NYC, The Rest of the Story

(I'm just cramming the rest of my NY trip into one long post. Set aside a minute for this. Or don't- your choice.) Friday...after an unexpected but lovely sleep in and some tasty oatmeal, we boarded the subway for another day in Manhattan. I should mention that although the first day was surprisingly warm, the second day was not just surprisingly cold in comparison, but surprisingly, health-threateningly cold, (my Minnesota-thickened blood has thinned down after just one winter away!), with a brutal wind. We braved the temperature (along with a huge mob of other teeth-chattering merry-makers) to admire the Christmas display windows outside of Macy's. Then it was off to H&M for a cold weather shopping spree. Liv got a winter coat for $50, I a terribly cute hat for $10 (we had one good day together, the hat and I, until I lost it somehow that night between the coat check at the Met and the subway ride home). Our wardrobe sufficiently bulked up, we headed toward Bryant Park, which not only had a cute ice skating rink and a little Christmas market (full of really, really devoted merchants, who probably each lost a toe or more to frostbite that day), but also is directly behind the gorgeously amazing New York Public Library. The lobby of the library was beautifully decorated for Christmas, as was, curiously, only about half of the grand light fixtures in the reading room.


After the library, we shivered our way to Grand Central Station for an admiring look around and lunch in the dining concourse. Afterwards, off to the gallery on Madison Avenue where Liv's friend D. works. The gallery is a single small room, covered floor to ceiling with frames. In each of the hundreds of frames is a photo or drawing of a famous person (famous enough where there was no one I didn't recognize), and framed in the same mat, some document that the person had written or signed. My favorite was a simple typed letter, presumably in response to some exuberant fan mail. "Dear Sir," it read, "Thank you for your enthusiasm. Sincerely, Katharine Hepburn." There was a letter written by Winston Churchill, a full page and a half, to a man who was procuring faucets of some kind of him. The last line says "I would not shrink from using (whatever variety) of faucets." Hee! If I had a great deal more money than I do, I would have brought home for Jim the original decree confirming certain land grants that had been made to the Knights Templar. And D. showed us a page of musical manuscript with a few notes on it, written by Mozart. Apparently when Mozart died, there was a scene similar to something out of the movie, a room with pages and pages of musical manuscript strewn about, and whenever another bill came due, Mozart's son or someone would sell a few pages to hungry collectors to settle the debt. This page, with its few little notes? $175,000.


Liv and I headed next to Central Park. Did I mention how cold it was? There was a handful of truly intrepid New Yorkers strolling briskly, and even a group of kids playing soccer. But I had my fill of Central Park, regrettably, after ten or fifteen minutes. Fortunately, our next target, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was in sight. We had cake and scalding hot tea in the American Wing Cafe, saw the Chinese art, including some calligraphy scrolls that were amazing not only in the obvious variety of styles, but also in the explanations for why these style variations were so significant. One big set of scrolls from the 1400s were a gift from the artist to his friend, and he jokes in the writing about how his friend's habit of heavy drinking can be considered a form of political protest. As is, ahem, mine. Somehow. We also saw the incredible Temple of Dendur, strikingly displayed in a specially built wing and carrying its own history of political intrigue. It's also covered with the graffiti of British and American tourists from the early 1800s. Quite the human drive, to leave one's mark, it seems.


Every Friday night at the Met, they place tables around the second floor balcony of the great hall and open a little wine bar, complete with a string trio. Here we met up with D. for cocktails and several small bowls of the free snack, olives, which, there in the heady surroundings of the Met, seemed to me for the first time ever to be a tasty and agreeable food. After drinks, it was back to the museum for a tour of the medieval faces exhibit and a quick breeze through some of the painting galleries. D. pointed out the Drue Heinz gallery, funded by the ex-husband of John Kerry's glamorous campaign-bankrolling wife. I particularly liked a Vermeer I had never seem before, of a woman dozing at her table. Liv particularly enjoyed showing off her knowledge of ancient buildings by pointing out which paintings of classical scenes were anachronistic in their inclusion of some arch or column that was actually constructed one or two hundred years after the event. D. told us which of the medieval heads she and her colleagues had picked as likely fakes. Sometimes you just need to know who to go to the museum with.

After some engrossing subway dish on a wealthy book collector D. had dealings with, we parted ways so Liv and I could get a train back to Brooklyn. We stopped off at a very nice little restaurant for Mediterranean food, where I continued my unbroken streak of eating moussaka that just isn't very hot (though it was certainly tasty). We finally returned to Liv's apartment, where I had a short but glorious fantasy that she was roommates with the Chinese foot rub guy. Oh well. Off to a sleep well-earned.


