NEW YORK CITY
May 9, 2009

STRANGER: Lynda Nyberg
LOCATION: AOC Bistro, 259 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, New York City
THEME: Breaking bread in Brooklyn

Despite enduring a difficult few years that would likely drive most people to despair, Lynda Nyberg is an amazingly cheery person with a simple outlook on the bad times. “I don’t regret any of it,” she told me at the latest dinner with a stranger.

Lynda, 26, and I met up at AOC Bistro in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for a late-night dinner. Our first restaurant choice was noisy and there was a 30-minute wait, so after wandering the street for a while we settled on the French bistro, located on a street corner. It had outdoor seating which was ideal on the warm New York night and the menu seemed generic but appealing.

A rather rude waitress showed us to our seats — my British birthright made me suspicious that maybe this was just centuries-old Gallic hatred of the English, but no, the place just has bad service — and then we tried to peruse the menus, but Lynda was keen to talk.

And talk.

And talk.

I don’t mean that in a snarky way. I was glad she was so talkative, and the conversation flowed effortlessly from the time we sat down to the end of dinner. It’s wonderful for an interviewer to meet someone who is completely at ease with themselves and just rattles off anecdotes, quips and jokes like a regular raconteur. When one has experienced the downs that Lynda’s had to go through, in addition to her high-pressure everyday duties, it’s remarkable that she’s able to maintain a cheerful disposition. Any dinner companion that suggests getting drunk even before the waiter has brought out the bread and butter is all right in my book.

Okay, I don’t actually have a book as such, but if I did then rest assured Lynda would be in it. Hmm…what could I call the book? How about “The Wonderful, Whimsical World Of Breaking Bread With Random People”? Or maybe just “Dining With Strangers” would work. Hey, Simon & Schuster, book contract stat, please!

Getting back to the dinner, Lynda and I managed to find 10 seconds of downtime to pick our menu items. She opted for a club sandwich and water (she was driving) while I went for the sirloin steak a Cheval, which is ground meat topped with a sunny-side up egg and parsley mashed potatoes. The waitress took our order with an air of indifference that would have been insulting were it not so amusing, and then left. I tried to eat the bread, but it and the butter were ice-cold — who freezes butter and bread? — so I gave up and listened to Lynda’s life story.

She was born in California, 1983, the day Aldous Huxley died…whoops, I slipped into a misappropriation of a Sheryl Crow lyric there. Won’t happen again. After about a month in the Golden State her parents moved to the Bronx for roughly five years before they moved to a new place in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, where her family has lived ever since. Despite, or perhaps because of, spending almost her entire life in New York, don’t expect Lynda to wear one of those tourist t-shirts proclaiming “I Love New York”. Lynda said she has a different view of the Big Apple. “I really don’t like the people, the traffic, or anything about it other than my family.”

Dislike of the city was the primary motivator for Lynda joining the Navy at the age of 17. She met her future husband in training school and after three months of dating Lynda went on bended knee and proposed. They got married and lived in various locations including Chicago, Washington state and Virginia, and after a while she said the marriage started to go downhill.

“He decided he didn’t want to work anymore, so he went AWOL” from the military, Lynda said. Typically when someone goes absent without leave the Navy won’t kick them out but instead put them on a restriction, for example being confined to a vessel for 45 days, but this was the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks and “because we were now in a warlike situation he got kicked out” and was no longer serving his country, Lynda added.

This started a stress cycle for Lynda, who was pregnant at the time, and she ended up carrying the burden of being the future family’s only wage earner. “Fast forward a few years and now I have two kids. During the course of the five years we were married he was unemployed for three years and using drugs,” Lynda said, entirely at ease with spilling what some would say are highly personal details. I was happy to listen, but at times I think my eyes must have popped out my head like a cartoon character when listening to tales of her ex-husband’s behavior.

Once Lynda’s children — Cameron, 7, and Jesse, 5 — were born, she went back on deployments and would send money back to her family to pay for clothes, foods, and regular expenses. Lynda thought things were fine until June 2006 when she got out of the Navy and came home to find “he’d used every dime on drugs. His mother was helping with the kids. I come back and she asked why I hadn’t sent any money home.” Lynda said she had indeed been sending money back, and that’s when she found out the dollars were going on drugs. “That was the bottom line. I packed up the kids, clothes, toys, and left him. I told him, ‘you give me the kids, you can keep everything else.’”

Lynda moved back to New York, where she continued to hear from her husband “all the time, asking for money.” Did she cut him loose? No. Lynda would send him money, even though she knew it would likely end up on drugs. “I was an enabler,” she said, “I was crazy in love him, I was a hopeless romantic fool and wanted to make it work.”

