Last night I sat at the bar at Rachel’s Taqueria while waiting for the take-out quesadillas I ordered for OSFO to be ready. I ordered a glass of Chardonnay but had to return it because it tasted bad. The bartender was eager to replace it with good glass of Pinot Grigio.

Sitting on either side of me, two people were deep in conversation. Obvious strangers they had struck up a conversation about being new in New York City.

The woman, who works in development at a local college had obviously been in New York for a couple of years. The guy, however, was a real newbie. It was an endearing conversation for me to overhear and eventually become part of.

The young man, who works in a bar in DUMBO, was talking about what fun it is to get to know New York City. “Doing the tourist stuff and then just walking around,” he said. “Part of me wishes I was here before it became so gentrified.

“Well, there are still places you can go to know what it was like,” she said.

At this point I couldn’t resist putting my two cents in.

“You know what they say,” I told them. I don’t think they were expecting me to chime in.

“What?” the guy said. He was an open and friendly person in his late twenties, originally from Arizona.

“Only the dead know Brooklyn,” I said ominously.

“Oooh. That’s good,” he said. “Only the dead know Brooklyn.”

“It’s the name of a short story…and a blog,” I said. “My blog.”

“Hey, what’s your blog?”

And so we were off and running. And I didn’t even bother to tell them about the story written in brilliant Brooklynese by Thomas Wolfe. There was something energizing about being around these new New Yorkers who were discovering the city for the first time. I had the vague sense that both of them would make their lives here. Marry, have children. Years from now they’d remember their early years in Brooklyn, when they were just defining this city for themselves. Maybe they’d remember the woman in the raincoat who told them about that Thomas Wolfe story.

Maybe not.