I ARRIVED IN New York City on a Friday evening. Ian flew in on Sunday. Danna was also in town for a few days visiting a friend.

The week before we’d arrived, we had no place to stay. Given the difficulty of finding a room in the city for under $200 (and with our budget more around the $20 mark), Ian emailed several hotels along with a couple of bed-and-breakfasts to see if we could stay there in return for a mention on the website. A few responded, expressing interest but no offers. After a couple of days we got an email from Anne, the owner of East Village Bed and Coffee on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She wrote, “I’m totally up for it. Though I don’t want anything in return.” Having owned Bed and Coffee for twenty-two years, she didn’t want any attention that would attract American tourists. According to her, they’re accustomed to more luxurious lodgings and have different expectations.

Her place catered to the European budget-traveler crowd. The rooms were small, each with a décor theme. There was the French Room, the Dutch Room, the Treehouse, the Beach, the Flight Room, and the Zen Room, among others. Each floor had a shared bathroom, a small kitchen, and a living room. It felt more like an apartment than official accommodation. I took the “E.R. Room”—a sofa bed in the downstairs living room that could be enclosed with a hospital curtain at night. Ian stayed above the kitchen in the fort resembling that of Peter Pan’s lost boys, built of rough-hewn wood, with a low ceiling, and accessed by a ladder.

It felt great to be in New York City, with people everywhere and its vibrant character. I couldn’t help but feel alive, as if in the center of it all. The city was an artistic, capitalistic, fashion-conscious, multicultural mélange. We took in the gated grass park for viewing pleasure only, dog pooh in the streets, deadline-driven, walk-when-you-please pedestrians, and met genuinely kind people. It was a seething microcosm of humankind yet had a small-town charm.

For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like I was missing out on something. This was the place to be.

Tuesday afternoon at One Girl Cookies in Brooklyn, an articulate little girl sat in the café enjoying her first bite of a freshly baked apple pie.

“My, the apple pie is particularly good today,” she remarked.

It sure is, I confirmed to myself rather smugly. Kids are tough critics, and this one knew what she was talking about. She was a regular at One Girl Cookies and always had a piece of apple pie when there was a fresh one on the counter. Dave would say the level of “deliciosity” must be quite high to warrant such a remark. I had to agree. But then again, I’d made it.

Dave and his wife, Dawn, are the owners of One Girl Cookies. Dawn is the business brains behind their cookie enterprise, while Dave is the head baker. “We love what we do, but it’s hard work,” said Dawn. “We take our work home with us, so it’s a challenge to balance the business with quality time together. We take only one day off a week. It has been hard to let go of the reins, but we’re working at it.”

Their hard work has paid off, and their gourmet, handmade cookies are well known throughout the city.

This week I worked alongside Dave in the kitchen. I made all sorts of things: pumpkin cookies, pumpkin bread, cupcakes, caramel-fudge-square thingies, and of course, an apple pie. There’s a real creative element to baking. We’d start with a bunch of ingredients that weren’t much by themselves, then we’d mix them in a certain order, shape them, toss them into the oven, and they’d come together to create some tasty goodness. I found there was also a meditative aspect to it, working with my hands, creating, concentrating solely on the task before me.

Dave had fallen into baking almost by accident, then quickly climbed the dough ladder. He started as a bread bagger, then became the muffin man, then the cookie guy, then the head baker. Every task and every day in the bakery offered him a new challenge: how to bake a better cookie, how to further motivate his employees. But mostly, he’s passionate about baking.

“It’s a tangibly satisfying career,” he said. “To come into the bakery each morning with nothing on the shelves, and then when you leave, there’re people in the café eating cakes that we made that day, and there’s forty pounds of cookies flying out the door to some party in downtown Manhattan. I think people want that satisfaction, that feeling that when you leave work, you’ve done something interesting, different, or helped people.”

Dave was a soft-spoken, unassuming, and generally calm guy. I couldn’t imagine him getting upset about a pie knocked to the floor or a spoiled tray of cookies. He appeared always able to put things in perspective.

“When I was looking to go to college, my father said to me, ‘You’ve got to get out of the house.’ He wanted me to go out and experience some different things, to get away. And it doesn’t mean you have to leave your house; that’s just his way of saying ‘Be adventurous, try some things that you want to try.’

“When you’re doing something a little bit different than you’re used to, you challenge yourself. And when you challenge yourself, that’s when you’ll learn the most about yourself.”

On my last day at the bakery, Ian and I boxed up a batch of freshly baked goods, then said goodbye to Dawn and Dave. We hopped onto the subway back into Manhattan and met up with Danna and her friend to explore the city.