Last week I put out a request for some guest-written MBOBs from our good company who reads here every Sunday, and ZurichMike’s was the first one in over the transom. Thank you, ZM! You’re the best. 😉

I grew up in a very middle class family in Connecticut. We lived in a small typically New England town, with a white steepled church on the town green facing the red brick town hall, with the old watch factory behind it and the little cluster of “new” buildings on one side:  a bank, a notions shop, a general clothing store, and a diner. Down the street was the cinema, where I remember my dad taking us kids to see our first film on the big screen:  Bambi. I was frightened of the large images and noises and to this day I do not like the film.

We had no reason (and the family had no extra money) to go to nearby cities (Boston or New York) – what an expense for a family with 5 children! Our grandparents lived in “larger” Connecticut towns nearby – that was the extent of our interaction with urban life, until one of our aunts, my father’s sister, the newly accredited nurse, took up a nice job at a specialty hospital in New York City.

When each of us kids turned 5 or 6, she would treat us to a weekend in New York. Oh, how jealous I was of my two older brothers who got to go to New York and I had wait another two years for my turn! My aunt was like Auntie Mame – always going a mile a minute, a bit contrarian, but wanting us to see a little more than our quiet surburban environment.

On the weekend in question, she would leave New York Friday afternoon, drive to Connecticut, pick up the lucky nephew or niece, and drive back to New York that evening. We would zip down the Merritt Parkway in her white Ford Falcon. She was a speed demon, and the trip would take just over an hour. It seemed like an eternity then, and these days it does take an eternity with all the traffic. She would drive back to Connecticut on Sunday, drop us off, and then return to New York very late Sunday evening. She loved to drive. Fast. Smoking a cigarette. We thought she was so cool. She had a contraption in her apartment called a “HiFi” that would play a stack of records with sound coming out of (count them!) *two* speakers. Peter, Paul and Mary. We could sing all the lyrics to “If I Had a Hammer” and “Puff the Magic Dragon”. Yeah, I knew PP&M when they were just starting out. Auntie told me years later that she had seen them in a small club in New York *before* they were famous.

She lived in a very tall apartment building in Manhattan, I believe on the 12^th floor. I had never seen anything over three stories in my entire life. She shared the apartment with her childhood friend, who was also a nurse. I remember being scared to look down out of the window – I thought for sure I would cause the building to fall over. They had a tiny apartment with one bedroom and a Murphy bed in the small living room. I slept on a little couch they had. You could barely turn around in the kitchen area. Such was the life of two glamorous, pretty young nurses (who wore white uniforms, white hose and shoes, and starched caps) working at the Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center. Friday night ate in the apartment. It was so late (for me, anyway) to eat at 8:00 pm, as my bedtime was 7:30. I thought for sure I would get in big trouble with my parents if they found out I stayed up to 8:30 pm! Yikes!

On Saturday, we walked around Manhattan and I think I remember seeing St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Rockefeller Center. It was all so overwhelming to me – so many sights and sounds and so many people. I do remember having a pretzel from a pretzel cart near Rockefeller Center. In the early evening, my aunt took me to what I thought was the ritziest place on the planet. She told me years later it was the local French bistro. I had never seen a tree growing inside a building, but in the lobby of this building were several potted trees (probably large ficus trees, but to me they could have been sequoias).

My mom made sure that I had my little checked jacket, white shirt and clip-on bowtie to wear with my brown corduroy trousers and Thom McAn side-buckle shoes. She impressed on me to mind my manners and always to be quiet and polite in public. At the bistro, we had some main dish I can’t remember, but I do remember ordering crêpes suzette (“they’re like pancakes” auntie reassured me) and loving every bite. Then, suddenly, someone at the table behind my aunt had ordered a dish flambé, which at that point was totally foreign to me, but remembering my mother’s stern direction not to be loud in public and to mind my manners, I leaned across the table wide-eyed and quickly whispered the alarm: “Excuse me, auntie, but that man’s dinner is on fire!” She turned and looked, and then burst out laughing – at the time, I knew I had said something witty but did not know exactly why.

This trip when I was five years old forever changed my view on what I wanted to do. I wanted to travel and see things. And I have and I do. I am forever grateful to my aunt, now deceased, for that special little trip to New York.

ZurichMike continues this tradition:  when my nieces and nephews complete college, and assuming they have done well and not caused any grief to my brothers and sister and their spouses along the way, I will treat them to a week in Switzerland. I fly them over, show them around Switzerland, and if they want to see more of Europe, they can (at their own expense), but for at least a week I have great fun showing them a special part of the world, and cooking for them. But no flambé.