September 6
I ring the doorbell at my friend, Margaret's house and use the elevator to get to the sixth floor, remembering that when she was apartment hunting she confessed that she'd count the floors on the outside of the building before even looking at the place because if it had only five floors, she knew that it was not required to have an elevator. She opens the door and after initial hugs she looks at my feet and says, "Are those KEEN shoes?" When I look at my feet to reply, she sticks out her foot and displays her own KEEN shoes. Coincidentally, it turns out that she's had this brand of shoes for several years because of their superior comfort.
It's good to see her though I wonder why I strangely don't feel as sentimental as before. Perhaps it's age or it's inconsequential to me anymore. Her house seems - oddly - exactly the same as when I was here eight years ago and this familiarity is undisturbing. Even though she retired at least five months ago (or is it a year and five months ago?), she's still trekking to her job two or three days a week at about twenty hours a week... While she's working, I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (whose collection of South Asian Art and the Musical Instrument Collection is unfortunately closed down until the next day), The International Center of Photography where there is an exceptional exhibit of photographs of black artists - artists, writers, musicians, civil rights leaders, boxers - too immense to list here, and we both go to the Whitney Museum on Friday night because it is free for two hours. Here we see a showing of the 1967 Summer of Love, basically all posters and memorabilia from that era shown with one feature which, as you stand in the room and move about, it repeats your performance until you move again. The "Black Light" room took me back to a 1968 performance of her ex-husband's band which was "freaky" but without the music. We go downtown and eat at an Indian restaurant in a block in the Village that had no Indian eating places when I lived in NYC...
One of the last days we spent together, we took a trip downtown to Columbus Circle, which used to be a circle out in the middle of (I think) 6th Ave and 59th St. where you could not stop in and was hard to cross to the other side of the street. Now, it's got a brand new fountain with wooden benches and across the street, there is a structure of buildings (the Time Warner Buildings) with stores in it just like those in the Embarcadero in San Francisco (Williams Sonoma, L'Occidente , Bebe, Coach, etc.) Obsequious capitalism. Margaret took me down to see the new Whole Earth Foods in the basement, which is larger, probably, than any of those I've seen in California. If you have less than ten items, they direct you to a line which has about twenty cashiers for less than ten items (the number's inconsequential) so that you get out more quickly. So, when he rang us up, the cashier asked, "Twins?" We both, taken aback, said "No!" at the same time and then she explained that we grew up together. We went home and I cooked the beets we had bought that morning at the "green" market in her neighborhood and made a salad with them and the beet-greens.
Also, sometime during my stay we attempted to see a new, Indian movie called "Vanaja," but the movie theater's air conditioning was not working. It might have been interesting to see because it was made somewhere in Southern India where I am heading.
I leave on the 13th of September for Paris from Newark Airport...
I ring the doorbell at my friend, Margaret's house and use the elevator to get to the sixth floor, remembering that when she was apartment hunting she confessed that she'd count the floors on the outside of the building before even looking at the place because if it had only five floors, she knew that it was not required to have an elevator. She opens the door and after initial hugs she looks at my feet and says, "Are those KEEN shoes?" When I look at my feet to reply, she sticks out her foot and displays her own KEEN shoes. Coincidentally, it turns out that she's had this brand of shoes for several years because of their superior comfort.
It's good to see her though I wonder why I strangely don't feel as sentimental as before. Perhaps it's age or it's inconsequential to me anymore. Her house seems - oddly - exactly the same as when I was here eight years ago and this familiarity is undisturbing. Even though she retired at least five months ago (or is it a year and five months ago?), she's still trekking to her job two or three days a week at about twenty hours a week... While she's working, I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (whose collection of South Asian Art and the Musical Instrument Collection is unfortunately closed down until the next day), The International Center of Photography where there is an exceptional exhibit of photographs of black artists - artists, writers, musicians, civil rights leaders, boxers - too immense to list here, and we both go to the Whitney Museum on Friday night because it is free for two hours. Here we see a showing of the 1967 Summer of Love, basically all posters and memorabilia from that era shown with one feature which, as you stand in the room and move about, it repeats your performance until you move again. The "Black Light" room took me back to a 1968 performance of her ex-husband's band which was "freaky" but without the music. We go downtown and eat at an Indian restaurant in a block in the Village that had no Indian eating places when I lived in NYC...
One of the last days we spent together, we took a trip downtown to Columbus Circle, which used to be a circle out in the middle of (I think) 6th Ave and 59th St. where you could not stop in and was hard to cross to the other side of the street. Now, it's got a brand new fountain with wooden benches and across the street, there is a structure of buildings (the Time Warner Buildings) with stores in it just like those in the Embarcadero in San Francisco (Williams Sonoma, L'Occidente , Bebe, Coach, etc.) Obsequious capitalism. Margaret took me down to see the new Whole Earth Foods in the basement, which is larger, probably, than any of those I've seen in California. If you have less than ten items, they direct you to a line which has about twenty cashiers for less than ten items (the number's inconsequential) so that you get out more quickly. So, when he rang us up, the cashier asked, "Twins?" We both, taken aback, said "No!" at the same time and then she explained that we grew up together. We went home and I cooked the beets we had bought that morning at the "green" market in her neighborhood and made a salad with them and the beet-greens.
Also, sometime during my stay we attempted to see a new, Indian movie called "Vanaja," but the movie theater's air conditioning was not working. It might have been interesting to see because it was made somewhere in Southern India where I am heading.
I leave on the 13th of September for Paris from Newark Airport...
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