One Day, Three Meals, Two Old Friends, and 40 New Ones
It started on Tuesday morning. I woke in DC to 1.25 inches of thick ice coating everything. The ice was so thick on my windshield that I broke two prongs off my ice scraper trying to make the car drivable. I scratched a little view hole in the front, a little view hole in the back, and drove to Union Station with the windows open so I could see out the sides. I left the car at Union Station still all covered in ice. I hoped it would melt.
I met my colleague in Penn Station in NY and we were dismayed to find the rain pouring down outside. We went to the taxi line. The powers that be have removed our favorite "secret" taxi line on 33rd Street that had a nice plastic covering. Now the only taxi lines are on 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue in the open, no protection from the weather. And they are long lines. We had no choice but to go stand out in the pouring rain. We just stood there, getting very very wet. There was nothing to do. My colleague was wearing heels and stockings and she was very miserable. I was wearing knee high boots but I was still very miserable. Our hair flattened and began to drip. We looked at each other, grimly. I said, "I can't really believe this. Doesn't it seem like someone should have done something about this by now? This must happen all the time." My colleague agreed. "Yes. How can they let us just stand out here in the rain. It rains all the time in NYC." I said, "where are the station employees or something who would fix this? Where are the little men." We continued to stand glumly in silence.
By the time we got to our client we were utterly and completely soaked and frankly, we looked horrible. Four hours later we were done with out witness and we went back outside on the street and….stood in the rain again. We had ordered a car but it had not arrived. I refused to walk to my hotel in the rain. My colleague refused to do anything in the rain. Stasis. By the time I did get to my hotel, I was again totally soaked.
But my hotel was a marvel! It has only been open one month in NYC and it was absolutely splendiferous -- I got a nice guided tour of my room which included a huge bathroom mirror with a flat screen TV embedded in it that you didn't see at all until it turned on. The bedroom had a 3D TV which was a little weird. I was very very happy. Not only that, but I had failed to pack sleeping gear so I walked to Macy's to find they were having a 40 percent off pajama sale. Hooray! Brand new fabulous pajamas in my fabulous hotel room. I was much happier than my colleague who was still trying to get back to DC in the ice and rain.
The next day it was still raining but I did not mind. I had a long lovely breakfast with a very old college friend in my hotel -- in a vast, shiny restaurant with windows overlooking Fifth Avenue. It is very rare for NY hotels to have restaurants with windows. We had a fabulous time. I ate buttermilk pancakes and she had salmon eggs benedict and we gabbed away about everything from the new generation's relationship with feminism to our changing relationship to work as we enter our 40s. She told me that our favorite Cuban restaurant up at school had closed. This depressed me tremendously. I stared at her agog. "No more La Rosita's?" No. "What do people at Columbia eat, then?!" We ate mounds of toast and drank pots of coffee. The staff was fabulous. We stayed until almost 11.
Then I hiked 20 blocks up town (in the drizzly rain) to have lunch with an old law school friend. He emerged from his office building and said, "you look the same." I said, "so do you." This friend of mine and I had studied for the bar together after law school and our routine then had been go to Bar Bri class, eat lunch at a Chinese restaurant, go to a Barnes & Noble and study the rest of the afternoon, have dinner at a Chinese restaurant, play tennis at night because it was too hot in NC to play tennis during the day, then we'd jump in the pool around 11 or midnight, cool off, then start all over the next day. So there we are standing on Park Avenue in the rain and he says, "what do you want for lunch? Chinese?" " Of course," I said.
So we dawdled over lunch until 3 p.m. -- talking about our changing relationship to work as we enter our 40s and the struggle to find time to do thinks for fun. Also, the odd professionalism of the younger generation. My friend's version -- "So, you see all this stuff here that you did?" "Yes," says the minion. "Well, it's wrong. All of it." "Uh-huh," says the minion. "So, you need to go do it all over again. But correctly." "Okay!" says the minion. My friend scratches his head. "Where's the shame?" I say. We nod sagely. He talks about all the neighborhoods around NY and how he doesn't feel like he fits in to any of them but has to live in certain places for his kids' schools. "Those people aren't like us, Kim." "I suppose not," I say. "Where are the people like us?" he says. "I don't know -- what are people like us called?" "I don't know." Sigh. So we talk instead about books and painting and we practice speaking Chinese to each other and then we leave and go get big mugs of tea and walk around in the rain and then it's time to be done with lunch.
