This essay is part two of my year-long project where, each month, I’ll look through old journal entries by using a random date generator to decide which day of my past to explore. This month’s was December 29th.
December 29, 2011—2022
2011: Mom drove me and the boys to New Hampshire to go skiing at Loon. It was so icy that I could only do one run. Mom also made 13 sandwiches to split between the four of us. I never want to leave.
2012: Mom and I went to Braintree to go shopping and she bought me really cute shoes and blazers. Mom, Dad and I started watching a movie about old people and I picked Dana up from Jenny’s in PJ’s.
2013: Mom, Sarah and I went shopping in an outdoor mall in the pouring rain, but it was fun going to Charming Charlie’s together. After, we watched the “Roast of James Franco” which was funny.
2014: We met Zach at the place behind Lincoln Center and he said he didn’t want to pay more rent, so Jonny and I applied for an apartment for me [to live alone instead] on the east side, but almost got stabbed by a Snooki lookalike as well as missed our bus.
2015: We all slept terribly last night, so Mom and I had a really lazy day where we just watched movies all day, then we finally got out of the house so we could go to Zumba with weights. It was a good day.
2016: I took Mom and Dad to Bikram in the morning, then at night, the three of us plus Jonny and Caitlyn went to Rivershed to hear Grace sing and drink beer.
2017: Jonny and I went to Boston and had lunch with Dana at Thinking Cup before heading to Harpoon to drink with some friends. It was a really fun day to end the trip.
2018: Mom and I went shopping in the afternoon and then Jonny and I went to Boston to meet up with Kim and Eleanor. We all got really drunk and I completely shattered my phone.
2019: Dana left today and I spent most of it on the couch reading, but then Mom and I had a girls day by going to see “Little Women.” It was nice to do something by ourselves.
2020: It was very cold out today — much more than we were expecting — so instead of going on a walk, I was able to do my COVID test and drop it off at the FedEx box. Nothing else really happened.
2021: We had a very chill day — Mom, Dad and I took Charlie on a walk to Norris Trail before Dad made raviolis homemade for dinner. It has been a really nice visit; I kind of wish we were staying longer.
2022: Mom, Dad, Jonny and I took Charlie on a really nice walk on the beach and then came home to have a nice last day together. I’m glad we were home and had this time, I really needed the rest.
When my family moved to Idaho, I was two — it was just me, my dad, my mom and my mom’s 4-month pregnant belly that I had named Jonny. This was not supposed to be the name of the baby who would later arrive, but I’d gotten into the daily habit of placing both hands on my mom’s stomach and addressing “Jonny” by name while recapping my toddler-like adventures and clearly, it stuck.
Prior to our cross-country relocation, my parents had lived in New York their entire lives, surrounded by a tight-knit extended family as well as a group of fiercely loyal friends. They were leaving all of it for a job opportunity that required them to live in a tiny town where we knew no one very, very far away. I don’t remember the loneliness my parents must have felt, but considering I am around the age now they were when they changed their whole lives, I can almost place it.
About six months before our move, a band called Counting Crows came out with an album titled “August and Everything After.” I don’t remember our first years in Idaho well — again, I was two — but I do remember that album was always on some sort of loop. Arguably, the most famous song from the album is “Mr. Jones,” but the one I recall most specifically from my childhood was “Raining in Baltimore.” Though beautiful, it is not a particularly pleasant song — it’s focused on what it feels like to be separated from loved ones and the lyrics “three thousand five hundred miles away, what would you change if you could” hit the Prandato family pretty hard in the year of 1994. At the time, I couldn’t comprehend the complexity of what my parents must have been feeling every time they heard those words, but now, it’s what I turn on when I miss my family desperately.
December has always been a time focused on family for me. For as long as I have lived in New York City, I spend the holiday season doing a lowkey unhinged commute. In the early twenties of December days, I take an Amtrak back to Massachusetts. On Christmas Day, our family drives from Massachusetts to upstate New York to have the holiday with our extended family. The day after Christmas, we drive back to Massachusetts and then, I usually take the Amtrak home on the 30th to make it back in time for NYE in NYC. This back and forth (and back and forth) means most of my December 29th’s have been my last day of every year to spend real quality time with my family.
My family is close in a way I naively did not realize every family was not until a friend of mine lived with us for a few weeks during a summer when we were in college. At the end of her stay, she made the comment that she loved the dynamic of our family. She loved how we all had dinner together every night and that we genuinely enjoyed spending time with each other and, that when a person in the family unit, like my father, arrived back at the house, we’d all announce it, standing up from the couch with a “Dad’s home!” and running down the stairs to give him a welcoming hug. I’d always appreciated the closeness I felt toward my family, but those comments put into perspective how lucky I am to have this reliable support system and I am forever grateful for the bonds I have with my parents and my brothers.
I talk to my family daily, but on those days where I do feel lonely or miss them or just am a little homesick, I put on the Counting Crows — almost always “August and Everything After” — and listen to the album in full. It’s a calming ritual I have used for years and never fails to make me feel like I’ve found a little piece of home. My two rules for this process are simple — I won’t turn it on if I am sad from heartbreak and I will always play the album straight through. As wild as it sounds, this album holds too big a piece of my identity to accidentally imprint any romantic emotions onto and I listen to it in order because I like the consistency of knowing exactly what song is going to come next. It brings back the memory of when I was a kid and had to patiently wait in anticipation until the middle of the album for the trio of my favorite songs (“Anna Begins,” “Rain King” and “Sullivan Street”) to start playing on our stereo.
