I  meet my very good  friend Dana Bryant. It’s 10am and we are  at Soho’s Bleecker Street Theatre. An exhilarating one hour and an half later and we are outside speeding through
Manhattan rain to a cafe. At 11.30am  The Journalist turns up and we all eat breakfast and laugh.

The three of us all found our  parents  late in life. By 1.30pm Dana has gone and  The  journalist and I are at Spring Street Natural, an organic restaurant on Spring and Lafayette. In minutes my family descends, My brother Mehatem, his partner Simone,  my
niece Nayenne, Ratesh my brothers best friend and our mother Yemarshet. We get
the table for seven and eat, talk and laugh over the next four hours.  It’s kinda beautiful –  The whole thing.

At 5pm Ratesh,  Mehatem The Journalist and I walk to West Village to the Marc Jacobs shops, there are three of them (marc Jacobs shops) on the same block near the magnolia bakery  (not Mongolian as the journalist called it) . It’s all very sex in the city.  Fictitious
Carrie Bradshaw lived in the street round the corner.

It is the first time a girlfriend of mine has ever met my birth mother.  After a life of searching for my birth family I am familiar with these  momentous occasions of introduction.  They don’t excite me no more.   If life is a journey where  flags are placed upon the mountainside then I am bored with the flag planting ceremonies. To watch the wind change directions is more the point… and the ever changing view. It is nature, family. It grows and changes like the atmosphere. Such as it was we all had a good bloody laugh and it dawned on me that I have known my birth mother for twenty years. And I don’t know her at all.  Welcome to the family I suppose this is how it
is.

The journalist and I make it home for seven thirty PM and for the first time get to talk. It is the first time a girlfriend of mine has ever met my birth mother.  We talk for ages on the kingsize bed then we have a Sunday night of nothing. We go to the deli and eat in the hotel and watch trash TV  – perfect.