Ambling among the Physicians
On Friday, I had two doctors' appointments. The first one was in Midtown, and when I climbed out of the subway at 59th Street, this is what I saw. I think it's rather poky, don't you? The girdered bridge and the smokestack and the trees. I could be in a small city on the Mississippi - thanks to cropping.
I thought I'd find something to do between the appointments, but I was in and out of the first one so fast that I couldn't think. I was hungry for lunch - a bad thing. I cannot go into an unfamiliar restaurant if I am hungry, and all the ordinary coffee shops in Midtown are unfamiliar to me. So I got back on the train and went back up to 86th Street. What a failure of imagination! But Burger was Heaven. As it was still too soon to head to the Hospital for Special Surgery, where my rheumatologist would prescribe my next infusion (yay!), I headed home and picked up a package in the lobby. It contained an orchid that I'd bought from Orchids.com. It's like the one that Kathleen bought at the Orchid Show in April: red spots on a white background. Buying orchids online assures that most of the buds will open at your house, not at the florist's.
Then I sat down to play Freecell. Last week witnessed a breakthrough in my approach to this game, which you can count on my playing if you're talking to me on the phone. I've been addicted to it for well over ten years. I win most games handily but I will replay a losing hand until I beat it. As I said to Kathleen, I don't think much about playing a hand the first time, but it gets a lot more attention the second time. By the fourth or fifth play, I'm Mr One-Track Mind - an unusual state for me. Anyway, I realized last week that I had a tendency to prioritize the getting of kings to the tops of columns. This is a hangover from the Klondike of childhood, in which new row stacks can be started with kings alone. I saw, too, that this predilection is a mistake. The first item of business in Freecell is to free up the aces, and then the twos. Having made it this far, the stacks will have probably opened up nicely. There's no reason to worry about court stacks at first. I'm playing a small percentage of hands fewer more than once.
Then it was down to 70th Street and the river, where everything went nicely. The weather was so pleasant that I thought I'd walk home along the promenade between the FDR Drive and the water. Or at least I'd walk up to 77th Street and then head over to Agata & Valentina, and First Avenue and 79th Street. As I reached the far end of the footbridge that crosses the Drive, right outside the hospital door on 71st Street, Roosevelt Island looked very grand in the afternoon sun; I wish I could show all the pictures.
Now, it couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes after I'd crossed the 77th Street footbridge and headed inland that the MBNA helicopter crashed into the East River, about forty blocks to the south. I'm not sure that I'd have seen it even if I'd been looking for it, because the plane never got that far from the shore, which at that point would be hidden from a southward glance by the mild protrusion of Sutton Place, which swells out into the River just above the United Nations. I read about the near-disaster as soon as I got home, at Gothamist, which I just happened to glance at. It took the Times a good fifteen-to-twenty minutes longer to get the story onto its site. Go, Jen Chung!
Here is a closeup of the balconies overlooking Cherokee Place and John Jay Park. These buildings are very atypical of New York; they naturally would seem to be much more at home in New Orleans, or on Shamian Island in Guangzhou. There are four blocks of flats, each with its own interior couryard and open-air stairwells. I'm pretty sure that it's on one of these that Christopher Gill (Rod Steiger) passes Kate Palmer (Lee Remick) on his way to commit a serial murder, at the beginning of No Way To Treat A Lady (1968).