These are swizzle sticks. Actual ones, from actual places in New York and Montreal, Canada. The Cattleman, the Riverboat (used to be at the bottom of the Empire State Building), Ruby Foo's, Hthe one that looks like a branch in the appended photo., the Hotel Frontenac. I have something like 50 or more of them, these my parents actually acquired sipping various adult beverages when they were on the town. The Canadian trip, I am told, resulted in. . . .me, nine months down the road. Every time they'd show the photographs of that trip, I'd hear how I'd been conceived in French Montreal. Mais oui!

I have very specific memories of some New York restaurant hopping, as we kids, me, my and my cousins, were often brought along. We'd have cokes and peanuts and dinner, listen to violins, or guitars, and the hubbub of grownups at play. The Rainbow Room. Cave Henri IV. Top of the Sixes. Manhattan at my young feet. A particular memory is seeing Alan King leaving El Morrocco. I was the 14 year old sitting in a zebra themed booth. It was hard on my first boyfriend when he tried to impress me with the Rainbow Room. Been there I said, now a well travelled (gastronomically speaking) college kid. But one could not get enough of the Rainbow Room. I think about those days and marvel at my tolerance for things well beyond my emotional ken. No regrets, for it wasn't a typical part of the usual Bronx kid's growing experience. It not only did not hurt me, but it forms a fond memory for its uniqueness. My parents danced like Fred and Ginger, with an ease I have never acquired, but always admired. There was many a dance floor in these restaurants. And I heard the music of rumbas, cha-cha's, mambos, fox trots and swing from an early age, appreciating something old that just never gets old.

There was a bit of an incongruity that we lived in a one bedroom fifty dollar apartment but managed, fairly often, frequently with the largess of my uncle next door, to sample so many restaurants and, yes, bars. Interestingly, I never had the urge to drink and when I had my first one, I was of legal age, and at my high school prom (those days you could drink at 18), and it was, at the then still in existence, Riverboat, now long gone.

I like having those swizzle sticks. They touch a time and a place, and in a way I cannot quite explain, an innocence of my parents, then still young and full of possibility. They connect me to them.