Grace Brown: From Law to Cake

Vol. I, No. 9

Well, this really takes the cake. And for this post, I'm going to need to interrupt the story about leaving New York to follow my husband's dream to move to New Zealand. There's a lot to tell about the in between - in particular, an adventure into China with our baby girl! But for now...

Cake!

Bernie's on the Bay, Wellington

When we first arrived in New Zealand, I was intrigued by the number of signs around Wellington, the country's capital, that advertised dreams. Dreams, dream-following, passion, adventure, and so on. A sign posted outside Bernie's on the Bay cafe stated, "Bernie's: FREE admission to those who dream." Or an ad for Victoria University: "Know what you stand for. Know where your passions lie. Know your next move." My favorite was an entirely improbable ad for getting a mortgage, of all things: "Are you still living someone else's dream?" The last time I cross-referenced following a dream and mortgage debt was...never. Having written and covered stories of dream-following for all these years, a part of me felt a little bit right-at-home when I saw these signs and sentiments. 

But back to cake! 

So one Sunday morning, just after we'd arrived in New Zealand, I opened The Dominion Post, the local paper here, to find a front-page feature story on none other than someone following a dream...

Grace Brown was an attorney working at a Wellington law firm. When she got engaged, she and her fiance moved moved to London for a time. It was then that she decided to pursue her dream to bake. She'd been baking with her grandmother since she was a kid, and it was her grandmother who taught her how to say "cake" when she was just a tot. As Grace told The Dominion Post, "Being a lawyer was satisfying, but it never really lit my fire. I was much more excited by the cakes and cupcakes I made for my colleagues' birthdays..."

Well, practice had made perfect and Grace ended up landing a job at one of Britain's most famous bakeries, turning out bespoke cupcakes for the likes of Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing. She worked at Crumbs & Doilies for a year, and then moved back to Wellington. Recently, she opened up her own bakery, "Sweet Bakery & Cakery."When Grace and I met earlier this week, she had just taken another leap: she'd signed a lease for her very own baking space. And in order to afford it, she had to move back in with her parents.

So what gave Grace the courage to pursue her dream? Well, as she told me this morning, Grace and her fiance "strongly believe happiness is more important than money, and I never would have found that being a lawyer." She added that she "just doesn't really see another option - it's what I'm meant to be doing, and I have to make it happen."

Grace Brown's dream-following adventurous "suit-cake"

Well, obviously, I had to give Grace a tall order. I wanted a cake for my little girl's first birthday. I told Grace it had to represent following dreams, adventure, and all the places the baby has traveled or will soon travel. Grace asked me to give her a day to think, and called me promptly a day later. "How about a suitcase?" she said. "With luggage stickers and a baggage tag?"

I was speechless, and here's why (pictured right). I mean, check out the stitching! And the "suit-cake's" edges that look straight out of Louis Vuitton! And the heart-shaped Mongolian flag! And the luggage tag! And the chocolate luggage handle (which my little girl promptly ripped off and stuffed, whole, into her mouth).

If you're in New Zealand and you're in the market for a cake that will knock your socks off, or you just want to follow the progress of someone following her dream, you can contact Grace via http://www.sweetbakery.co.nz or follow her on Facebook. 

-Patricia Sexton is the author of "LIVE from Mongolia!", the true story of a woman chucking in her Wall Street career to follow her dream to become anchor of the Mongolian news. Her book will be published by Beaufort Books in October, 2013. Follow her on Twitter and on Facebook. 

Following Someone Else's Dream: The Beginning

Vol. II, No. 1

"My dream," he said, "is to one day go back home to New Zealand."

I shuddered.

Three months earlier, I'd met him. For the first time in my life, I'd experienced love at first sight. And despite all the odds* stacked against our long-distance, overseas relationship, we were becoming we. So when he moved to New York from London so that we could be together, he didn't even bother to finish unpacking before he told me we needed to talk. Hand in hand, and mostly in uncomfortable silence, we walked in the summer afternoon to that old triangle-shaped Italian restaurant in the West Village of Manhattan. There, gravely, he told me what he had to tell me, and then he asked cautiously:

"So what do you think? One day? Could you leave New York?"

At first, I didn't say anything. Maybe it shouldn't have been such a big deal to hear that, but for me it was. And I knew he could tell it was going to be a big deal. I'd already told him that I was living my dream, that ever since I'd been a kid in Cincinnati, I'd wanted nothing more than to live in New York City. As a kid, I'd watch the financial news, delivered by Tom Brokaw on the 6:30 broadcast, and swear one day I'd work on the "Doe Jones stock market."And, sorta anyway, I did.

Arriving Auckland airport, June 2013

"But I love New York," I'd said to him at the restaurant, adding that I'd think about it. I'd never been to New Zealand, but that wasn't the point. The point was that I was living my dream, and I'd made a lot of sacrifices to do so.

So, what do you do when two dreams seem mutually exclusive? Whose do you choose? How do you even know if they're mutually exclusive? Can a dream, a path, change? Should it?

And there's the rub: "Should it? Should you change your dream?" That was a question I spent five years asking, and have never once come any closer to answering. I mean, if you're really meant for something, isn't it just a little bit wrong to get intoxicated on the elixir of love? Aren't you diverging your own path, where perhaps you were not meant to? Aren't you giving up...on yourself?

For the next five years since we met in 2008, I pondered these and all the other questions. Then, one day a few months ago, we did move - he and I and our little baby girl - from New York to New Zealand. It wasn't that I'd answered all those questions, quite the opposite. It was that it was time for both of us to take a leap of faith - he to finally follow his dream, I to experience the odyssey of changing my own path.

