Washington Heights

 "New York walking isn't exercise: it's a continually showing make-your-own movie."

-Roy Blount, Jr.

A five day hiatus is a great way to kill a blog.

In my defense, two of those were Saturday and Sunday, and I rarely if ever write anything over the weekends because P's not working and we're on sort of an ongoing adventure those days. Monday morning I started driving us back from Manhattan first thing, then on up to Canandaigua after dropping off the cats. Yesterday I juggled a mediation that began first thing, while getting all of our corporate tax filings out the door by the 15 September deadline. So it's been a busy time.

And an uneasy one. P and I found ourselves talking about that last night, this feeling of being unsettled and ill at ease. It's always there. My professional life entails being in a perpetual state of flight or fight, but she's feeling it now too. We agreed that part of it is the national zeitgeist, that emotional soup we occupy along with everyone around us. There's catastrophe in the air, as I think I've mentioned a few times here. In our case, we're too old to recover from losing everything, even as we were recently reminded in a wall hanging in the medieval tombs exhibit at the Cloisters, surrounded by effigies of nobles and bishops who turned to dust 700 years ago, "Everything will be taken away."

The Cloisters was an amazing find for us. Perched on a steep ridge at the very northern tip of Manhattan, hidden behind acres of dense forest, sits a perfect reproduction of a medieval cloister, complete with cornices and windows taken directly from no-kidding European monasteries and other church structures.

The place was built in the 1930s by John D. Rockefeller to serve as the home of the huge medieval art collection that still resides there. The bluffs in the distance are the Palisades, in New Jersey and on the far side of the Hudson. Rockefeller bought those as well, to ensure the view would never be diminished by modern development.

Outside there's a garden filled with the medicinal and cooking herbs, fruit trees and flowers one would have encountered in a 14th century courtyard.

Those are quince trees. Never seen one of them in person.

The art inside runs the gamut from the sublime to the strangely funny. Amidst things like a solid alabaster altar, the usual devotional sculpture and reliquaries that once contained the skulls of long forgotten saints, one finds things like this.

I should've done a better job of capturing the whole thing in the photo. I burst out laughing at the look of horrified revulsion on Our Lord and Savior's face as he encounters what I take to be Adam and Eve, not terribly overweight and yet presenting with dangling panuses. He trades disjust for confusion as he assumes the role of King of Creation with mouth agape. Probably not what the artist was shooting for.

Then there were the odd exhibits, like this Aztec mechanical Mickey Mouse god from around the same time period.

What in the pluperfect hell is he doing here?

Oh yeah--his perfect mouse ass probably drove the curator into some sort of eroto-spiritual ecstasy.

There's also the liberal tendency toward dropping something shockingly non-European into a collection from the high Middle Ages, as if to say "sure these white people created some beautiful stuff, but just look at the amazing art created by the Aztecs when they weren't ripping hearts out of living prisoners and throwing them down the smelly bloodstained steps of their temples." They may not have made the point they were trying to establish.

From the museum we walked the length of Fort Tryon Park, a beautiful cliffside oasis where once the revolutionaries maintained their last toehold on Manhattan Island before the Brits ran them off in 1776, for an early supper at the Bonnefont, a charming little restaurant inside the park that felt like a cross between the Central Park Boathouse restaurant, and the restaurant at the Wakulla Springs Lodge. The staff was great, the menu interesting and affordable. We'lll definitely be back.

And what a surprise Washington Heights was to us! Perched up there in the 190s, back in the day it was considered too dangerous for most folks to wander. Now it's just another funky New York neighborhood, with all races under the sun represented (the biggest group up there being Dominicans), nice parks and lots going on, and living spaces maybe half of what they'd cost downtown or midtown. We'll tuck that away as we ponder where we'll spend that looming retirement.