Maybe we eat there too much?

Diane and I sat down at our local sushi restaurant two days after I bonked my forehead.

Our waitress asked, “What did you do to yourself?”

I said, “Diane hit me with a rolling pin.” I got my laugh and then I continued, “I’ll have a Sapporo and…”

She interrupted, “Would you like something for it?”

“Naw, it’s nothing.” I said, “And Diane would like…”

“But we have Neosporin.”

Last night, I arrived, sans Diane, and three separate people asked me why I was alone.

Diane bought a new Subaru Impreza Wagon. She had two dealers, one local and one on The Automile in Norwood, competing for her business. She finally agreed to Tony of Norwood’s price and when she informed local Carl, he appeared befuddled.

Ring dingy

“Diane, how much did you say you paid for your car?”

Ringy dingy

“Diane, did that include transportation costs?”

“Yes.”

Ringy dingy

“Diane, I don’t mean to keep bothering you, but did that price include a trade-in?”

“No.”

Diane knew she’d gotten a good price, buy Carl confirmed it. The next time you buy a car, she recommends using the internet to get dealer costs, etc. The next time you buy a car, I recommend you pay Diane to buy it for you.

Matthew drives home from school, parks his Honda, hops into the Subaru and speeds off.

To Ed: The April 18th issue of The New Yorker has a long article about Andrew Mclean.

Peter has settled into Evansville, after an overnight flight on a DC-10, sitting bolt upright in one of those non-reclining bulkhead seats while the the snoozer in front of him slept fully reclined.

From one of Joan’s many emails:

“Addressing your next email, yes, if Peter comes he has serious work to do.
HO & Mac first but then he needs to haul ass.
No frivolous time.

I doubt anyone can match your level of energy.
Although I gave it a shot last night. Up till 2:30 and back up at 6.
Remember my brain needs every sleep nanosecond & then still leaves something to be desired.

What else? Oh, Pete will surprise us.
I thought you would be useless.

This, from my friend, Brian Pontz (left) . Brian worked at Channel1 and he was a part of the pokergroup, but now it seems all he does is move. He asked me for help and I said sure until I remembered I had to water my plants that day.

“The move was a disaster. We started at about 9:30ish and were done loading by 12PM. I made the mistake of driving the moving truck out back by the basement door to load up the basement stuff. The truck got stuck. We tried for a while and couldn’t get it out and couldn’t get a tow truck to come pull it out that day. So we had to wait till Monday. So the tow
truck came Monday and tried to pull it out but the moving truck was heavier than the tow truck so the tow truck couldn’t do it and started sliding on the grass. So then the tow truck got stuck as well. Then a second tow truck came and they anchored the stuck one with the second one which was on the tar and finally got the moving truck out along with the tow truck. Everyone was kind enough to come and move me in after work on Monday. We started at almost 6 and were done a little after 8. It cost $300 for the tow and another days rental for the moving truck….

I think the worse part was that my wife told me many times previously not to bring the moving truck out back because of the rain – that it would get stuck. Needless to say I heard about it later…”

*****************

I called my mother the other day:

“I was thinking about you last night. I’ve been taking antibiotics and I couldn’t remember if I’d taken my third dose. If you told us that we’d be ready to ship you off to the Mary Hotchkiss Hospital For The Mentally Deranged (from Sam Spade, July 17th, 1948). We hold you to much higher standards than we’ d ever expect of ourselves.”

Helen knows it and though she has never said anything, is not all that happy about it. Since her event we’ve all cast an anxious eye her way. This sideways confession made her laugh.

“Did I tell you about Jo Ann Resch and Father Lex?”

“No,” I said.

“Jo Ann brought us a grocery bag full of food Saturday night. While she was here, I told her that Father Lex had been by to see me while I was in the hospital. She asked me, ‘Helen, was that in body or in spirit?’ I said, ‘Why, body, of course.’ She said, ‘Helen, Father Lex has been dead for two years.’ I laid in bed that night laughing. I had confused Father Lex with my friend, Ted Temple.They are both priests and have both written books.”

