how to pickle
08
May 10
writings
guests welcome!! this page is just for anything creative that you’d like to post on the traveling cafe site.
please email me at thetravelingcafe@gmail.com if you’d like to submit an essay, short story, poem, drawing, photograph, observation….related to food or not.
(i reserve the right not to post anything that doesn’t strike me as appropriate for whatever reason…)
story: SHOPSIN’S
When I moved to New York City, at the age of 20, I Iived on Leroy Street in the West Village. It was my stepbrother’s apartment, but he was living with his girlfriend uptown, so he let me stay there. A few years later my boyfriend, who later became my husband, heard through a friend of a friend about a little apartment on Leroy Street just a few doors down from my stepbrother’s old place.
Other people wanted the apartment, but we persisted and fought hard to get the place. We were successful and moved in for $225 a month. Places like these were not common, but you could still find a deal once in a blue moon.
He was an actor, I was a dancer. We had met at a corner bar late one night, during my stint living uptown on E. 77th Street. The bar is no longer there, of course. Mr. O’s. It was a shabby establishment, with not much to recommend it except that it was there, and on a warm summer night I had stopped in with a friend, and he and his sidewalk Commedia troupe were having an after-rehearsal drink.
I took up with this skinny kid who was so young he still had acne, who drank gin straight, and who had a great sense of irony.
We moved to the Village, joined a commune, got married, worked for a grande dame of publishing and opened a warehouse for her on Morton Street. Around the corner from our little apartment and en route to our Morton Street warehouse was a place called Shopsin’s. We stopped in every morning for coffee and croissants. It was a family owned store; a husband and wife, and many little kids. Mr. Shopsin fixed up a big pot of soup every day. The scene consisted of Mr. Shopsin with a large white apron and white chef’s hat emerging from the kitchen now and then to greet customers or bring out the food, and Mrs. Shopsin working the counter and running the store which had a small selection of grocery items. It was a rather rarified corner store–with a touch of Alice’s Restaurant thrown in–catering to a clientele with slightly demanding tastes, but before the era of ‘upscale’ hit New York in a big way.
The store held an appeal for me beyond, or even without regard for the tangible purpose it served. I loved it as one of the few remaining family businesses where you would sometimes see the newest baby propped up on the counter next to your order of potato leek soup, or an older child with pencil and paper sitting near the window pondering her homework for the day. I always thought I ‘d want to own a business like that some day.
After so many years have passed, and so many experiences, I think it’s time to have my little shop, put on a white apron and serve up a big pot of soup to whoever is hungry and wants to drop by for a little conversation.
shawna kent
