The great mitten caper

It all started with a haiku from Nina, authoress of my blog addiction, Reader:


Manhattan sidewalk
A safe place, I have hidden
Your new red mittens

Mittens? I’m getting mittens? Just for writing a silly post about Fishgiving?

Nina continued:

Snow flurries, lovely
aloft like mudflapper boobs
Of course, red mittens

To which I answered (in haiku, of course):

Oh, where can they be?
Porny mitts amid the drifts –
Sluts in virgin snow.

At which point she gave me a hint:

Seven train and up
past sephora and soupman
midtown mittens park

It was a hunt for buried treasure. GAME ON.

Mission I

I make my way to Bryant Park. I am convinced, for some reason, that the mittens are buried in a planter somewhere in the park. There are approximately 87 planters in the park and I stick my hands in about 63 of them. Fishing about in one of the pots at lunchtime, a man approaches me.

“What are you doing?” he says. Though he is not in uniform, I am uncertain if he is undercover Planter Police. He has that paunchy, self-satisfied look about him.

“Checking for deer ticks,” I say - with such gravity that for a moment, I believe this is true. I am performing a service for the city of New York by checking for deer ticks. In a suit. And four-inch heels.

“No deer ticks here!” I mutter to myself. I appear to be a paranoid schizophrenic. With no mittens.

Mission II

I am still convinced that the mittens are in Bryant Park, but this time, I check out the Christmas tree to see if there are any mittens hanging among the boughs. I consider scaling the tree as I spy something vaguely red and fuzzy-looking high up in the boughs, but it’s dark and I losing visibility. Two young women approach me.

“Excuse me, we’d like to ask you a question as part of a survey we’re conducting.”

Okaaaaaay.

“Are you familiar with God the Father?”

Jesus freaks. Jesus freaks under a Christmas tree.

“Yes, I am.”

“Are you familiar with God the Mother?”

“Um…you mean like Julian of Norwich? And the motherhood of God?”

“…” The girls look at me blankly.

“You know…like the 14th century anchorite who wrote about God our Mother?”

“…”

(I’ve noticed in my post-college years that an undergraduate concentration in medieval history and literature has had one and only one effect on people in my life: complete and utter alienation. Spouting fun facts about medieval history is akin to dousing people with pepper spray. Try it at a cocktail party sometime.)

The girls recover and blather on about God the Mother and the Mother of God, but all I can hear is MITTENSMITTENSMITTENS.

Missions III and IV

Somewhere in between Missions III and IV, Nina tells her blog peeps about the hidden mittens and all hell breaks loose. Everyone wants the mittens, and several threaten to hunt them down. The heat is on. Nina confiscates the mittens and re-hides them. Because I am not particularly clever, Nina is forced to tell me where they are.

I find them buried in a topiary. They’re absolutely gorgeous, fluffy, red – they are everything mittens should be. I clap my hands with glee, doing a short mitten jig in the middle of Bryant Park. They are the loveliest mittens ever created.

In the middle of the Great Blog Bust of 2007, I tell Fauxhawk about the mittens. He begins to understand why this blog is so important to me.

It’s because of the mittens.

Thank you, Nina. I love my beautiful mittens. I am a very lucky girl.