I know, I’ve become a one trick pony, but as I look at this I think to myself, Yeah, Diane is in Montreal.
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Adam Kibbe

Reflections in†night’s window block my view.

They were there by day, just invisible.

What is outside is still there, just not seen.

Such balance

shapes what is available to us.

And what I see through this window (when I can see)

is not all there is,

but it shapes my perception

as the frame of a camera describes a worldview.

“Careers are limiting” said Michael,

and of course he’s right —

in that we will do what we will do

and no more.

But the things we do

expose us to what we come to know.

Were our actions other, we’d be too.

Is there always more to more?

Are there not paths that

in leading inwards,

expand?

To know something well from one perspective

can be limiting.

But to know that point of view at all

is a gift.

To know knowledge, however thorough, deep and vast, to be finite,

is to come to a field

rich with life.

All the blossoms of that field are beyond one’s picking.

And to find one’s limitations,

measured against†such multitude,

may be daunting.

May be liberating.

But we are pickers,

and we†walk this field.

One is as fair as another.

I am inside this window.

What is outside is outside.

Tomorrow will come,

and tonight’s separation will have no relevance,

save for these reflections on a reflection.

Bertha Downing as told to her son, Dan.

Jim Downing

Bertha, Emerson and Jim Downing

“When Jimmy was born, it was in Mexico’s ABC Hospital. He was delivered by our long-time family doctor, Dr. Castorena. His mother wanted her aunt Peg, who lived in Mexico City, to be there. JoAnn was never very friendly. I remember having a shower for her; all the ladies came, but she would not come downstairs. You three stayed with us for about a month, then went back to your Junior year at RPI.”

“I think that’s the last we ever saw of JoAnn. You got divorced the next year.”

“Your father and I maintained contact with Jimmy through his great grandmother, Hazel Anderson. I remember we visited him at Mrs. Anderson’s tiny apartment in Pontiac. I have some pictures taken of your father and me sitting on her front door steps in June ‘73. Jimmy was 6 years old. Tom [Tillson JoAnn’s father] would send us photos of him every birthday, and I have a bunch when he took Jimmy to Florida in 1974.”

“Later I remember that Tom befriended you and Bonnie, and we invited him to come and spend Christmas of 1973 in Mexico. He never had such a good time as that Christmas with our whole family. He brought lots of presents, and he brought me lots of books. Mrs. Cambon [Gaby’s mother, Dan’s sister Lilly’s first husband] also came from France that Christmas.”

“We took them to a Pastorela [a re-enactment of the birth of Jesus] in Tepozotlan [a little village near Mexico City]. The performance was outdoors, after sunset, played by the shepherds and inn keeper where Mary and Joseph seek shelter. All the players wear colorful Mexican costumes. We all sang, and afterwards they served pozole [a light stew with beef and corn in chicken broth]; this is a typical Mexican Christmas dish.”

“Tom took us all out to dinner at Normandie. Here’s a photo of the whole crowd.”

“That was a long time ago. Long past the time when a spanking or an injection would cure anything.”

Jim all grown up.

The pain in my jaw had reached that tipping point. Could I suffer through it, or would I have to jump in front of the first bus? The last three dayshad beenunpleasant , but for some reason, as I walked to the dentist’s office, the throbbing that had been a discordant cymbal player morphed into a Mephistopholean version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

I thought about my friend, Sharon, who developed RSD (Reflexive Sympathetic Dystrophy) after she separated her shoulder. My short, butchered form of this syndrome is that once the pain pathways have been established, the brain lays pavement for a superhighway. The initial injury heals, the pains remains, and as a free add-on, it gets worse. Now we have tandem tractor trailers rumbling up and down the Autobahn. In Sharon’s case, after failing to get relief from every pain pill on the planet, her inventive physician implanted a morphine pump which injects directly into her brain. The trucks now have softer tires.

