My lower lip is bruised from biting down on the cannibalistic urges that Liam De Luce brings out. That fat, sweet arm would burst like bratwurst, if only I could get at it. Caitriona watches closely to make sure that doesn’t happen, but she admits she wants to bite her son too. Only women confess this to her, she says. Apart from Swift, men don’t seem compelled to bite baby flesh, even though it’s as silky and springy as kneaded dough and smells better than baked bread. At least this strange love is reciprocated. On Saturday morning, I was jolted by six sharp teeth nipping my big toe, and a cross-eyed, adoring smile.

At ten months old, Liam tiptoes delicately if someone holds both fists, and he can stand alone for a few moments, swaying on magnificent columns of pudge. His eyes are such a dark blue that they look brown in indoor light. As soon as he wakes, he gets down to the business of playing and singing, and banging on his Fisher-Price music table. Nothing would please him more than to hurl himself off the bed, but he’ll settle for the fun of being hauled back from the brink over and over. Loud, farting belly-raspberries—given and received—also entertain him. He eats like a farm laborer, and has better table manners than me.

Feelings colonize his face. He throws his being into each dramatic emotion, then lets it pass. I wish I were as wise as Liam, who trusts the universe to provide, and finds that it does.

My old friends show me baby pictures and wedding pictures on their cellphones. Many are quitting Vindigo and birthing new lives. Google and Condé Nast scoop them up, and are lucky to get them.

James has to jet. “The baby,” I say sympathetically, but no; his wife is delayed at work, and so he’s going to take over her personal training session. He’s sweet when he’s sheepish.

I cross the bar to talk to David and Jason. They’ve resumed the jokey, syncopated rhythms of a friendship that became business for a while, and they’ve started running together again; on Riverside Drive, not in Central Park, now that they’re both downtowners. They’re discussing their personal trainers. David is trying some new stretching thing. Jason says his trainer never even talks about stretching. David says that in that case, his trainer is a jackass. Jason begs to differ.

I give them shit about personal trainers. I’m only half teasing, even though my Thoreau streak has never played well in Manhattan, and especially not with these two logic addicts. But when we outsource the movement of our own carcasses, what’s left of our lives?

Candy comes over to say goodnight. She blinks and shakes her head, and says how weird it is to see us all together again.

Outside, on Eighth Avenue, the rain sluices down. In a green and democratic city, rain falls almost equally on rich and poor, and after a week of filthy weather everyone is sick of it. New York is not at its best.

My mouse-sized room at the Hudson Hotel cost nearly 200 times more than a night at the Hotel Italia in Bolivia a few years back, and made the carry-on bag wedged next to the bed look huge. For another ten dollars, I got a shaky one-bar wireless connection. On the east coast, the Interweb is still a privilege, not a right. In spite of the the honking on 8th Avenue, the close wooden walls and drafty windows put me in mind of my log cabin days. That suits me, but I’m still horrified at the expense.

“The city hasn’t turned the heating on yet,” said the very nice woman at front desk when I called to tell her I was cold. Was this Leningrad with Louis Ghost chairs? In the Library bar downstairs, people drank cocktails to Thriller, same as five years ago, except the New Yorkers have moved on and these are out-of-towners now. The cafeteria was furnished with heavy benches, like Hogwarts.

In the boom years, my friend Lee would call me for Priceline slumber parties on her work trips to New York. I’d meet her at the Ritz, the Waldorf, or the Royalton. Sometimes we slummed it at the Paramount, which was all sharp edges, tight corners, and tricksy fittings. We sat up late telling secrets over thirty-buck club sandwiches.

At the time, my ex was plagued by phone cards calls from would-be investors in his new business. (1999 was an odd year.)
“You don’t understand,” one specimen hissed, “I can introduce you to the business development group at Acme Corp.”
“As it happens,” said Jason, reasonable as always, “my wife is in a hotel room with the head of business development at Acme Corp right now.” Lee and I were trying on one another’s clothes at the Royalton.

Slumber parties aside, I don’t like the learned helplessness of hotel life. Doormen worry me. So do bellhops. I’m too cheap for room service, even—and especially—when I’m not paying, and too often I find myself sitting alone above a city, dithering over a mini-bar Toblerone that would have bought five nights at the Hotel Italia, and longing for a nice cup of tea.

At a Vindigo reunion on Tuesday night, Jason gave me a fat manila package. He’s clearing house for a big trip and a new marriage. On the cab ride back to the hotel, hundreds of photos tumbled into my lap, all different sizes, some dog-eared. Spain, college parties, and a visit to see Pat. Our last night in Dublin. Group shots from a Wall Street training course—the names are long gone, but I remember their Myers-Briggs scores. A holiday in San Francisco. Drinks to celebrate quitting jobs. Visits home; visits from my parents. A wedding; our wedding; more weddings. New Orleans. My desk at Vindigo. Our little millennium party, propping up a listing Christmas tree.