I walk the 20 blocks back to my hotel and on the way I visit the renovated Morgan Library. This is a fabulous institution -- Pierpont Morgan's library and his annex and his art collection. The building is fabulous. His library has 14,000 rare books and you can stand in the library and look at them. I saw several editions of Bleak House, the collected works of Stendhal, all of Thackeray, etc. He also has a Gutenberg Bible and one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence. And he has original manuscripts by Bach and Chopin and the original galley edits of John Milton and original Babar the Elephant drawings and a huge collection of children's book illustrations and Degas prints and all sorts of eclectic lovely things. He has a folio version of Chaucer open to "Whan that apprill with the showres sought…." I intoned it quietly to myself and people thought maybe I was the little crazy lady in the wet coat and the flat hair. He has beautiful botanicals of a scientific expedition to the Caribbean circa the time of Sir Francis Drake.
His study is magnificent and is an excellent model for every library that people nowadays paint in "Library Red." Morgan's red though is original Venetian silk damask paper with a lily and mountain design. His coffered ceiling was shipped piece by piece from Venice in a boat. His desk was built by hand for him in London. The glass in the windows were gathered in bits and pieces from mountain sides in Italy somewhere.
I love the Morgan library. I went to the Morgan Library book shop and bought several postcards of hilarious children's illustrations, including the famous etching of Rudyard Kipling's elephant getting his trunk stretched out by the crocodile in the Great Grey Green Greasy Limpopo River All Set About with Fever Trees. Also a lovely painting of the owl and the pussycat sitting together in a boat, clearly mightily irritated with one another. And a girl giraffe saying to a boy giraffe, "I've had it up to HERE with you!" And a big sign that says, "Stop and Think" and two New Yorker characters standing in front of it saying, "It kind of makes you Stop and Think, doesn't it….?" And a set of cards that say Happy Holidays and depict a table at which the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, The Statute of Liberty, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and a Hallowe'en Witch are all seated, with a plumb turkey walking in front of them.
Then I walked 20 blocks back up town to a dinner with 40 people I had never met and who turned out to be riotously funny. It was a dinner to celebrate the fact that one client of mine had purchased another client of mine. The two CEOs were there and they were hysterical. The BDO Siedman guys were there, including James the Italian Accountant from Brooklyn, who was hilarious. And a baby lawyer who worked on the corporate side who was hilarious and turned out to be in the same bowling league with James the Accountant. And two amiable chemists who turned out to know all about my Great Uncle Tom's discovery of colorfast dye for nylon, which was tres helpful during WWII what with all those camouflaged parachutes and all. And they had all grown up in Flushing, too, how funny. And the head deal lawyer is a semi-professional show jumper on the side so we traded pictures of our respective horses and I told everyone that men who show jump are kind of like professional ice skaters -- you know, not really that manly -- where people who foxhunt are like Bode Miller and Peekabo Street and other extreme skiers. You can imagine how that went over. And Doug the CFO who was so jealous of our table (which was the best table) that he and one of the CEOs crashed it during the dessert course. The CEO kicked James the Accountant out of his chair and drank his coffee and ate his cake, all with great gusto. Doug the CFO switched his entrée with my entrée and so I sat with the other CEO and learned he was tragically unhappy and had no friends and not time to read or paint or do anything fun….so I reprised my conversation with my law school buddy and voila -- CEO number 2 was so happy he drove me home to my hotel and bought me a ginormous bottle of Carbernet. One of the corporate guys decided I was so funny that I should move to NY and go on stage. I am pretty funny some times.
The next day, as I trained home to DC, James the Accountant and the Baby Lawyer and the CFO and CEO number 1 and CEO number 2 and I all decided on email that we need to go neon bowling the next time I'm in NY. I'm thinking of bringing my law school friend along for kicks and giggles and to prove that making 40 new friends in one night isn't that hard after all -- it just means that every now and then you have to not go home to Scarsdale.
Because it turns he will never find the "people like us" that he is looking for in Scarsdale -- we are not in Scarsdale. We are in fancy hotels and the renovated Morgan Library and cozy NYC Chinese restaurants and at raucous, gregarious financial dinners and on horseback careening around the countryside.
