Gotham Diary:
Sodden Spring
What an awful day! Or, should I say, what awful weather. Spring has definitely arrived in New York City, but that doesn’t mean that it’s nice out.
I had a rather good day, very productive. Hmmm… I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to hear that phrase, “very productive,” with a bit of a squint. What it means is that I took care of a number of items on the the to-do list that had piled during a spell of very unproductive days. I would like to have days in which I do not have to make up for other days. The other thing about today’s “productivity”— besides its remedial tenor — is that it involved a lot of ordering things on line and over the phone. “Expensive” would be a very good substitute: I had a very expensive day. I don’t know why I should call it “productive”; I didn’t make anything.
But I was out there in the weather, too, and let’s hope that that wasn’t expensive health-wise. I had some things to take to storage. Nothing much, really. A bolt of fabric that’s destined for the canape in the blue room, which is slated to be reupholstered in a month or so. Taking the fabric to the storage unit made sense because it got a big long box out of the house but even more because the upholsterer’s shop is right around the corner from the storage unit. We had lunch — WWW was helping out — at the Baker Street Pub, where the waiter asked us if we were there for the game. There seems to be a soccer tournament at the moment. I never did figure out who was playing whom or where, but players by the name of O’Shea and Ramirez seemed to be much on the commentators’ lips. By the time I was through with my black and tan, we could hardly hear ourselves think.
Then I had to buy a lampshade. You see what I mean by “productivity.” I did not have to go to the Museum, but when I mentioned the Forbidden City show, WWW jumped. Or maybe he jumped at the mention of the Museum; I’m not sure. It was indeed, as he said, the perfect day for visiting the Museum. I ought to have asked him what he wanted to see, but I was keen to hear what he thought of my pots. If  WWW agrees with Kathleen (she thinks that the pots are kitsch), he didn’t say so.
This time, I bought the Forbidden City show’s catalogue, but as I haven’t read it yet I still don’t have anything intelligent to say, except that the subject of the show is a pavilion that has recently been renovated. This pavilion is in the Forbidden City, or, in other words, Beijing. It is not at the Museum. A number of tchotchkes and home furnishings associated with the pavilion have been shipped over for our delight and edification, but every time I happened on something really impressive, it turned out to belong to the Museum. I suppose I really ought to have seen “Cézanne’s Card Players” or “The Open Window,” current exhibitions of Nineteenth-Century paintings. I’ll get to them eventually.
We stopped off at Crawford Doyle on the way home. Until this morning, I had never heard of Peter Mountford or of his debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, but after reading bits and pieces at The Millions and The Rumpus (which I shall write up in this week’s Grand Hours, at some more genuinely productive time), I had to have it — and Crawford Doyle had it to sell. Then I bought some pots of ivy at the flower shop, to replace the ivy in the living room that I had killed by neglect. It is not like me to kill plants by neglect, and I chalk the minor disaster up to the business of changing my routines. It’s also the case that the ivy required a lot more watering than the nepenthe that used to be in the living room. The ivy will be delivered tomorrow. It was productivity at its most blissful: I was in and out of the flower shop in three minutes, and all I did was ask for ivy and say that I’d take four pots. Oh, and that tomorrow morning would be a good time for delivery. I did not produce a credit card or sign an invoice — all of that sort of thing is on file. Not only did I tick something off the list, but I was tickled by the illusion of living in a quaint village where everybody has known everybody forever and there is no need to pay for anything. Delicious! Thinking what Karl Marx would say only made it more delicious.
Then we went to Williams-Sonoma, where I bought some tableware for Will: a rimmed plate, a bowl with a suction cup on the bottom, and a sippy cup. All in unbreakable melamine and all decorated with cute French cochons and papillons and bottles of lait. When we came out of the store, it was pouring with rain. Since WWW had a big umbrella, I asked him to carry the shopping bag with my books. Rain wouldn’t hurt the plastic dishes! It did, however, turn the Williams-Sonoma shopping bag to pulp, and half a block from home everything tumbled onto the pavement. No harm done, though; the bowl with its suction cup were wrapped in stout paper, which also cushioned the fall of the other two items. Â
At home, I made a pot of tea and did not spend any more money.