Dear Diary: Return of the State Visitor
Unlike yesterday’s, this evening’s visit was planned. It was Nana Penny’s wonderful idea, conceived long before she arrived in New York: she would bring Will up to our apartment so that his parents could have a few hours alone together, after six weeks of Not.
If I weren’t so tired, I’d think up a slew of State Dinner jokes. The three grown-ups had an Upper East Side classic: lamb chops (from Holland Court), steamed baby Yukon potatoes, and Lesueur peas. It was wildly out of harmony with the spirit of the evening, which called for sandwiches on tray tables. We did not dine together, for example; Kathleen played with Will while Penny and I dug in. Adding injury to idiocy, the lamb chops were overcooked by about a minute.
On the nursery front there were many interesting issues. I don’t think that I ever drank a martini, back in my martini days, as fast as Will put away his bottle. The downside of this healthy imbibition was an apparently painful intake of air: the boy was botherated by gassy cramps. Kathleen and Penny managed to elicit relieving burps, but when I bounced Will, I simply made him uncomfortable.
That, on top of the overcooked lamb chops, would have convinced me that life is no longer worth living, if it weren’t for pictures like the one above. Nana Penny will be back this summer, thank heaven. What an angel she has been!
As for Will, there was a stretch just before dinner when he was looking up at me from Penny’s lap, and really taking me in — but enough about me. The thing is that, for the first time, I thought that I was seeing his face to come. And it was super, because it seemed that Will is going to take after his handsome father.