At least that's my perspective.
I haven't written about a trip to NY recently because trips to NY have been so frequent in the last 5 years that they don't really qualify as "trips" and would be stunningly dull to write about. But my trip this week was entertaining enough to warrant a write up.
I met my colleague in Penn Station in NY and we were dismayed to find the rain pouring down outside. We went to the taxi line. The powers that be have removed our favorite "secret" taxi line on 33rd Street that had a nice plastic covering. Now the only taxi lines are on 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue in the open, no protection from the weather. And they are long lines. We had no choice but to go stand out in the pouring rain. We just stood there, getting very very wet. There was nothing to do. My colleague was wearing heels and stockings and she was very miserable. I was wearing knee high boots but I was still very miserable. Our hair flattened and began to drip. We looked at each other, grimly. I said, "I can't really believe this. Doesn't it seem like someone should have done something about this by now? This must happen all the time." My colleague agreed. "Yes. How can they let us just stand out here in the rain. It rains all the time in NYC." I said, "where are the station employees or something who would fix this? Where are the little men." We continued to stand glumly in silence.
By the time we got to our client we were utterly and completely soaked and frankly, we looked horrible. Four hours later we were done with out witness and we went back outside on the street and….stood in the rain again. We had ordered a car but it had not arrived. I refused to walk to my hotel in the rain. My colleague refused to do anything in the rain. Stasis. By the time I did get to my hotel, I was again totally soaked.
But my hotel was a marvel! It has only been open one month in NYC and it was absolutely splendiferous -- I got a nice guided tour of my room which included a huge bathroom mirror with a flat screen TV embedded in it that you didn't see at all until it turned on. The bedroom had a 3D TV which was a little weird. I was very very happy. Not only that, but I had failed to pack sleeping gear so I walked to Macy's to find they were having a 40 percent off pajama sale. Hooray! Brand new fabulous pajamas in my fabulous hotel room. I was much happier than my colleague who was still trying to get back to DC in the ice and rain.
The next day it was still raining but I did not mind. I had a long lovely breakfast with a very old college friend in my hotel -- in a vast, shiny restaurant with windows overlooking Fifth Avenue. It is very rare for NY hotels to have restaurants with windows. We had a fabulous time. I ate buttermilk pancakes and she had salmon eggs benedict and we gabbed away about everything from the new generation's relationship with feminism to our changing relationship to work as we enter our 40s. She told me that our favorite Cuban restaurant up at school had closed. This depressed me tremendously. I stared at her agog. "No more La Rosita's?" No. "What do people at Columbia eat, then?!" We ate mounds of toast and drank pots of coffee. The staff was fabulous. We stayed until almost 11.
Then I hiked 20 blocks up town (in the drizzly rain) to have lunch with an old law school friend. He emerged from his office building and said, "you look the same." I said, "so do you." This friend of mine and I had studied for the bar together after law school and our routine then had been go to Bar Bri class, eat lunch at a Chinese restaurant, go to a Barnes & Noble and study the rest of the afternoon, have dinner at a Chinese restaurant, play tennis at night because it was too hot in NC to play tennis during the day, then we'd jump in the pool around 11 or midnight, cool off, then start all over the next day. So there we are standing on Park Avenue in the rain and he says, "what do you want for lunch? Chinese?" " Of course," I said.
So we dawdled over lunch until 3 p.m. -- talking about our changing relationship to work as we enter our 40s and the struggle to find time to do thinks for fun. Also, the odd professionalism of the younger generation. My friend's version -- "So, you see all this stuff here that you did?" "Yes," says the minion. "Well, it's wrong. All of it." "Uh-huh," says the minion. "So, you need to go do it all over again. But correctly." "Okay!" says the minion. My friend scratches his head. "Where's the shame?" I say. We nod sagely. He talks about all the neighborhoods around NY and how he doesn't feel like he fits in to any of them but has to live in certain places for his kids' schools. "Those people aren't like us, Kim." "I suppose not," I say. "Where are the people like us?" he says. "I don't know -- what are people like us called?" "I don't know." Sigh. So we talk instead about books and painting and we practice speaking Chinese to each other and then we leave and go get big mugs of tea and walk around in the rain and then it's time to be done with lunch.