I thought about Sharon, because I couldn’t think about anything else. When I approached Dr. Wang’s receptionist, she looked up at me and asked, “Are you okay?” I wanted to ask her, “Do you drive a bus?” But then I realized she wasn’t asking about the tears on my cheeks, but about the blood on my forehead.

Earlier in the day I’d stacked new wood on the railings of my neighbor’s porch, which I had been hired to rebuild. As I stood in the yard, the pointy ends of those boards happened to be slightly lower than my forehead. Every time I looked down to pull a nail from my tool belt, or bent over to retrieve a dropped tool, I’d bonk the board. The first whack, cushioned by my glasses, produced a single drop of blood between my eyes. The second raised an ostrich-sized egg way up on what my brother, Peter, refers to as the living version of Half Dome. The third whack, a direct hit on the ostrich egg, struck oil.

“You mean my forehead? It’s nothing.” I said.

She handed me the requisite forms to fill out.

“But you have blood all over you.”

I had some blood, but it was not all over. Mostly on my sleeves, which served as emergency gauze pads. I wanted to engage this trim, sparkly blue-eyed, raven-haired receptionist in conversation, but I could only clench my teeth.

After I’d scrawled through my health history, Dr. Wang ushered me into his office. I gingerly leaned back on his vinyl chair, and then a very strange thing happened. The pain disappeared. So completely I couldn’t identify the offending tooth. Nor could Dr. Wang, but boy, did he try.

He tapped each tooth with the heavy metal handle of a dental probe. He began with my first upper canine and worked back. Clang. Nothing. Clang, nothing. Clang, still nothing.

“Is it heat sensitive?” He asked.

“I can’t even breathe in without pain.”

He yanked his air gun from its cradle and hosed down the upper right side of my mouth. Nothing. He reached behind where I couldn’t see and returned with an instrument he dipped in ice, and then placed on each tooth. Still nothing. Finally he applied a similar probe, but this one with a red hot end. I could hear sizzling as moisture evaporated from the enamel, but I felt no pain. I thought about Dustin Hoffman in the movie Marathon Man.

Dr Wang smiled; not a malicious Zell-like smile, but a caring, curious one. “This is like going to the doctor and having your symptoms disappear.” Take out the “like,” I thought, this is the real thing.

“I took Nuprin before I left. Do you suppose that’s the problem?”

“It could be. Is that Ibuprofen?”

I still had the bottle. I reached in my pocket, past my keys, assorted nails and loose change,and I pulled it out. There on the label it said – Ibuprofen.

“I guess the anti-inflammatory did its thing. I’d been taking aspirin without much relief, but I talked to another dentist today and she said to take Advil, so I switched.”

Frustrated, Dr. Wang held up the new x-rays and explained which tooth he speculated needed the root canal. The one capped by silver.

“I could do a root canal on this one, or you could come back tomorrow when you’re certain which tooth hurts.”

I opted for door number two.

**********************

Next week: That Filing Feeling

Rakkity

The next part of our trip to Spain–Toledo to Ciudad Real to Cordoba
After this will come Chapter IV: Sevilla and Italica.

After visiting Flo Saturday night, Diane and I walked across the street to the
Ninety Nine for dinner.

Bertha and Emerson Downing
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I remember when I first met Emerson. I was at work, and my aunt called me and told me to come home early, because a Gringuito was coming in answer to the ad for the room, and I was the only one who could speak English.

My mother, sister and I were living with my Aunt in a brand new house she had bought with lottery winnings, on Mazatlan 161 (Colonia Condesa, right near the Angel). The house had two floors and three bathrooms, and she advertised one bedroom and bath for rent to supplement her income.

I came home early; it was raining. I peered out of the Venetian blinds waiting for him. He arrived in a little beat-up old Ford. The minute he stepped out of the car, I said “He’s for me!”.

