I am staying this evening at the lovely home of my dear old friends Ted and Ellen in Palo Alto. When I first met them, long ago, they were living in New York City. Midtown Manhattan, no less.
One day Ted was offered a fabulous job in California that he really couldn’t refuse, and so they needed to leave New York. We were talking this evening about that time years ago when they were about to depart New York, and had marked the occasion by convening one last gathering with their good friends in Manhattan.
This evening I reminded Ellen of something she’d said to me on that day long ago. “How does it feel,” I had asked her then, “to be leaving New York City.”
She’d thought about it, and had responded with one of the most quotable lines I’ve ever heard. “When you leave New York,” she told me, “you’re not going anywhere.”