Not long ago, I spent a week reviewing the city's finest steak-houses, one medium-rare, truffle-crusted-wagyu after another.  The week before was seafood week. More lobster bibs, crustacean claws, and lemony finger bowls than even I cared to count. 

 

When one is young, it seems impossible to imagine one's joie de vivre ever dampening.  But even the sharpest knife is dulled by the gristle of life.  And even a food critic might grow hungry for something they cannot quite put to words. 

 

And so it was with no small dash of ennui that, wandering through Park Slope to some osteria or other, I plucked one of the paper-airplane dinner invitations flitting about the city from where it'd landed in my hat.  Of course, I had heard rumors of these "life-altering" invites from various cynical artist emeriti types (rumors at which I scoffed), but this paper airplane was evidently no urban legend.  It was genuine, corporeal.  A heavy cream cardstock that exuded a delicate whiff of jasmine as I unfolded it.  

 

I was, it seemed, most cordially invited to attend at such and such an obscure alleyway at precisely midnight of the next full moon.  No sooner had I read it than the invitation folded itself into an origami crane and flapped away, leaving yours truly utterly baffled.  Even more remarkably, syncing lunar calendar to day planner, I found myself altogether unbooked and wholly at liberty on the evening in question.  

 

Mystical and wondrous as all this doubtless was, this whole paper airplane rigamarole had me running late for that evening's engagement.  So I hurried off towards whatever dusty chianti awaited me that night with scarcely a moment to gaze wistfully back at the distant avian figure disappearing upon the horizon. 

 

On the appointed night, I made my way to the alley in question.  In the right conditions, the full moon's light casts a romantic, incandescent glow.  These were decidedly not the right conditions, and the full moon's light did the alley absolutely no favors.  Utter darkness would have better served that dingy urban defile.  I kicked my way down the alley, looking vainly for a door to a clandestine speakeasy, but nothing availed.  I had just about called it a night, a good college try having been given by all, when a door materialized at my left.   

 

It wasn't much of a door.  It was quite short, for one thing.  Not that I have children, but by rough estimate I would say it was built to spec for a toddler or possibly miniature child.  I looked around, but there was no other door, and I had come all the way from Uptown . . .

 

I raised a hand to knock, but before my knuckles rapped wood, the door opened.  From the other side wafted a breeze, smelling possibly like the vernal equinox circa 500 BC, which is to say, fresh and floral and very much divorced from the fetid alley milieu in which I then languished.  Needing little further inducement, I ducked through the door and emerged from the side of a tree, someplace very much not lower Manhattan. 

 

Time went a bit squishy at that point, but it seemed I walked interminably along rolling sylvan trails.  The air was sweet, the night sky limpid with stars of peculiar constellation.  Various night birds trilled songs I remember now only in dream.  All this was paired with sundry other pastoral and bucolic touches, et cetera.

 

At last, I came to a sort of clearing.  Moonlit, obviously.  Exquisitely decked with all the typical moonlit-glade accouterments.  To wit: floating lanterns.  To wit: ten-seat-dining-table-carved-atop-single-colossal-oaken-treehouse.  To wit: silent-elfen-maitre-d'-sporting-white-tie.  

 

Evidently, I was underdressed, but silent-elfen-maitre-d' was silent on the matter, bidding me climb steps ringing the solid-oaken-treehouse, whereupon materialized two silver cloches.  Lifting cloche one, silent-elfen-maitre-d' gestured to a glass of clear liquid.  An aperitif, presumably.  

 

"This is all quite lovely," said I. "Just one question. Why me?"

But silent-elfen-maitre-d' merely shrugged, as if to say, "Why not you?"

 

Taking my seat, I brought glass to lips and sniffed the proffered liquor. It smelling of nothing at all.  

 

I took a sip.  

 

Water?  

 

While perfectly refreshing, I was thinking I would have appreciated at least the option of sparkling when a curious feeling overtook me. 

 

I had a sense that I was too big.  Not that I was fat or excessively tall, just that I was . . . well . . . that I'd grown.  

 

How had I gotten so big? 

 

So tired? 

 

So immune to life's charms. 

 

Then, before the navel gazing could descend to even darker depths: 

 

Fanfare, flourish, and cue cloche number two, beneath which was . . .

 

A single blueberry?

 

I looked upon the face of silent-elfen-maitre-d' as though asking, is this what passes as comedy amongst elfen-kind, but received no answer.  The clear liquid had, if nothing else, primed my appetite, and so I popped berry from plate to mouth.

 

And then I was no longer at that table.  I was small again—six years old, say—hiking along the coast in Northern Maine, waves crashing against some stack far below, a salty breeze tussling my hair, the sweet smell of fir trees everywhere.  My knees were scraped, my socks filled with scratchy little leaves as I scrabbled over bedrock outcrops and back amidst bushes, bushes with tiny blue-purple berries that stained my fingers as I plucked them hot from the bushes, popping them in my mouth, the juices staining teeth and tongue a riotous indigo, and the world was bright and new and untrammeled by repetition and monotony.  And every instant, every moment, was fresh and unique and holy because the instant was all one ever had.  

 

And then I was no longer within that seaside memory, nor sitting at the oaken-treehouse-stump-table.  I was sitting in my underpants in my cramped apartment well past midnight, my stomach growling.  I padded to the refrigerator and the fluorescent glow spilling from within revealed a jug of milk, miscellaneous takeout cartons, and an unopened pint of blueberries.  

I climbed out the window onto the fire escape and popped one after another into my mouth, and, for the first time in years, felt full. 

 

Full of wonder.