Daily Blague

At some point before nine, I crawled into the kitchen and turned on the oven for croissants, but by the time it had heated up I was back in bed, mortally ill with fatigue. Kathleen called on her way home from an appointment with the ophthalmologist, and was kind enough to grant my supplications for coffee and a sweet. At some point, we traded places: I sat up reading The New Yorker while Kathleen stretched out for a nap. The prospect of our leaving the apartment together at any point in the day seemed dim.

But we made it, shortly before one in the afternoon. We dropped off four shopping bags of donations at Cancer Care - bags that had taken up what threatened to be permanent residence in Kathleen's tub. We went to two hardware stores, one for kitcheny things for me - timers, a baking sheet - and one for carpentery things for her - a hacksaw and some G-clamps. This is not the study in role reversal that it seems to be. Kathleen is simply taking her beading hobby onto a new level of seriousness. I don't actually think of what she does as a hobby. She's much too good at it. I think of her as a jeweler. As soon as we learn how to take them, I'll run some photographs.

We had lunch at the Lexington Candy Shop. Since there's nothing visual readily online - a bit of a surprise, considering what a venerable institution this Upper East Side soda fountain is - I captured an image from Three Days of the Condor, in which it plays an interesting part as the hero's unknowing refuge. (Sydney Pollack shot the actual interior, too.) We both had the fantastic, squeezed-before-your-eyes lemonade that keeps us coming back.

When we came home, Kathleen took a conference call while I gathered up the last of materials on the dining table, boxed and labeled them, and stacked them in the blue room. After that, I took the leaves out of the dining table and restored the living room.

We never seriously considered going to the storage unit. I will have to digest what we've decided to keep, if possibly discarding further. There are twelve boxes of letters alone. Kathleen apologized for not having done more, but in truth there wasn't much for her to do. I could have done the whole thing myself, and I feel infantile for not having done so. I needed her company, her commitment to help if necessary, to undertake this important but thoroughly unattractive task. I'll probably need it until the room is empty, and we have relocated our few stored items in something less room-like, and more box-like.