Gotham Diary:
The Wednesday Circuit
The Wednesday circuit goes like this: I begin by walking to Crawford Doyle, on Madison between 81st and 82nd. Then I walk down 81st Street to Willy’s, my barbershop. Trim and spruce, I head for the Hi-Life, which used to be at 72nd and First but which has moved to Second Avenue between 78th and 79th. (Here be excellent club sandwiches.) After lunch, I creep along 78th or 79th Street, depending on the temperature and the need for shade, to Agata & Valentina, at 78th and First, to shop for Thursday night’s dinner. Bags in hand, I head up first, more often than not stopping at Morning Calm Gallery, and, today, paying a rare visit to Yorkshire Wines and Spirits (I usually phone in), with a final stop at Gristede’s.Today, tThe circuit took a bit more than two and a half hours to run. That’s about as quick as I can be.
I make it sound like an immemorial routine, but it dates no further back than May of this year. I’ve been making each of the Wednesday circuit  for years — decades, in some cases — but I’ve never chained them together in a regular row. The comfortable sense that I’ve been doing this for years is offset by the knowledge that I haven’t been doing it for years, not at all; I try not to feel too stupid. But when it hits me that I’m 62, I wonder, with finger-tapping impatience, just what it is, exactly, that I’ve been doing for most of that time. How could it have taken so long to figure out the simplest everyday rhythms?
In lieu of speculative answers to that question, let me just say that I’m deep into Look At Me, Jennifer Egan’s last novel but one (two?). Crawford Doyle didn’t have it in stock, but Dot McClearey was happy to order it for me. I could, of course, have ordered it from Amazon. (And you might think that I could have found it at the big Barnes & Noble down the street, but no — they had nothing but The Keep. It’s my settled conviction that, for all his moolah and whatever, Leonard Riggio does not really know how to operate a bookstore.) But nobody at Amazon is going to ask me, as Dot does, what I’ve been reading and thinking — much less actually listen to my answer.
The great thing about the Wednesday circuit is that it lets everybody know when I’m going to show up.