But then came the proverbial straw that broke the equally proverbial camel’s back. It was tax season in April 2007 and Lynda was told that someone had already claimed her children on their tax form. Turns out her husband “had the nerve to claim my kids” even though they were living with her, Lynda said, “So that’s when I finally filed for divorce.”

Is Lynda sad about the situation? To the extent that the marriage didn’t work, I think so, but she seems delighted with the way things are — other than living in New York. She works as an office manager for a media company and it suits her to a tee because she clearly loves being busy. Or, in her words, “I love it like a pig in shit.”

That last comment actually sparked a rather joyful discussion between Lynda and I on our favorite swear words, which includes our debate over what we think the “A” and “C” in AOC Bistro stand for (hint: not nice things). In the interests of keeping this article PG-rated, I’ll decline to write it up. If you really want to read it, e-mail me and it’s all yours, dear reader.

Back to non-bawdy topics. Lynda’s life right now is very busy. She misses the Navy, but is now in her last year of online courses at Kaplan University for a business management degree. She described her daily routine and I think the best way to communicate both her packed schedule and style of speech is simply to quote from the interview audio.

“My schedule is insane, I wake up at five in the morning, I go to the gym, once I get back I get the kids ready for school, I rush to work, everything about my life is rush rush rush rush rush, there’s never a moment where I just get to stroll — even in the way I talk, I speed talk because I feel like time is against me, I feel like I’ve got to say what I have to say now now now now now — so then I take the kids to school, rush to the train station, I stay on the train for an hour, I get off at Grand Central, I go to work from nine to five-thirty non stop, five-thirty I hop on the train, that takes an hour, then I’m home at six-thirty, I’m feeding the kids, I’m bathing the kids, I’m doing homework with them, I read them a bedtime story, nine o’clock to twelve o’clock I’m doing my coursework, then twelve o’clock I go to sleep, if I’m lucky I get four hours of sleep at night, that’s my day, every day for the past three years, it’s fucking exhausting.”

Oh my. Still, she has no desire to change things and despite her dislike of New York Lynda has no plans to move anytime soon. “I want to move but because of my kids I’m going to stay. My youngest has already moved four times in the last five years and that’s not cool.”

Lynda has roughly nine more months of school and she’s determined to graduate even if it solidifies her role as what she called “the black sheep” of the family. “It all goes back to my culture. Asian people aren’t meant to go to the military, you don’t marry a white man, you don’t move 3,000 miles away from your family, you just don’t do that. You go to college, get a job, live at home with mom and dad till you’re 50. But I was the one who wanted to be independent.”

This is the point at which her train of thought was quite literally rudely interrupted by the waitress, who brought out our meal with a side serving of what seemed to us like cold contempt.

Lynda’s club sandwich looked delicious and filling, and she said it was worth the $9 price tag. However, we didn’t really spend a lot of time chatting about the quality of the food.

My steak — or more accurately sirloin burger — was well made and the parsley mashed potato was outstanding. The meal was pretty heavy and sat in my belly like a gym weight, though it was tasty and the potato, egg and steak was an unoriginal but tasty combination. It was also hard to argue with the $10 price tag for what was a large serving of food.

The total price tag for the two dinners, plus a $10 mojito I drank before dinner, came to $37.44 including tip. Not bad for a late-night meal for two in Brooklyn. Then it was time to hand over payment.

Unfortunately, AOC Bistro has a somewhat irritating policy of only accepting cash or American Express. I didn’t have enough dollar bills to cover dinner and I don’t carry American Express — please, American Express, don’t use that as a reason to keep sending letters offering me discount rates and free air miles if I get one of your cards — so Lynda very kindly offered to use her American Express card to pay for dinner.

My dining companion more than adequately made up for the snotty service at the bistro, a place I don’t plan on visiting again. I enjoyed my evening with Lynda. As I said above, conversation flowed easily and she’s the kind of person one feels entirely comfortable talking with about anything. Plus despite the setbacks that could send someone on a downward spiral — constant relocation, drug-using husband — Lynda has taken those negatives and worked hard to turn them into positives.

She said, “Because I married such a douche bag husband I had to learn to do everything myself, from fixing things at home to driving a car. I did my thing. I made some mistakes but I don’t regret any of it. People may say ‘whatever’ but I really mean it.”

Now, to leave you with something a little different, Lynda demanded that we make gangster poses for the camera. Below is the fruit of our one and only effort. Judge for yourself whether we were successful.