“Sullivan Street” is actually the reason I got the idea for this essay. At the beginning of the month, I began this project by pulling the randomly generated date of December 29th and was trying to figure out how to loop all those above entries together. I also needed to finish completing my tasks for that week’s Artist Way activities and one of them was to listen to an album all the way through. I’d recently come back from a week and a half long trip to my parent’s place in Massachusetts, but I do sometimes get more homesick in the immediate aftermath of leaving them than when I have been away for months, so, as I ordered a car to drive me from Bed Stuy all the way to a dance class on 12th Avenue, I queued up “August and Everything After.” The drive from Brooklyn to Hells Kitchen is not a short one and I was dropped off at the same time “Sullivan Street” came on. Early for class and eager to find a cup of coffee so far west, I began walking east… where, half a block up, was the only coffee shop open — a Sullivan Street Bakery that I had never seen,
I know it doesn’t sound like much — ok, cool, we get it, the bakery had the same name as a song! — but I have been leaning so heavily into finding synchronicity that it felt important to me. There are a few instances in my life where I have walked into a spot and immediately known I am exactly where I needed to be. Experiencing that on such a small scale while listening to a song that’s essentially been threaded into my core beliefs as the soundtrack to my life made me feel safe and reminded me of the other times I had that “ah, this is very right” feeling.
And, one of those moments happened to be on December 29th, 2014.
Back in 2014, I was not having what could be described as good luck finding an apartment in New York. I was slated to start my NYC-based job in January, but at the time, was still finishing out my contract at The Boston Globe. So, when I’d see an apartment online that was available within my price-range, I would message the broker and get on the four hour Amtrak after work. (Please note: this is insane). By the time I’d arrive in Manhattan, exhausted and completely unprepared, the apartment had almost always been taken. On the rare cases it was not, there was something so obviously wrong with the place that I, even on my scarce, barely-existing 22-year-old budget, couldn’t possibly fathom living there. So, I’d hop back on the Amtrak (again, insane) overnight to go straight into the office in the morning, feeling extremely drained and wildly unaccomplished.
This was so obviously unsustainable (though did set the precedent for my ability to accomplish future holiday-season train commutes) that after Christmas that year, my parents dropped Jonny and I off in the city with the directive to not come home until we finally found a place for me to live. Looking back, this also seems insane — we were basically children! — but the thought was that it’d be easier to navigate the rental market of the city while actually being in the city.
For a brief time during all of this, ZG and I toyed with the idea of living together, an idea I can confidently say is the worst we have ever had in our 14-year long friendship. (One of the available apartments I had said I could absolutely not live in after a commute from Massachusetts one night was a basement unit in Soho with a singular window where we’d have to walk through each other’s rooms to get to the bathroom). After we’d met up that day and decided it was for the best that we live separately, Jonny and I went to the Upper East Side to check out a group of buildings tied to a management company we’d found that seemed legitimate.
As it would turn out, December 29th is a hot day for apartment rentals. Seeing as almost every open unit was on the top floor of the multiple six floor walk-up’s we’d be viewing, the representative decided to minimize her steps for the day by showing us the apartments in unison with other prospective tenants. This led to what could only be described as a Hunger Games-like situation when she opened the door to the spot I knew I’d have to live.
The second we walked inside the sun-lit studio, I got the feeling that I was exactly where I was meant to be. Immediately after, it was replaced with instant panic in that I wasn’t going to be able to make this my home. The other person viewing the apartment, a small, loud girl who looked like she’d just come off the set of “Jersey Shore,” made it clear she also wanted to claim the place. (She did so by looking directly into my eyes, saying she would fight me for the spot, then filming my reaction for her SnapStory). Communicating solely with our eyes, Jonny sprinted off in search of the nearest ATM for my application fee so we could get a head start on the process — it was three avenues away, this was extremely kind of him — and by the end of the day, the apartment was mine. That afternoon is such a core memory for me — finally finding a place I wanted to live, Jonny and I giving each other that knowing look, the nervousness of going through the application process quickly, wanting to make sure everything was accurate, but also, that I was getting it in first. It’s cemented in my life as my first memory as a New York City resident and looking back on the moment now, I feel calm thinking about the chaos that defined it.
On the night of the day I found Sullivan Street Bakery, Jonny flew to New York. To the delight of our family, after years of living across the country in California, he was finally moving to the city as well. We spent the next two days apartment hunting, looking at spots, but not having that incredible “a-ha” moment until the very last one.
I’d been expecting his apartment search to be easier than the one we’d done almost ten years earlier, partly because we had weeks, not days, but also because the budget of someone established in their career is significantly higher than that of a 22-year-old child whose contract at The Boston Globe was technically a six-month internship. (Still, I wore my sneakers just in case I needed to pay back the running-to-the-ATM favor). We’d looked at a lot of spots all over Brooklyn, but the last one on our list for the day was a place that was comically close to my apartment.
We walked in and I watched in real-time as Jonny went through the same experience I had all those years before. It was so clear by his reaction moving through the apartment that this was the place he was meant to make his home and it was exciting for me to see this moment happen from the other perspective. The two of us left his future apartment to walk quickly back to mine to go apply for it with that same urgency we’d exhibited nine years prior (being generous, the walk took three minutes) and within a few hours, we were out at dinner, celebrating that he’d been approved and the place was his.
A week or so later, I left my apartment to walk to the subway and a Counting Crows song — not from “August and Everything After,” but calming just the same — came across shuffle as I moved down the street. It was “A Long December,” the song whose story begins with the sentence “A long December and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last.” I was running late, but the song started playing when I got to the corner where my brother now lives. I stopped, looking up as his windows with those words in my ears and a smile, feeling that we were both exactly where we were supposed to be.