Turns out NYC is just a small town after all.
We spent a good long time in line last weekend for the WTC1 observatory. Right in front of us was a stunningly good looking European couple with a young child in a stroller. Mom looked exactly like Keri Russell (circa Waitress, not Felicity or the more recent Americans). Dad was thin, well-dressed, and the kind of Euro good-looking I expect to find on an ad for a watch I can’t pronounce. Lily was a blond cherub, probably about 18 months or so, who caught everyone’s attention in line.
Well, not everyone’s attention. Once Keri and Dieter (I’ll call him) released Lily from her stroller/prison, Lily was on the go. And Keri and Dieter were oddly disinterested in where Lily was off to. A good spin on their parenting skills is that they were not fussy helicopter parents. A more negative spin would be that they were completely negligent. I and others in the line were shepherding Lily along so that she wasn’t lost from her oblivious parents.
And then we got up to the Observatory and parted ways with Keri, Dieter and Lily. (And ate a $50 lunch consisting of 2 grilled cheese sandwiches and 2 drinks, because that’s exactly what you can get away with charging people who are hungry and 102 stories in the air.)
The next day, wandering around the south-end of Central Park before heading out to the airport, I asked G: Hey, I wonder if Keri and Dieter still have Lily? The odds did not seem good.
And then, about 2 minutes later as we walked out of the Park, who should we encounter at the 61st Street entrance but Keri and Dieter – and Lily, in her stroller, safe and sound. Turns out NYC is just a small town, and the odds were pretty good for us to run into the fashionable family one last time before heading back to TO.
Warning to NYC: if there’s a blond 18-month-old toddler with a pink sippy cup running around tourist spots in Manhattan all by herself, I think we know Keri and Dieter have dropped the ball.