Central Park in the Dark
Here’s a view of Midtown from the top of the Great Lawn in Central Park – which is not a lawn at all but a constellation of softball diamonds. It’s pathetic of me to point this out in such a teensy photo, but the Chrysler Building is the fourth speck of light from the left. On the right, you can see the lighting at the top of the TimeWarner Center, which I had never noticed before. I don’t know why, but it gives the towers an air of mad-scientist laboratory. Lights in the attic – that sort of look.
All photographs by Kathleen Moriarty.
What a silly boy I was. I thought that, after an early dinner, we would come home in plenty of time for me to sit down at the computer and dash off a Sunday entry about our walk across Central Park and our lovely meal at Nice-Matin with Kathleen’s client (who happens also to be our personal friend), Jim. The walk and the meal were indeed lovely, but I was an all-but-weeping basket case by the time that Kathleen poured me into a taxi and took me home, where I went to bed on the spot.
The towers of Central Park West.
Perhaps I’d overdone it. I had gotten up at something close to five in the morning and waded through no end of New York Times – including three editions that dated back to my hospital stay, a month ago. (Don’t think it was a waste of time; I clipped three interesting articles!) I also read a lot of James Schuyler’s recently re-issued What’s for Dinner?, a novel that I look forward to recommending more fully. And I made breakfast-in-bed for Kathleen. Later, after lunch, we tackled a very disorganized closet – you know what that’s like. Kathleen stood on a step-ladder and handed things down from an almost inaccessible top shelf, which we promptly stocked with old tax records and such that had been taking up prime lower shelves. There are still a few piles of stuff to deal with in the blue room, but not as many as I feared there would be. Several cubic feet of stuff were tossed.
Then we went for our first walk, our regulation Sunday constitutional: down 86th Street to Carl Schurz Park and the flagstaff next to Gracie Mansion. Then the promenade to and from the head of the Finley Walk at 81st Street, a view that, if you’re a regular reader, you’ll have seen perhaps once too often. Then homewards from the flagstaff, this time via Holy Trinity Church on 88th Street, to check to see whether Anthony Newman’s organ recital (!) is scheduled for tonight or for Wednesday night (I somehow remembered an even-numbered date) (it’s tonight). I was pretty tired when we got back to the apartment, but a little over an hour later I was cool and spruce and ready for another stroll. I hailed a taxi to take us to Fifth Avenue, not so much to save the walk as to put us in the Park before night fully fell. I have Photoshopped Kathleen’s images in order to give an idea of what the light was like at about six-forty.
The Beresford, partially under wraps.
I cannot deny that dinner was all the more delicious for being expensed. Jim, who lives in San Sebastián when he is not on a plane or in a hotel room (or at his flat in the West Eighties, which we were to have visited after dinner had I been a little stronger), has acquired an expertise in Spanish wine, and what a dope I feel now for not have made note of the excellent choice that he and the sommelier arrived at last night. All I can say is that it was a Rioja, possibly an Alta Rioja, and that it had the ethereal qualities that I associate with the very best Burgundies – although it tasted nothing like a French wine. Kathleen was quietly impressed with me for cutting off the pouring of a second glass – not absolutely altogether, but right after a few thimblefuls had dribbled in.Â
And so to …. [yawn!].
The worst of it is, I slept until eight-thirty this morning, a now-unconscionable hour. Guess I was tired. Â