Adam Gopnik - Charlie Ravioli 

 

 

Thank you. Thank you. The story I want to tell you tonight is actually dedicated to a couple of people. One is to my wonderful daughter Olivia, who's sitting with me tonight, who's 11 years old, [cheers and applause] and a very grown-up and beautiful girl. She's given me permission to tell this story, though she's policing it and is the fact-checking department as well. 

 

And the other person is the special honoree tonight, Calvin Trillin. Because it was Trillin, really, who back in the 1970s wrote all of these wonderful pieces about family life in New York that convinced all of us in Milwaukee and New Mexico and in Canada, in my case, that New York would be a wonderful place to come and make a family, raise a family. And so, we all came and we ruined the city by our arrival as we all poured in, and Trillin was the magnet who drew us. 

 

We came and then we left. My wife and I left New York for several years. We lived abroad, we lived in France, and we decided we would come home just 10 years ago, in the year 2000. For a lot of reasons, but essentially because we wanted to see our children grow up here in New York City. We wanted them to have not the experience that kids have growing up in Paris, where every child at 04:30 when school is finished looks like a Democrat. 

 

They look completely beaten and depressed and kind of dog-eared and enormous circles under their eyes, and they've been beaten and abused for the last nine hours, and they have no idea how to respond to the force of unappeasable authority at every moment. We wanted them to have that kind of light-footed, spring-hearted sense of ownership that New York children seem to us to have. So, we came back to be in New York so that they would have a childhood in New York, so that they would be able to be part of New York. And then, of course, we had just come back when the greatest tragedy in the city's history happened.

 

And a long shadow spread out over every life, and I think maybe particularly over the lives of parents with small children, as we wondered if we should stay in New York, if New York was the right place for us to be and the right place really for us to bring up our children. It was just about at that moment when we were all full of doubt, as I suspect many of you were as well-- And my wife Martha would put on my pillow night after night brochures from real estate in Connecticut and houses in New Jersey, and even things clipped from the paper about the farthest reaches of Brooklyn. It was just at about that time that my daughter Olivia, who was three then, told us that she had an imaginary friend, and that this imaginary friend's name was Charlie Ravioli. [audience chuckles] 

 

At first, Charlie Ravioli seemed like a terrifically attractive Manhattan kind of character. He lived at the corner of Lexington and Madison, [audience laughter] which seemed like a great neighborhood. “And he lived,” Olivia explained, “on grilled chicken and water,” like a fashion model or an imaginary friend. [audience laughter] It was a great New York diet. We knew a lot of people who lived on exactly that. But then, something a little disturbing, or a little concerning, began to happen. Olivia would be on her cell phone, you know, we gave her one of those toy cell phones that they had then, and she would be talking on it, and we would hear her say, "Hello, Wavioli. Wavioli. Okay, call me when you get in." And she would hang it up, and she would turn to us and say, "I always get his machine." [audience laughter] 

 

And we realized that she had invented an imaginary friend who was always too busy to play with her. [audience laughter] She had an invisible playmate whose salient characteristic was that he was too busy to play. She would come every night to the table at dinner, and everyone would recite the things that had happened through the day, and we'd turn to Olivia, and she'd say, "Oh, I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today. We grabbed a cappuccino, but then he had to run." [audience laughter] Or, she'd say, "I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today.” She would say, “We got into a taxi, but then he had a meeting, so he had to go." It turned out Charlie was working in television in those years. That's how Olivia explained it. But she actually would say, "He's working on a television."

 

We could never figure out if he was a talk show host, like Charlie Rose, or if he was a guy in the electronics business with a little repair shop someplace in Queens. But that was what Ravioli did. And he was always too busy to play with her. Now, I should explain, of course, that Olivia, at that moment in her life, had no life where she was bumping into people, had no life where she was grabbing cappuccinos. She was simply expressing and imitating the world that she heard all around her, and particularly that she heard from her mother. 

 

Every night when we would come to the table, and I would say to her mother, "How was your day?" And her mother would say, "Oh, you know, it was one of those days, I bumped into Meg downtown, and we grabbed a coffee. But then, I had a cell phone message from Emily. But we couldn't connect, so we came back uptown” and on and on and on, a whole history of miscommunication that had enveloped eight hours. And Olivia was taking that in. She had one person in her life who was out there in the world. Her older brother Luke, was exactly five years older than she is to the day, which tells you more than you really want to know. [audience laughter] 

 

Every day at the end of the day, they would sit down together for cookies and milk when Luke came back from school, after Olivia had spent a day at the Central Park Zoo, taking naps, doing the things that three-year-olds do. And she would say, "Luca, how was your day?" And he would say, "Oh, okay." "Luke, did the teacher like your essay?" "Yeah, yeah, I guess." "Luke, what did you have for lunch?" "A sandwich, I guess." "Luke, how was my day?" The basic rhythm of man and woman gets set at about the ages of seven and two and never alters throughout a lifetime. 