Saturday, we walked to a Brooklyn neighborhood called Cortellyou Road for brunch with Liv's lovely friends Luke and Willow. The restaurant was called "The Farm on Adderly," and according to the owner, this referenced a funny South African saying one uses when referring to a something that is a long shot, as in, if that works, I'll buy you a farm on Adderly. Ok? Ok. The brunch was tasty and everyone but me seemed to have a crush on the owner. Afterwards, Liv graciously agreed to let me lie around for a while, and I treated myself to a rare nap. When it was ended by a call from an old grad school friend I had been trying to see, who gave his regrets that it probably wasn't going to work out, as well as a little disappointment in my clumsy failure thus far to adopt "texting." Whatever.


We got our coats back on, headed back to the subway, and rejoined the fray in Manhattan once more. First we hit a flea market that sets up each weekend in a mercifully heated parking garage. There we saw many interesting things, but the most interesting by far was...the same kooky little old lady from the kitchen shop, using her same bargaining wiles, such as they were, on the flea market vendors. I don't need to tell you, there are a LOT of people in Manhattan. And there is a lot of Manhattan, for that matter. Nevertheless, we found her. It was a little piece of weird NY magic. After the flea market, we went to an architectural salvage place with amazing huge light fixtures and staircase bannisters and fire places that have been saved from demolition, as well as the usual assortment of ten zillion doorknobs and hinges and whatnot. Neat!


We needed to find some dinner, and after blocks and blocks of fruitless searching, we stopped at an "Irish Pub" and decided to just brave whatever was inside. If you find yourself in an Irish pub in NY that is brightly lit, crammed with tourists, decorated by the good people at Denny's, and staffed by a depressive Irish waitress whose Paxil prescription has run out and whose benefits have not kicked in yet, friends, you are not as hungry as you think you are. Take my advice, wander a few more blocks, and settle on something else. Learn from my mistake.
My next piece of advice: Stay out of Macy's at the holidays. Maybe even all year round? But for sure at the holidays. It's worth it to go to Macy's to see the fantastic window displays, but do not be tempted, even by the promise of the famous wooden escalators, to go inside. Because first of all, it is a crazy mob scene. And second of all, it's just a Macy's. You want it to be all historic and graceful and marvelous, but it's not. On the scale of Macy's' I have known, it ranks between ratty and decent, with both extra points and demerits for having so many floors (demerits because when one of those famous wooden escalators stops working, the ten thousand people who are trying to go down them at the same time start to pile up tremendously between floors six and seven).


After struggling through the sweaty masses at Macy's, it was time to hit the subway again for a trip to Harlem to attend a party at Liv's friend's apartment. She had a wonderful view of the city, but no elevator, so I found the good-sized Christmas tree in her apartment all the more impressive and festive when I learned that she had carried the thing up the six flights of stairs herself. I ate too much cheese and crackers, and too many cookies, as well as fulfilling my big party fear of saying something...stupid.
Girl I don't Know: I am so jealous of this big fridge!
Me: Oh? Do you have a small one?
Girl: I have this tiny studio in Chelsea, so my fridge is the kind that fits under the counter, with the tiny freezer that doesn't freeze anything.
Me: Where you, like, can't even fit a ben and jerry's in there?
Girl: Exactly.
Me: Huh. I live in Washington. State? And, uh, I have a pretty big refrigerator.
Girl: (Walks out of the kitchen).


Ah, parties. Back on subway, change to other subway, walk past OTB and storefront church, back to apartment, throw up party food, bad fish and chips, go to bed.

The next day, Liv had terrible news- her tutor, mentor, and friend from Oxford had passed away. We talked about it for a while; she had been planning a book and a conference in his honor, and fortunately had told him about it just a few months before. Isn't it great when you don't miss the chance to say something important to someone who is important to you? Anyway, then I had to get into the town car for the long ride back to La Guardia. The driver, in a barely intelligible (to my untrained ears) Carribbean accent, chided me two or three times for not being more talkative. Which seems like a weird thing to get in trouble for with a town car driver. I had time to get a ben and jerry's cone in the Minneapolis airport (though my preference would have been for someone to meet me at the airport with a Byerly's Killer Brownie). The highlight of my travel day was seeing Jim and Naomi waiting for me by the baggage claim, and seeing the crazy-ass outfit that Jim had put our innocent toddler in. I should have taken a picture of that!

That was my trip. What did I learn? I am not the tireless young traveller I once was, but it still felt great to be in an amazing new place, soaking up the sights and sounds and (subway) smells. Best of all, of course, was catching up with Liv, who appears to be rapidly aging in reverse, and despite recent stresses, has her life beautifully put together. Shout out to Liv! NY agrees with you, sister. Thanks for a wonderful visit.