He came into the house; we showed him his room; he rented it on the spotÖand he never left. Poor Bolton Mallory — I dumped him right away.

This is the house we were married in. We did not get married in the church because Emerson was not a Catholic. His best man was Oliver Ormond, an FBI friend from Texas, who was later killed in a plane crash. Only my side of the family came to the wedding.

Bertha and Emerson Downing
View larger image
I remember when I first met Emerson. I was at work, and my aunt called me and told me to come home early, because a Gringuito was coming in answer to the ad for the room, and I was the only one who could speak English.

My mother, sister and I were living with my Aunt in a brand new house she had bought with lottery winnings, on Mazatlan 161 (Colonia Condesa, right near the Angel). The house had two floors and three bathrooms, and she advertised one bedroom and bath for rent to supplement her income.

I came home early; it was raining. I peered out of the Venetian blinds waiting for him. He arrived in a little beat-up old Ford. The minute he stepped out of the car, I said “He’s for me!”.

He came into the house; we showed him his room; he rented it on the spotÖand he never left. Poor Bolton Mallory — I dumped him right away.

This is the house we were married in. We did not get married in the church because Emerson was not a Catholic. His best man was Oliver Ormond, an FBI friend from Texas, who was later killed in a plane crash. Only my side of the family came to the wedding.

Bertha Downing as told to her son Dan

In February of 1943 I embarked on a trip by myself to visit my fiancÈ Emerson and his family in Michigan. As a passenger service representative for Mexicana de Aviacion, I flew for free on standby from Mexico City to Dallas, where I would change planes to Detroit. However, in Dallas I was bumped from the connection to Detroit because I had to give up my seat to soldiers that were scheduled to fly there.

So, I took a taxi to the train station, and boarded a train to Detroit, within minutes of its leaving the station. It was an overnight trip, and I was treated very nicely by soldiers aboard. I arrived in Detroit the next morning, and the station was completely empty ñ what was I going to do? I knew I could call on American Airlines for help if needed*and just as I was about to do so, Emerson rushes into the station to get me. Apparently the arrival time had changed, and that’s why he was late.

We drove to his cousin Lucille’s house in Detroit, where we had breakfast. I remember that a call came in from Aunt Estelle, who “wanted to meet this woman”. She was a retired English professor that later had a building named for her at Eastern Michigan University. When we arrived, I started discussing Charles Dickens with her, and her opinion of me immediately changed for the better. That was a relief, as she had written Emerson a nasty letter when she learned that he had broken off his engagement with Mary Ducat to propose to me.

There we waited for Emerson’s brother Jack to take us to the family farm in Romulus. I was greeted by the formidable Downing family, all waiting to meet this Mexican woman that was going to marry Emerson. There was Jim Yarger and his wife Marion (Emerson’s eldest sister) and their little kids Harold, and Alvin; Jack’s wife Margaret, and their eldest daughter Susan. A large family reunion was organized, and I mainly remember being stuck with washing all the dishes afterwards.

I was fascinated by snow, which I had never seen, and by the chickens on the farm. The chicken house had heat and music from a radio to encourage them to lay more eggs.

We stayed at the farm in a small room, and visited other family members and friends in the area ñ Miss Cooper, The Greggs. †Emerson took me to visit Cleary College, where he had graduated from, and also to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. We went shopping at Hudson’s in Detroit ñ I was fascinated by Hudson’s ñ such a large, fancy department store! I shopped every department on every floor.

We stayed about two weeks, and then flew back to Mexico together. Oh for those times again. I was full of enthusiasm and self-confidence, and scared of nothing.

