The Day Before

"When I'm back in New York... I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I'd like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It's kind of like being in the Mafia."

-Anthony Bourdain

Tomorrow is graduation. Damn.

We spent the weekend goofing off with friends, and mostly just eating. Georgian food and wine in an lovely courtyard at Old Tblisi. The best chopped liver and borscht on the planet at Russ & Daughters. PEI raw oysters and fried zucchini so light it was in danger of floating away. A lovely Thai late lunch in a little hole in the wall around the corner that had the benefit of no TVs and wonderfully efficacious air conditioning. Ending the weekend with a wonderful square pizza from Iggy's (our first DoorDash delivery, making us real New Yorkers) while watching Colbert and Letterman through furniture off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater, and mourning the loss of that old friend for the last decade.

The town feels very crowded right now--tourists are beginning to stream in, and the universities (there are a bunch) are all having their graduation ceremonies. After church yesterday (Peg cried as we left, when I turned to her and clumsily observed, "that's the end of that" as we walked out the doors of St. Mark's on the Bowery for the last time), we took a very crowded Number 6 train from Astor Place up to Central Park, which was crushed with humanity out enjoying the sunny, 88 degree day.

That's the Dakota in the distance, where John Lennon lived until he didn't.

Finding a huge mob of folks waiting for a table at the Central Park Boathouse, and a similar wait at Tavern on the Green, we walked over to the neighborhood around Lincoln Center only to find a similar crush of humanity in search of a sandwich and a spritzer, leading us back to Columbus Circle to take the D back to our neighborhood, which felt very much like going home.

Before bed we schlubbed into the elevator for a look at the skyline from the roof, me in my cheap polyester sweats and UGA polo shirt (Peg looking lovely as is her set point). We enountered a little group of kids in their early 30s watching a basketball game and enjoying the night air. They were a very polite, well-spoken group, all from New Jersey. We all lamented the fire and flood and "bad tenants" who take away from an otherwise wonderful place to live. We traded stories about boats, about Jersey, about living here in this place that's been home to so many generations of irrationally optimistic people. Who else crosses the Atlantic with the shirt on their back, or leaves the World's Most Beautiful Beaches, to try to create a new life in a place like this?

A real feeling of loss this week. I don't see adding a place here without letting go of something somewhere else, and in the Trump economy we're all losing that ability to trade properties as buyers dry up. Maybe we'll just rent for a couple weeks every now and then, back here in our old neighborhood, but this part has been an irreplaceable treasure.