My own face looks out most of them, sometimes fat from college beer, sometimes thin from New York stress, with worse or better haircuts through the years. These snapshots are artless. They tell you nothing.

I have a running joke with Keith Yamashita, who hired me through these pages, that this “Dervala” is a fabrication. That my real name is Debbie, and I was a Wal-Mart greeter from Festus, Iowa. I’d stored up years of fake smiles and silent dreams there, until one night I sneaked into a traveling production of Riverdance, and was inspired. Night after night I sat in Festus with a book of Celtic baby names and a DVD of Angela’s Ashes, planning my escape to the big city. It took months to work out the back story for this Irish yuppie-drifter, who has bounced around too often to keep track of. Maybe I overdid it. This Dervala character, she’s a little implausible, Keith says, but it works, except when the accent slips and he can hear Debbie loud and clear. I tell him I couldn’t possibly do a worse Irish accent than he does.
    “Welcome to Wal-Mart,” he sing-songs behind my desk. “Pampers? That’s Aisle 6.”

When the taxi pulled up, I slipped one photo into my pocket. J. took it on my 29th birthday, and it catches me as I’d like to look but rarely do. I was too vain to resist this one trophy for my upcoming crone years, but I stuffed the rest of the photos back in their interoffice envelope and left them on the back seat with a pat goodbye. I like the idea of my past circling New York City in a yellow taxi, waiting for the next Debbie who needs it.

I have a co-worker who owns a sewing machine. He makes a new jacket nightly, like a fairytale tailor. They hardly vary. Sometimes they’re charcoal, occasionally they’re white, but usually they’re black. He moves the seams, plays with the placement of a collar, or tweaks a zipper. He adds headphone holders into the neck, or a pocket for his Leatherman knife. Maybe he adds different closures. Once in a great while, he shocks us with a scarlet jacket.

He stays so true to his vision, like a Broadway actor who finds new insights in a part he plays night after night, or a jazzman riffing on a few sweet notes.

Cian Surinder McDermott arrived yesterday, the latest addition to the Dooradoyle boys. (That’s KEY-en, for readers who aren’t Irish.)

    “You think your heart is a certain size, but when you have children you realize it can get so much bigger,” my friend Andy told me last year. We don’t all get to visit that country, but there’s a postcard from it in Natasha’s eyes.

Registrations for November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) opened yesterday. Last year 42,000 people signed up, and 6,000 made it to the 50,000-word requirement.

I’ve wanted to do this for years, but always had too much time on my hands. You need serious time constraints to turn out novel in a month—otherwise you’d fuss with every line.

This year, I’m tempted to sign up. Anybody in?

The City suddenly looks mighty fine. It’s the schlumpy, second-best guy who shows up one day with a decent haircut and a crisp t-shirt, making me bat my eyelashes and say, why, San Francisco, have you been working out?

It might be new freedom, or the autumn sunshine that took its sweet time this year. Nothing like sunshine for making strangers flirt at bus-stops; for getting people out of their goddamn cars; for making girls look good. Whatever it is, I’m glad to wake up in love again after eight months of pining for Brooklyn.

This week, as every week, some wireless technology conference had hundreds of blue shirts spilling outside the Moscone Center, so busy tapping on their phones that they didn’t notice the fog had lifted. It brought some New York friends to town, and over dinners they said all the things I’d said. Wow, the panhandlers are scary aggressive here. I’ve never seen so many homeless people. The buses suck. It just doesn’t have the energy of New York, does it?

These things are true, but don’t seem important any more. Other things are also true. San Francisco is a boomtown, and in a boomtown every street has a story, if you’ll listen. The surf crashes, the mountains rear, and the bridges are handsome. There are enough immigrants from enough places to make it interesting, and an outpost of my hometown warm enough to swap stories about four-inch bathwater and childhood sweets. In San Francisco, even people with day jobs weld giant robots, play thrash metal, write bad novels or—God forbid—start baby companies. Sometimes they turn the biggest hills into ski runs, just for the hell of it. San Francisco is daft enough to come up with Burning Man, or the Idiotarod, or Bill Graham’s Fillmore.

There are five fine second-hand bookstores within fifteen blocks of my house on a hill. Nearby there’s a yoga studio that does that funny but soothing No-Cal chakra chat, while the sixty students practice sighs and groans right out of a Ron Jeremy movie. Down the street, Phil makes handmade coffee by the cup.

The threat of an earthquake reminds us of all we have to celebrate and all we have to lose.

I’m a simple woman. It takes only these things, and eight months to notice them, to make me happy.