Jennifer

Elsie called this morning, worried because she hadn’t heard from my Aunt Beatrice in a long time. She had last gotten through to Beatrice by phone in early February. Beatrice has often been hard to reach; she leaves her phone off the hook when she writes, and maybe at other times as well. But two and a half months was longer than usual; Beatrice usually goes to a writing group Elsie convenes, and Beatrice usually goes to an Easter potluck at Elsie’s house. I usually see her there. Elsie and I are connected through Friends’ Meeting. Beatrice and I are connected through my mother’s brother who died about 4 years ago. They married when his children and I were all teenagers, and although we should have a lot in common, there’s always been tension and hurt there.

I decided to make copies of my mother’s senior paper and bring her one; that would be a good pretext for “dropping by”. (One point of hurt for Beatrice was why didn’t my mother like her? I thought reading the senior paper would help her see just how not-personal that dislike — which Beatrice had explicitly asked about several years ago, and about which I had tried to answer honestly — was. The paper was written long before Mummy met Beatrice, but one could see in it the beginnings of someone not-at-all-interested in politeness for politeness’ sake, which was one sticking point between them. I’m not sure one had warning about Mummy’s competitiveness as a writer in the senior paper, but I HAD been able to tell Beatrice about that.) In the past, apparently, when Elsie has become concerned and asked the police or fire department to check in, Beatrice has been fine, apologetic about worrying her friends, but hasn’t offered an alternative solution for future panics.

I arrived at the house around 1PM, rang the doorbell, noticed dog feces smell, checked the mailbox (empty, and Elsie had written), opened the screen (unlocked, unusual, hmm), st.a.r.t.e.d .. to .. r. a. p. on the window and realized it was broken and the door swung open.

This is a true story. It happened to me, today.

So, I called 911 on my cell phone and it took a while (an hour plus) but it turned out the fire department had broken in 2 days ago at the neighbor’s request, found her and her dog’s bodies in the house, but been unable to figure out the next of kin. The detective was glad to hear from me. The bodies had been there for some time.

One thing I got was a clear visual answer to why Beatrice sometimes left her phone off the hook for a month or more. My family had become aware shortly after my uncle married her that she was an alcoholic, but neither she nor my uncle ever admitted it. (That combination was the biggest reason my mother never liked her, but I had found myself unable to tell Beatrice that.) When she totally stopped drinking about 20 years ago, she still never admitted she had been a closet drinker. When my uncle died, or maybe before, she apparently went back to it.

I rather wish my immediate family wasn’t out of town just now. It’ll be a little hard not to brood over sights and smells tonight.

Poem written by Jennifer’s mother.
Photograph of Jennifer’s grandmother.

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January, February, March, April

Christmas was one of the times to be born:
Christmas or January, the Christmas mothers
having quickened to the call of spring
more urgently, put out their shoots
like indoors plants in the pull of the early sun,
before the warmth of air and sky
and earth and water could tempt the rest.

Yet she was not a Christmas baby,
but an April, conceived in summer
when all the world was hot and vibrant,
not gone to seed. She was moreover
an inflation baby, thought of
before depression, born after.
No, they had not wanted her,
they said so, later, frankly.
“But you were such a cheerful baby,
you smiled, and we were glad you came.”

And yet she knew, she had her birthday mates,
born the self-same day: parents divorced,
baby squalling in the background.
The grandmother brought them up, the aunt.
Not hers, no, with her mother too Puritan
to quit the father, penniless, despondent.
Hers stuck, said nothing but,
“We didn’t want you, no, but you
were such a happy baby, you smiled,
we had to laugh.”

Yes, it was one of the times of year
to be born, April, conceived in summer,
carried triumphant through the blazing fall,
holding heavy through the long
New England winter, holding, heavy, despondent.
(And will we all get through it this year?
she couldn’t help but wonder. No,
for Grampa died on Friday.) And then,
in April, the hepaticas curling silvery
and the skunk cabbages curving purple,
then to come: sturdy, smooth,
small, dark and determined. Then
to come, yes, to be born.