There will be more to come as I continue to write about this subject - from New Zealand.

*We met at The Sevens in Hong Kong. If you've ever been to The Sevens, you know the odds are about a kajillion to one that you'll ever hear from, let alone recognize, the person you took a liking to in the South Stand.

-Patricia Sexton is the author of "LIVE from Mongolia!", the true story of a woman chucking in her Wall Street career to follow her dream to become anchor of the Mongolian news. Her book will be published by Beaufort Books in October, 2013. Follow her on Twitter at "LIVE from Mongolia!"and on Facebook at

Why I've Hesitated to Leave New York City

For the first time, I've hesitated to leave New York. I've left this city before, but I've never really looked backward as I went. Suddenly, all the memories, those indelible markers of a time gone by, have become vivid as if they're all happening simultaneously, presently. It's become clear that what I'd thought was maybe just a little forgettable was anything but.

Somewhat belatedly, I suppose I've realized that I haven't actually fallen out of love with New York, despite what I've told myself. From the moment my husband and I had discussed leaving - leaving for good - I'd convinced myself that New York and I were done. That I was sick of the noise, the crowds, the air that smells always of a dirty brown color. I'd convinced myself that I was finally ready for a long-distance relationship with the city I'd fallen in love with as a little kid growing up in Cincinnati.

But, today, the memories keep pulling me back, though I'm already gone.

Sunrise over Dumbo, Brooklyn

There was that first apartment in the big city with Lisa. I was twenty-two years young then and living on Park Avenue, working on Wall Street. I'd never worked so hard to make it to a place, and with Lisa, I felt like I'd arrived. I was so broke during those early days that I quietly helped myself to the leftovers she brought home from her job at Le Cirque, and that very hot summer of 1997 I dressed in front of the freezer because I couldn't afford to buy an air-conditioning unit.

Then there were George and Mike. Mike and Lisa and George and I tried to double-date, but where Mike and Lisa would briefly succeed, George and I would spend the better part of a decade in a When-Harry-Met-Sally friendship, always discussing the "What if", but never quite certain enough to actually explore it. All those years later, when George died suddenly, I'll never forget how New York rained and rained and rained. The city was colored perpetually gray then, and there was no way out of how devastated we all were.

For a while there, I'd even left New York. I'd lived in Asia and London. Now and again, I'd come home on business trips and being back in the city always felt, well, obvious, the way it feels to pull on a weathered old leather jacket that you've owned for so long you can't remember when and where you bought it. There were midnight slices of pie, surly bartenders with waxed moustaches calling themselves mixologists, and nights at home staring from my apartment to the city spread out below me and in front of me. There was that sense that anything was possible, and every conversation I had seemed to reflect just that. That's the sort of dialogue that takes place in New York City, a place where people come to make their dreams come true. I, however, had to leave to make my dreams come true.

So when I did come home, one last time supposedly for good, there were Christina and Katie and Hebe, who made me feel like I'd never left at all. They offered me exactly what New York offered me: the feeling of being home.

Of course, there were also new friends who quickly became old friends. Netta sat with me in the East Village the night before I'd briefly leave the city once again to follow a dream I'd been grappling with for many years. Together, we spun round and round on the giant sculpture in Astor Place, talking through just one more time what it meant to leave everything behind to follow a dream. Years later, Sonia and I would do the same. Despite the years in between the two friendships, the conversation was no different: what does it take, really, to leave all this behind?

And it was Meghan who answered. Meghan had said, presciently, many years earlier during a snowy night, a magical evening in an incandescent city blanketed in white, that, "If you stay here in New York, only one thing can happen. But if you go follow your dream, anything can happen." And so the going began again.

Manhattan Bridge, from Abhaya Yoga 

And the going-again took me to everywhere: Africa, Mongolia, North Korea, Tibet, Nepal. But the coming home was secretly my favorite part. Every October, I'd do my best to make sure I was home in New York. Every October, I'd find a cigarette, a single cigarette, and make my way to 9th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues and sit in the dusk on someone's stoop and light up. For a while there, it was my stoop. Later, it was someone else's, but it would always be my block. My block in my town in the crisp October air, street lamps twinkling a backdrop to whatever I was thinking at the time.

After a while though, I stopped noticing these things. I'd simply forgotten that I loved New York. I began to take my home for granted, grumbling about the noise, the crowds, and the air that smelled always of a dirty brown color. Besides, I'd fallen in love with someone else, with a man, in that spectacular way you do when you walk down an aisle and bring a baby into the world. Without thinking, I'd let go of New York. I'd said goodbye long before that day this week when I boarded an airplane and watched, one last time, as we taxied away from Manhattan.

Now I'm on the road, pondering all those moments in between. Wondering precisely when I'll return home. Knowing, really though, that home is about to be somewhere else, somewhere new, with its own set of moments in between.

I'll be blogging from the road, probably a tad less nostalgically?, in the weeks to come. First stop is Loveland, OH. Then China, Mongolia, and ultimately...New Zealand! Join me for the journey by liking "LIVE from Mongolia" on Facebook.

-Patricia Sexton is the author of "LIVE from Mongolia!", the true story of a woman chucking in her Wall Street career to follow her dream to become anchor of the Mongolian news. Her book will be published by Beaufort Books in the fall of 2013. Follow her on Twitter at "LIVE from Mongolia!"