Long, Hot NYC Weekend

Hot town, summer in the city

Back of my neck gettin' dirty and gritty

Been down, isn't it a pity?

Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city

All around, people lookin' half dead

Walkin' on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head

-John Sebastian

Sitting at 7C, trying to find the motivation to work a little on this long weekend in Manhattan. It's challenging to get anything remunerative done on these days when Peg has a day off, and my to-do list is still there staring me in the face. It seems that her partial retirement, paring down the number of days she's standing in an operating room to maybe three a week, is driving me into the same space. After all, what fun is a day in New York if one of us is dictating and reviewing discovery?

We arrived here fairly late on Friday, after P worked a very long day at Arnot. We're now parking the car maybe five blocks away in Chinatown, a bargain at $325 a month, which led to a long walk back to Sione through throngs of mostly 25-year-old women dressed as streetwalkers, all in gaggles with not a young man in the formation. The young men were around, but bunched up in their own little herds, neither group interacting with the other. I don't get this generation, not at all.

The late hour meant most of the little family restaurants were shutting down for the night, so we ended up at the iconic Remedy Diner around the corner, open 24 hours. Joanna, our waitress, is a black lady about our age with a dyed pink streak in her hair, serving up meatloaf in mushroom gravy for me, and falafel for P. We still have half of my supper in the fridge, ready for lunch here in a little while.

Saturday featured a trip to Macy's on 34th Street to buy bathrobes. This little studio apartment looks across at apartments on the other side of Houston, and we quickly figured out that everyone can see into everyone else's space. So bathrobes are necessary to get from bed to bathroom without revealing the ravages of an aging body to these kids in the neighboring buildings.

Saturday night we went to the Penn Club for a quick bite in the bar, then on to see Operation Mincemeat at the Golden Theater. The musical, based on the true story of British intelligence creating a fake officer from the body of a dead homeless guy and dumping him on a Spanish beach for the Nazis to find, complete with forged papers supposedly detailing a planned invasion of Sardinia, was a lot of fun. The entertainment options are going to explode here in a few weeks, as the Met and the various symphonies and theater venues hit high season. August's offerings are pretty spare, unless you're looking for the schlock up around 42nd Street they stage for the tourists (Lion King, anyone?), but it's still the best entertainment scene on the planet.

Sunday meant church, always a moving, thoughtful experience at St. Mark's in the Bowery, and then onto the Number 6 train to the high holy church of America's sport, Yankee Stadium, to see the Braves try to avoid a sweep against the Bronx Bombers.

I had thought our seats would give us some shade, but that proved incorrect. With temperatures over 90 degrees, that meant ducking onto the food concourse behind the stands, so we could stand in the shade and visit with a couple up from Fayetteville to see the game. It was a great game if you like baseball--a three hit pitcher's duel through nine, tied 1-1 going into extra innings. P was ready to go before the end of the National Anthem, which is saying something because we hadn't arrived yet, so the prospect of going into the 17th still tied caused her obvious distress. Fortunately, the Braves struck in the 10th and held off the Yanks in the bottom of the inning to win the game 2-1.

Back at 7C, we took lukewarm showers after a very long subway ride from the Bronx, then ducked around the corner to our favorite Indian restaurant for an entree so hot it made our foreheads sweat. Those leftovers will be on the buffet today, as well. The owner of the place, Kabeer, turned out to be a chemist by training, with one of his kids starting a neurosurgery residency next month. But we want to keep these people out, in favor or Afrikaners pretending to be refuges.

Don't get me started.

Tonight the couple from the baseball game invited us to meet them at a comedy club a few blocks away, but the show doesn't even start until ten and I have trouble imagining we'll still be awake then. Still, it's really something to have all these options within a short walk or subway ride from where I'm sitting.