just trying to sound interesting

We just finished the super busy part of our New York week, during which I ate farro porridge, citrus-cured anchovies, wheat puffs with yogurt and tamarind sauce, and an Oreo donut; and felt alternately inspired and intimidated by the publishing industry.

I did have some free time on Saturday, which gave me plenty of opportunity to get rained on. On every corner there were mangled umbrellas apparently abandoned in fits of angry futility: Umbrellas don’t help when it’s raining sideways.

But a quick fix for anyone feeling sorry for herself because she’s soggy and under-published is a trip to the Tenement Museum on the Lower Eastside. An actual pre-building-codes-of-any-sort tenement building from 1863, the museum offers tours of several apartments restored to the way they looked when specific families lived there: German immigrants in the 1870s, Italian immigrants in the 1930s, etc. The apartments are cute and not so small by New York standards. But then you look around and think, Wait, where’s the bathroom? And the fridge? And the place where the four kids sleep?

(Answers: Outside. Not invented. On a fold-up bed inside that big sack.)

But it’s not all poverty porn. The tour I went on was called “Getting By: Past and Present” and it reflected the latest in museum-education trends (hot!) in that our guide encouraged us all to share our own family immigration stories.

(Answers: Ireland. Germany. Latvia by way of England. Mississippi.)

The woman who said “Mississippi” was from Arkansas, and when our guide asked her a follow-up question, she said, “Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been in Arkansas for as long as I can remember. I was just trying to sound interesting.”

We talked about current immigrant populations, gentrification and other intentionally touchy subjects. But things didn’t heat up much, perhaps because we were a fairly homogenous group: all white, all American-born, all seemingly educated. We were the kind of group that asked things like, “So, are most of your tours made up of educated American white people?”

(Answer: White and educated, yes. American, no. Now, let’s get back to talking about immigration, what do you say?)

The girl in me who never threw away her AP US history textbook lapped it all up, then reluctantly returned to the 21^st century. Now I’m curled up in my amazing hotel, with its 20^th-century movie posters and indoor plumbing. Charlie the cat is at my feet. If we can invent toilets, we can save literature, right? Or will it go the way of the icebox and the outhouse—things we are happy to do without?

(Answer: Uh…blowing in the wind?)