I walk the 20 blocks back to my hotel and on the way I visit the renovated Morgan Library. This is a fabulous institution -- Pierpont Morgan's library and his annex and his art collection. The building is fabulous. His library has 14,000 rare books and you can stand in the library and look at them. I saw several editions of Bleak House, the collected works of Stendhal, all of Thackeray, etc. He also has a Gutenberg Bible and one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence. And he has original manuscripts by Bach and Chopin and the original galley edits of John Milton and original Babar the Elephant drawings and a huge collection of children's book illustrations and Degas prints and all sorts of eclectic lovely things. He has a folio version of Chaucer open to "Whan that apprill with the showres sought…." I intoned it quietly to myself and people thought maybe I was the little crazy lady in the wet coat and the flat hair. He has beautiful botanicals of a scientific expedition to the Caribbean circa the time of Sir Francis Drake.
His study is magnificent and is an excellent model for every library that people nowadays paint in "Library Red." Morgan's red though is original Venetian silk damask paper with a lily and mountain design. His coffered ceiling was shipped piece by piece from Venice in a boat. His desk was built by hand for him in London. The glass in the windows were gathered in bits and pieces from mountain sides in Italy somewhere.
I love the Morgan library. I went to the Morgan Library book shop and bought several postcards of hilarious children's illustrations, including the famous etching of Rudyard Kipling's elephant getting his trunk stretched out by the crocodile in the Great Grey Green Greasy Limpopo River All Set About with Fever Trees. Also a lovely painting of the owl and the pussycat sitting together in a boat, clearly mightily irritated with one another. And a girl giraffe saying to a boy giraffe, "I've had it up to HERE with you!" And a big sign that says, "Stop and Think" and two New Yorker characters standing in front of it saying, "It kind of makes you Stop and Think, doesn't it….?" And a set of cards that say Happy Holidays and depict a table at which the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, The Statute of Liberty, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and a Hallowe'en Witch are all seated, with a plumb turkey walking in front of them.
Then I walked 20 blocks back up town to a dinner with 40 people I had never met and who turned out to be riotously funny. It was a dinner to celebrate the fact that one client of mine had purchased another client of mine. The two CEOs were there and they were hysterical. The BDO Siedman guys were there, including James the Italian Accountant from Brooklyn, who was hilarious. And a baby lawyer who worked on the corporate side who was hilarious and turned out to be in the same bowling league with James the Accountant. And two amiable chemists who turned out to know all about my Great Uncle Tom's discovery of colorfast dye for nylon, which was tres helpful during WWII what with all those camouflaged parachutes and all. And they had all grown up in Flushing, too, how funny. And the head deal lawyer is a semi-professional show jumper on the side so we traded pictures of our respective horses and I told everyone that men who show jump are kind of like professional ice skaters -- you know, not really that manly -- where people who foxhunt are like Bode Miller and Peekabo Street and other extreme skiers. You can imagine how that went over. And Doug the CFO who was so jealous of our table (which was the best table) that he and one of the CEOs crashed it during the dessert course. The CEO kicked James the Accountant out of his chair and drank his coffee and ate his cake, all with great gusto. Doug the CFO switched his entrée with my entrée and so I sat with the other CEO and learned he was tragically unhappy and had no friends and not time to read or paint or do anything fun….so I reprised my conversation with my law school buddy and voila -- CEO number 2 was so happy he drove me home to my hotel and bought me a ginormous bottle of Carbernet. One of the corporate guys decided I was so funny that I should move to NY and go on stage. I am pretty funny some times.
The next day, as I trained home to DC, James the Accountant and the Baby Lawyer and the CFO and CEO number 1 and CEO number 2 and I all decided on email that we need to go neon bowling the next time I'm in NY. I'm thinking of bringing my law school friend along for kicks and giggles and to prove that making 40 new friends in one night isn't that hard after all -- it just means that every now and then you have to not go home to Scarsdale.
Because it turns he will never find the "people like us" that he is looking for in Scarsdale -- we are not in Scarsdale. We are in fancy hotels and the renovated Morgan Library and cozy NYC Chinese restaurants and at raucous, gregarious financial dinners and on horseback careening around the countryside.
At least that's my perspective.
posted by Anonymous @ 4:05 PM
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