 

Well, Charlie Ravioli seemed to us like such a strange character that I decided I would call-- I have five sisters. I have five sisters. When the moths would come on, they all have PhDs. They all teach in universities somewhere or other. When the moths used to come onto our porch, they would dissect them and figure out exactly what genus they belong to. One of my sisters is a developmental psychologist out in Berkeley. I called her up, because it seemed a little strange to me to have an imaginary friend who was always too busy to play with you. I wondered if this was something that came up a lot in the psychological literature. So, I called her and said, "Listen, my daughter Olivia has got this imaginary friend, but she's always trying to connect with him, never can. Always too busy to play with her." 

 

And she said, "Oh, that's completely normal. That's completely normal. Because children make their imaginary friends out of whatever experience they have at hand. If they're living on mountaintops, they have imaginary friends who are made of clouds. If they live by the seashore, their imaginary friends are waves. So, what could be more normal than that her imaginary friend, growing up in Manhattan, would be always too busy, would be a creature of interrupted occasions, of constantly occluded connections. Makes perfect sense? The kids understand that these imaginary friends are fictional. You have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

 

So, I told my wife that, and I said, "We have nothing to worry about. Completely normal. Every child in New York has a busy imaginary friend." [audience laughter] So, it seemed that this was going to be okay. But then, a new character arrived in the story. We would listen to Olivia talking on her little cell phone, and we heard her talking to someone called Laurie. Someone called Laurie. She would say, "Hello, Laurie. Hello. Is Ravioli there? No? Okay." And at first, we thought, you see, that Laurie was sort of the Linda Tripp of the whole Ravioli operation, [audience laughter] that she was the person you spoke to when Ravioli was ignoring you, the big creep that he obviously was, and you confided in Linda Tripp, she was recording your conversations and so on. [audience chuckles] 

 

But then, we listened more carefully and we realized who Laurie really was. Laurie was Ravioli's assistant. She was Charlie Ravioli's assistant. She was the person on the phone who tells you, "I'm sorry, Mr. Ravioli is in a meeting. He'll try and get back to you as soon as he can." Martha turned to me and said, "This is wrong. This is really wrong. I don't know, I'm not a child psychologist, but I know that imaginary friends should not have assistants. [audience laughter] They should not have agents. They should not have personal trainers. Imaginary friends should not have people. They should play with the child who imagined them. That is their role in life. Not to be surrounded by an entourage who prevents the child who thought them up in the first place from ever actually playing with them." [audience laughter] 

 

So, I called my sister and said, "Ravioli has an assistant who's answering his phone now. Would you describe this as normal?" And she said, "This never occurs in the psychological literature." And I said, "Oh, so, you think we should look into it?" And she said, "No, I think you should move." [audience laughter] But then, something very strange, something very interesting, began to happen. Olivia didn't seem to get any closer to Charlie Ravioli. She didn't seem to come any nearer to actually having the playdates and the good times with him that it seemed to us that she deserved. But every day she would report to us at the end of the day that she had gone out into the world in search of Charlie Ravioli, and something amazing had happened to her. 

 

She had gone out looking for Charlie Ravioli, and she had ended up in the zoo, and she had released all the animals from the zoo, and they had a dance. She had gone out looking for Charlie Ravioli, she came home and told us one day-- About a day, of course, when she spent it entirely inside watching Caillou on television and taking a nap. She had gone out in search of Charlie Ravioli on the streets of Manhattan, and the taxi driver had a heart attack, and she'd gotten into the front seat of the taxi, and driven through the city throughout the day. She'd gone looking for Charlie Ravioli downtown somewhere, and she had ended up telling jokes in a nightclub with a microphone. [audience laughter] 

 

We realized that Charlie Ravioli for her was truly the prince of the city. He was the prince of our disorder. He was the representative of the spirit of New York, which is always the spirit of attainment. It's always the spirit of the thing that lies before us, is always the place that we haven't quite got to yet, but we'll get to someday. Ravioli wasn't, we realized, just an incarnation of the insane busyness and misconnections she saw around us. He was also her hero, her demigod, her fictional version of the endless possibilities in New York, which always lay just around the corner and on the other side of a cappuccino. 

 

And so, in those years, when we were all asking ourselves, should we leave New York? Should we go out of New York, when I was being bombarded with real estate literature from Connecticut, where all writers go and become alcoholics and write bad autobiographical plays-- [audience laughter] I knew. I knew that we could stay in New York, because I understood that all we really wanted from this city, and I could say to my wife whenever she suggested that we leave, all we wanted was to go on bumping into Charlie Ravioli as long and as often as we possibly can. Thank you so much.