Weekend Update: Normal
That’s what this weekend was about: feeling normal again. No more holidays, no more special events. And no more excuses, either.
“Excuses” isn’t the right word. “Priorities” is. I’ve had my hands full of priorities, ever since we got back from St Croix at Thanksgiving. As a result of prioritizing the priorities, I live in a much less cluttered apartment. Oh, the place still looks as cluttered as ever, but then that’s just a look, a decorative tic. The kind of clutter that I’ve been working on lurked in closets and drawers and cabinets and under-the-bed boxes.
I took a walk today, and it felt great. That was new. I’ve been limping home from recent walks, so completely out of shape am I. But after a big walk on Wednesday — almost four miles — and another mile or two on Friday and about a mile yesterday, I was my old self again today. I walked over to Central Park. It was very cold, but I think that that helped. I walked the oval that surrounds the Great Lawn. Then I came home. The word for the experience was “invigorating.” At my age, unfortunately, “invigorating” means “good for nothing but a nap in front of a roaring fire.” In the absence of a roaring fire, I merely dozed.
Before the walk, I ran errands. I had to buy a birthday card. It has been so long since I last bought a birthday card that Kathleen had to remind me, if that’s the word, that Barnes & Noble sells them. I had thought I had the perfect card: the William Eggleston photograph of what looks like a Manhattan on the rocks, bathing on a tray table in the sunlight pouring in from a jetliner’s porthole at 35,000 feet. When I opened the box, the card turned out to be a postcard: not suitable under the circumstances.
At least I finally got to the Eggleston show at the Whitney. It closed today. I was an idiot to put it off. But I did see it twice, first on Friday and then yesterday. I persuaded Kathleen to see it yesterday after breakfast, on her way to George Michael. “It’s not the sort of thing that I would go out of my way to see,” she said, “but I’m glad that you suggested it.” The amazing thing about Eggleston’s color is that it makes everything look clean, even the dirt. Take the two most humdrum kitchen photographs in the show: the freezer and the oven. Neither is what you’d call next to Godliness, really; but because all the colors seem right, the subjects appear to be pristine.
Paying for the birthday cards at Barnes & Noble — unsure of my choices, I covered the waterfront, hoping that Kathleen would choose the right one — I bought Transsiberian on an impulse. We were going to watch it after dinner, but, after dinner, we both felt more like reading. Or, in my case, writing.
Everyone I passed in the Park seemed to be much younger than I — about thirty-five, max. Many were not only not speaking English, but not speaking a language that I recognized. Of the Anglophones, the only one to make an impression was a guy who was walking with a woman in a red quilted coat. “I’ve heard the word before, but I’ve never heard anybody use it,” he said. How I wanted to know what the word was! But instead of repeating the word, he repeated himself. As if he hadn’t said it before, he said it again. “I’ve heard the word before, but I’ve never heard anybody use it.” This time, I heard the woman say, “Yeah.” I tried to remember which playwright employs such repetitions, as a tic to signify our failure to attend to one another. I doubt that my thought patterns would have been so grandiose if I hadn’t been walking along the river at Carl Schurz.