Yes, it was one of the times of year to be born,
April, the world waiting expectant,
ready to laugh and smile through the wet,
and she grew like an April child, shy,
expectant, into summer. “What,”
she said, “will the world do, now
I am come? Will it perhaps change?
They will war no more when they see me.
People will work and war no more.
There will be no orange peels thrown in the street.”

So she went forth to seek her fortune,
and was strong, willing, worked hard and was tired.
She stooped to pick up orange peels
a thousand times a day, candy wrappers, pop bottles.
But they threw them, and at her, and she said,
“Good heavens, whatever is the matter?”
and they said, “Shit. Aw, shit.”

“You know,” said her friend one May morning, “it seems
really quite senseless to me, yes,
it is very lovely to sit here under
the apple blossoms eating liverwurst
sandwiches on pumpernickel bread,
and carefully saving the waxed paper to stow
in the receptacle at the end of the park,
but it really does seem quite senseless to me:
when you look underneath, there is absolutely nothing
holding it all up. It is like Euclid,
lovely and simple and complicated, but
there is nothing behind those geometry
theorems at all.”

“Oh, that is true,” answered the girl helplessly,
“but the apple blossoms are lovely,
are they not?” Yet her heart sank
within her, for her friend, too,
was an April baby, born that self-same
day of affirmation just past,
but her friend asked so very much.
“I,” her friend said, “am not sure
that I shall bother to look again,”
and the girl knew the bottomless panic
for the first time. When her friend
died, and by her own hand, the girl
was furious. God was stupid, exceedingly stupid;
there had been a terrible mistake.

So she wrote to a boy she knew, also April.
“Come,” she said, for she knew no other
word, “is the world not beautiful,
will they not war no more when they see us?
Come, we are grown, it is May already,
time that we and our lives bore fruit.
Come, we will work and be tired, come.”

And so there was marriage, January children,
all but the first. Tired. They were tired.
Christmas came, January and winter
set in. “Here,” she said, “it is only
February, I am exhausted, they
are driving me wild, here it is only
twenty to three, supper at five,
bed at seven, and already they
have crayoned the walls, clayed the floor,
spilled milk twice and left six leaky
orange juice cans in a pool on the couch.
Only nineteen minutes of three
and the fifth of February.”

“Come,” she said to them, snowsuits, mittens,
boots, hats, “out, under the sky,
along the Charles, under the sycamores,
there will be a sign.” And the sign came:
black birds came alight on
the forsythia branches, shaking the snow.

She gathered the large sprays and hurried them home.
“These will be forced,” she said,
“before you know it, it will be March,
the room will be ablaze with yellow,
it will be lovely. We will see
the philodendron sprout and
the kalanchoe bloom. The long
winter weeks of brooding will be over.
Spring will come for us, yes,
rebirth, yes, the affirmation.
Why could she not have waited? ëMy friend,
we are all, else, here. We all are,
though Grampa did die on Friday.’”

It was, it was a good time to be born, April.
More babies were born into the world,
sons of April sons, daughters
of April daughters, those that were left
after war, suicide, divorce and darkness.
More babies wriggled in wrenching agony
toward the world, strong and moist
as hyacinth buds freshly surfacing,
tensed for the last huge pushing pop.
“Yes, pop, they do pop, corks from bottles,
except slightly more dignified. Yes,
sweetheart, you did, too. I was
tired, but I was glad you came.”

More babies were born into the world,
January, February, March and April,
some on her birthday: a boy, Christopher,
a girl, Sarah (the names that year).
Six pounds, twelve ounces, eight
pounds, four. Did the parents know
that Christopher was “Christ-bringer,”
Sarah, the middle name
for Hitler’s Jews? What
did they know, except for club feet,
which didn’t happen any more,
though flippers did. What could
they know, except for constipation?
Over and over she bore them
or bore them with her, through
January, February, March
and April. They’d make it
to April, many an April. Such
a fine time of year to be born.

Except then it struck her:
May was the problem.

