Gotham Diary:
Rentré
12 August 2013
It took three hours, door-to-door. Traffic was heavy on the Long Island parkways, and the driver opted for a route that was unfamiliar to me. We took the Cross Island Parkway to its nominal end, at the foot of the Whitestone Bridge, but swept right along onto an extender called the Whitestone Expressway. Soon we joined the Grand Central Parkway, which had backed up somewhere between the Cross Island and the Van Wyck. There were ten minutes of drag along the lower reaches of Little Neck Bay. So this is Bayside, I figured to myself, but I did not get so far as to work out that it must be Douglaston across the water. I was vexed. I wanted to get home, and the brake-and-roll congestion seemed to threaten my getting there, ever. But then, as usual, our speed picked up, and most of the cars along side us peeled off for one of the two bridges, without any sign of the cause of the backup.
Everything in the apartment seemed to be as it ought to be. There were only two messages on the answering machine — two for a whole week! And one of those was rubbish.
It would have been nice to stay on at Fire Island, but when I awoke yesterday morning — to ice-blue skies that would cloud over with the passing day — knowing that we would be leaving that afternoon, I found myself ready to go home.
And now I’m home. There are a million things to do, but I already saw to the most important one: watering the plants on the balcony. Ray Soleil was going to stop by last Thursday to give them a drink, but before we even left for Fire Island he broke his left arm. (He’s doing well!) A few of the plants were a bit wilted, but they bounced back nicely overnight. Nothing else on my to-do list is at all urgent. But I’d like to get some of it taken care of before writing about what I’ve been reading, or rather whom — J K Rowling. For the moment, it suffices to say, damn, she’s good!
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And of course I’m not talking about Harry Potter & Co.