free Palestine” sign-holding protesters, swarms of crowds escaping the subway at each corner; brownstones and townhomes and quaint restaurants and quiet and landmarks of the early twentieth century (not to mention the bar where the BF and I–just F at the time–first hung out and spent hours talking); iron gates surrounding the gravel paths, shady trees, and bursts of flowers that make up the city’s only private park; endless Indian restaurants a block over from endless post-college, beer-pong-playing, bad-decision-making bars.  An entire world in a few blocks, and all I have to do is walk.

And not just an entire world, but my entire world for the last four years, which means these streets are dotted with memories as well as culture.  The BF bar (Revival).  The restaurant where my mom and sister took me for my twenty-ninth birthday (The House).  The wine bar where I had a date with the Italian and we barely understood each other (Vintage Irving).  The sushi place where H. and I had our “book club” while eating outside as Rufus Wainwright walked by wearing what looked like a circus ringleader’s outfit (Choshi).  The block where I stood for an hour and watched Gossip Girl being filmed and realized how tedious and boring acting could be (Irving and 18th).  The spot outside the Gramercy Hotel where I saw Taylor Hicks and thanked him for winning American Idol (seriously).

And I was comforted.  Because one of the things I worry about when I consider leaving New York is how denigrating it will be to my sophisticated city pride to have to return as a tourist.  BUT!  I realized while walking through it that this city will always be mine because of the memories each street holds for me.  I have marked it (only once in the way a dog has…okay, make that twice–the half-marathon in Central Park and New Year’s Eve in Tribeca) and made it so.  It tells my story block by block.  All I have to do is walk.

Since this is presumably my final year in New York (right, God?  RIGHT?), I’ve issued a command to myself: stop crying over spilled piss (aka sidewalk paint) and focus on the things I love about the city.  The things I can’t find anywhere else.   Hopefully the pendulum won’t swing too far in the opposite direction, making me want to stick around indefinitely.  But I don’t feel there’s much danger of that.  So here’s to my exercise in positivity!  Today, I love how New Yorkers embrace tough questions, search for answers, and pursue constant challenge.  And I love Tim Keller’s preaching and how it demonstrates how life as a Christian can be all of the above.

Let me begin by saying that I detest more than anyone the reporters who flee straight from their storm-proof newsrooms to trailer parks after a tornado just so they can find a toothless racist to interview.  Same goes for documentarians who set out to expose the pro-life movement and park themselves at abortion clinics where hate-mongers spew venom at scared pregnant women.  And don’t even get me STARTED on movies that feature an actor from Connecticut whose past travel is limited to L.A., New York, and Europe yet considers his Southern accent Oscar-worthy.  I have found myself on the stand countless times, defending Southerners and people of faith (more often than not, a redundant description whether sincere or not) against accusations of subhuman IQ and generalized hatred.  One such time was when I was “dating” the son of the Speaker of the House (the one who broke all the ceilings) and we were at the home of his sister, a documentary filmmaker.  Her latest subject was the religious right, and researching them had naturally taken her all over the Bible Belt.  My old stomping grounds.  She asked me if it was strange to grow up there, if I ran into crazy people all the time, if I knew anyone who went to church regularly.

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I do.”

I feel it should be a rule that no one but the people who grew up there can make fun of the South.  I love my home and so many things about it (read: fried everything.  Oh, and my family).  I hate when people reduce it to an unfair, poorly researched caricature.  I believe there are brilliant people there (just like everywhere else) and idiots there (just like everywhere else).  What I realized about myself after spending my first twenty-seven years there was that it was easy to be, and remain, a certain kind of person.  A religious conservative white person.  Four years later, I’m still that person. T.S. Eliot observed that “home is where one starts from,” but he also said that “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  I haven’t made a circle and ended up in the same place I started.  But now I know why I believe what I believe rather than blindly accepting it, which I was only too happy to do before I ever left the comforts of home.  I know that resistance to change and challenge isn’t limited to one region.  And staying in the same place doesn’t mean a person will never grow.  Anyone can hide, or thrive, in their hometown.  But for me, it took leaving home to find out what I was capable of and who I could be, demographic descriptors aside.  I appreciate that New York is full of people who were willing to make that journey as well.  No one comes here to take the easy way out.

I love that here, I meet people who are from everywhere.  That they have well-worn books and passports.  That they are adventurers.  That they talk and care and know about what’s going on in the world.  That they are willing to venture underground and underwater for transportation.  That my BF will pull out my chair for me and email me the college paper he wrote on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (guess I’m into T.S. Eliot these days).

And I love Tim Keller’s preaching.  Tim is the pastor of my church, Redeemer Presbyterian.  And he presents the Gospel like I’ve never heard it presented.  This is not s Sunday service of platitudes and feel-good cliches.  Nor is it a fire and brimstone exercise in yelling.  I grew up on, and tired of, both of those.  This message is a challenge to the intellect.  An appeal to logic.  It’s unpredictable, yet totally reliable–just like the Gospel.  He draws primarily on Scripture, then throws in movie, literature, and poetry references.  Because the Gospel is a story that is retold daily in art and culture:  sacrificing love, redemption, forgiveness, second chances.  In other words, God truly is everywhere.  And he is a lot different from the god I created when my world was small.  The Gospel I am taught here is the ultimate challenge to self, much like the city has been the ultimate challenge to myself and countless others.  I love that I’m part of two communities–New York and Redeemer–that embrace challenge and the intellectual workout that comes with it.  I landed in a place where people run toward, not away from, challenge.  I love that.