Daily Blague

This is my Eustace Tilley shot. I take it every year, and every year it's the same, just like the cover of the last February issue of The New Yorker. Except this year, it isn't, and that's nothing to do with me. By a quirk of the weather or whatnot, the trees have begun to leaf before the cherries have quite flowered. I hope that the fruit trees aren't in trouble.

Today's promenade was minimal. I've only just begun to get my strength back, have overdone it like a madman last Sunday, when the removal of our sofabed was finally coordinated and effected. On Jason Kottke's recommendation (quite a while back), I contacted Call Paul to Haul, and Paul couldn't have been nicer. It was he who got the blue room door off its hinges. It was M le Neveu who saw that the couch had to be lifted above the baseboards. It was Ms NOLA who welcomed the piece at Crazy Eights. The calls were close all the way, and if I hadn't done anything else for the rest of the day, I'd have still been a wreck.

But I did plenty. In addition to wanting to get out of the stay-with-us business, which I will resume only if we find ourselves living in a place with either a separate dining room or a third bedroom (and then quite happily enough), I had to open up the living room, which is half dining room and half sitting room. The sitting-room half had three sofas in it. Two loveseats and a four-seater. Too much sofa! With the Louis XVI canapé that Kathleen's mother had built many years ago taking the place of the sofabed in the blue room, I could move one of two matching wing chairs, built to my scale, into the living room. Thus each room would have less furniture in it. There's more. Without the clutter of the second wing chair, the elements of the blue room's configuration could be restored to an earlier, more successful arrangement. This meant that dresser that I use to store DVDs, already emptied and hulking in a corner to make room for the sofabed's eviction, could cross the room, but for that to happen... It was one of those keychain puzzles with the sliding squares. Having tidied up the living room, which had been only minimally distrubed, I attacked the blue room, and emerged, four hours later, victorious, more or less. (There are still a few items in search of a final resting place.)

And that should have been that, but no: M le Neveux and Ms NOLA were coming for dinner, and I fried some chicken. An attempt at mashed potatoes failed completely, because instead of following my usual method (never mind), I thought I'd do what I thought everybody does, and, guess what, I don't know what everybody does because I'm sure that everybody doesn't turn out a bowl of glue. Cook what you know - at least when you're fading.

Monday, I had enough adrenalin in my blood to write a few posts, but I felt pretty shaky, and when, early in the evening, I tried to use the new juicer for the second time and it broke almost at once, the setback pricked my balloon, and the energy rushed out of me with a whoosh. Tuesday, I stayed in bed until the early midafternoon, and it turned out to be a great boon to have arranged for a shortened French lesson; I could hardly get through the hour and a quarter that my prof spent together. After an hour of quiet reading - refusing to think about anything except A Time To Be Born, and this means that I didn't even think about writing it up; I got to that yesterday - I started to get dressed for dinner, and at 8:20 I walked into the Plaza as dapper, or at least as relaxed, as Cary Grant. A sign that I wasn't operating on full batteries, however, was that when I opened my camera case toward the end of the festive dinner, the camera wasn't in it. Fortunately, Ms NOLA had brought hers, and as soon as the film has been developed, I'll share anything that's not indiscreet.

Yesterday was even worse, for reasons that I will discuss in a subsequent post, but over Chinese take-out, Kathleen convinced me that I was probably not going to have a stroke at any minute but that I was suffering from severe physical exhaustion. So, after dinner, I just sat and read some more. I opened Barbara Vine's latest novel, The Minotaur. Within two pages I forgot myself completely.

This morning, I felt something like my regular self. My wrists and shoulders weren't sore, and it wasn't so painful to get up or sit down. I thought I might be up to lunch at Burger Heaven, after which I would walk down to Carl Schurz Park to see the cherries. So the extent of my walk, effectively, was the length of 86th Street between Third Avenue and the East River, or a little over half a mile (maybe more - those are long blocks). Not much of an adventure, and so familiar that I had to vary things a little by coming home along 87th Street, passing Harriet the Spy's home in Henderson Place. You can't see it in the photo above because I cropped it out; in any case, it would lost in the cloud of Bradford pear blossoms. But I believe that it's the house on the near corner.

I had carried along The Minotaur, to read both at the restaurant and, irresistibly, on a bench overlooking the river. I began to note some distinctive qualities. First of all, the writing is more punctiliously correct than Ms Vine's books usually are; is that because her narrator is a Swedish woman who has not learned the language in the schoolyard? Second of all, I feel something that I've missed terribly in the recent BVs, that sense of a family of women decaying from within that was so beautifully set out in A Dark-Adapted Eye.