In Thursday’s Times there’s a cute essay by Henry Alford on moving in together: “Welcome to My World, O My Beloved. Don’t Bring Your Stuff.” (Juliette Borda’s illustration is pretty cute, too.) The piece begins,
With age I widen, and not just bodily. Recently, despite the fact that I’ve never lived with a romantic partner before, a surge of affection — affection underscored by 44 years of on-and-off loneliness — led me to invite my boyfriend, Greg, to move into my 800-square-foot Greenwich Village apartment.
To honor the occasion, I proposed that we take a page from the playbook of Joan Crawford, who replaced all the toilet seats in her home after each of her marriages. At Bed Bath & Beyond one Thursday night, I told Greg, “Let’s pick the bath towel that’s going to represent the Greg Years.”
After Greg nixed a variety of Wamsutta offerings — terming them “not nice enough for our symbolic relationship towels” — and I clucked in disapproval at some slightly wanton Nicole Miller numbers with sparkly silver threads in them, we finally bought some fluffy white Lenox towels, 70 percent cotton and 30 percent bamboo. The Greg Years: Fluffy, White and Threaded With Bamboo.
Heh. Jeff and Thom, the California Years: Fluffy and Soft Sage with Loops of Zero-Twist Cotton. Thank you, Thomas O’Brien and Target.
2 replies on “‘Welcome to My World’”
Towels: the real sign of true love. 🙂
I thought this was the best line — “once you have Pietà-ed, you cannot look back” — until I got to this one and laughed out loud: “the eerie textural similarities between sisal rugs and Triscuits.”