Gotham Diary:
Prep
20 September 2013
This afternoon, I’ll be preparing a get-together dinner that I’m pretty sure will be enjoyed on the balcony this evening. The menu will feature nothing special, at least in the way of home-made dishes. Grilled chicken and baby-back ribs — they’re already marinating. Corn on the cob, roast sweet potatoes, and a big bowl of cole slaw from Schaller & Weber. Baguettes and a couple of pies from Fairway. A pitcher of Arnold Palmers.
I make it sound so easy that I’m almost fooled myself.
There ought to be fish on the menu. Also, more vegetables. I know what I’ll do about the vegetables: I’ll chop up summer squash and cherry tomatoes and shallots, and put them in a pot with some olive oil. Then, into the oven. I used to make this every day when I had a microwave oven. Inevitably, I got tired of it; I also got tired of how much room the microwave oven took up. So it has been a nice while. As for the fish, a cold poached filet of salmon might be nice. In which case, I’m going to head down to Agata & Valentina. The fish is better there.
More than ever, though, the food isn’t the point. Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil will be here, and so will Ms NOLA and Messir di T — for whom I shall have to invent a new, married name, as tonight’s visit will probably be their last as fiancés. Our other guests will be neighbors. After years and years of polite “hellos” in the elevator, we have made some friends in the building, and it turns out that they’ve all known each other for ages. So we’re sort of their new friends rather than the other way round. If Megan and Ryan and Will were here, it would be a real family dinner — but it will be “real family” even without them, just not complete.
(Megan & Co are installed in their newly-rented house in the very part of San Francisco where they hoped to live, and they’re exhausted. Will, I’m told, has, on more than one occasion, asked to “go back.” Sometimes, he’s referring to New York. Sometimes, he just means the apartment in SOMA that they occupied for three weeks. I expect that he’ll stop talking about going back shortly. He’s crazy about the Zoo.)
Still, I can’t help wishing that I were doing something ambitious. Which is to say: I miss, just a bit, being young.
***
At the downtown storage unit the other day, I had a bright idea. I used my iPhone to take pictures of the barcodes printed on the dust-jackets of several books that I want to hold on to and eventually send uptown. What with my shaky hand, it was hard to get clear images, but I managed, in two out of three cases. I’ve just discovered, however, that the barcode reader can’t work with a screen. That horizontal red light doesn’t even register over the phone. So I copied in the ISBNs manually, and that worked. The point of this exercise was to try to avoid taking a laptop to the storage unit, with all the paraphernalia required (the portable barcode scanner, which doesn’t work as well, and the MiFi card for wireless hookup), every time I want to sort books.