All right, not exactly at Hell’s Gate. But it’s there in the background, roiling treacherously between the Triboro Bridge (vehicular traffic) and Hell Gate Bridge (railway). Can you tell that I’m losing weight? I can, sort of. My clothes are beginning to hang on me. Which is just too bad – most of them are still new.

A word about the neck brace: it is filthy. The padded parts are covered in some sort of nylon-esque material that, after I’d worn the brace for a week, began to irritate the hell out of my skin. What to do? I learned to fold a piece of cotton flour-sack towelling into a triangle and to arrange it around my neck like a Colonial-Dame kerchief. Now the only part of my anatomy that the brace comes into contact with is the beard under my chinny-chin chin. That itches, sometimes like the dickens, but it does not raise red splotches on my shoulders. Now that the brace is so much more comfortable, I’ve come to feel rather naked and unprotected without it.

As I stood with my back to the East River, here’s what I could see just beyond Kathleen, who kindly took the picture. This is Gracie Mansion, the famous mayoral residence that the current incumbent has declined to inhabit, preferring his doubtless far more comfortable East 70s town house. As a result, the house is still haunted by the ashes of the Giuliani-Hanover marriage.

Being a native New Yorker, I’ve never taken a tour of the house. Kathleen almost went to a party there, during the Lindsay Administration, but something went disastrously wrong, and I don’t think it was the weather.

 

As we promenaded along the Finley Walk, we were diverted by the small-dog run. It is so different from the large-dog run that one’s tempted to thnk of a division in species. The big dogs gallop through thick sand and over rocks and rails in pursuit of tennis balls and one another’s rear ends. They outnumber owners, it always seems, by three to one. At the small-dog run, it’s the other way round. The people are much more parent-like, not protective so much as admiring. The small dogs are, after all, cute. I’m not sure why they rate the plastic tile, which I’m sure the big dogs would detest. But the sound of their little nails clicking across the blue surface is comical in itself.

Kathleen and I both like this photograph a lot. There’s the promenade on top, with one level of highway below. The reason for the rise in the promenade is the dip of the southbound lane of the FDR below the northbound lane – three levels in all for most of the run. I remember loving these “tunnels” when I was a child, on the rare occasions when my parents would come into Manhattan via the East Side, but I was over thirty years old before I knew what stood on top of them.

“I hope that we never live far from here,” I said to Kathleen. “I don’t think that we will,” she said, making my day.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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