Nancy Tomlinson Hall Rice 1930 – 1988
(This poem was written sometime between 1962 and 1973.)

“Sturdy, smooth, dark and determined.”

With permission, I’m posting this email Adam sent to both me and his father.

The New York Lighfair was enormous, though lacking some familiar names. Lots of big names don’t show a booth, both because of industrial espionage, but also the cost — the bigger you are, the harder to distinguish yourself, so the more it costs. $30k – $50k seems like the low end of the high end. Didn’t see any of those factories’†people either — they sometime send folks to walk about just for the sake of being there politically.

The trip was good, though not especially “productive”. We took the Acela high-speed Amtrak train†down from a stop on 128/95 south of Boston –†3 hrs. 15 min. there to Penn. Station. And just days before they were grounded for brake problems. Rode down sitting with a rep friend†and Tracy from Ripman, who’s just gotten engaged, her boyfriend proposing underwater while scubadiving in Curacao!

Dropped our luggage at the Times Square Westin (not to mention dropping several hundred dollars) then a free shuttle to the Javits Convention Center on the lower West Side. Walked onto the floor about noon, where we were to meet a German manufacturer for lunch.

There’d been a change of plans, though, so no lunch. Invites to Germany on their dime at some unspecified time, but no lunch. Despite grumbly stomachs, we decided to just hit the aisles and later bought savory crepes (of all things) from a sales floor vendor. Huge show, with hundreds of booths. Lots of interesting new stuff, though little approaching revolutionary. LEDs have really hit their stride, showing up in everything from track fixtures and outdoor spotlights to neon-like linear things and television-like panels. Much of it kinda silly, really, though some of it quite useful and clever. And Chinese firms were as usual†dense around the fringes, making few contacts that I could see but engaging in the aforementioned subtle espionage. Luke even saw someone thrown off the floor for unauthorized photography. And China itself (or its trade commission or something) took†several whole “blocks” of booths, a first in my experience.

Show closes at 6:00 each day, and after waiting in a huge line for the shuttle bus and changing back at the hotel, we were off for the first of the night’s attempt at three parties, at the Guggenheim, arriving there about 7:30.††Few familiar faces, and the museum devoid of art for the first four floors due to an installation in the atrium — a 90-degree outside-corner mirrored tower reflecting the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral back on itself, with small panels of neon-green colored taped applied as dashes to the insides of the spiral rail/walls for visual clarity. Clever for about 5 minutes. Then funny for the funhouse mirror moments for†a few minutes more, and then the stark whiteness of the place begins to gnaw, the black-clad human ants insufficient and equally stark counterpoint. Tasty hors d’ouevres and free drinks kept us there a half-hour or more, but then we were off for the next party, thrown at storied The Tavern on the Green in Central Park.

More mirrors, but a†whole other experience. Zigzagging paneled halls of faceted mirrors confuse the eye but ultimately†lead you into a brashly frilly open space full of white latticework gingerbread and drippy crystal chandeliers, where hundreds of people were hoovering up extensive tablefulls of food and free booze, a few dancing in the central greenhouse atrium (to cheesy Abba covers as we arrived, almost spinning on our heels and departing in response). Many hundreds more were in the†equally drippy†garden outside, where the huge trees are wrapped trunks-to-branch-tips in glitter-light nets. We’re told that over 700 showed up, about double the expectation, making a harried night of it for the waitstaff.

Some compatriots and old friends were smoking cigars outside (like everybody else who for some reason finds that habit a social necessity — not that you’d get any truly fresh air in NYC, but you had to go inside for it there), so we stayed to talk. After about as much as we could take, though, we were rescued by a phone call from the third party, which was nearing its close at 9:30, our friends about to head out for dinner. So we scooted by foot a couple blocks down to the Time Warner complex on Columbus Circle, a fascinatingly massed almost twin tower of curved glass, up to the 15-minutes-of-fame-trendy new Stone Rose bar, where I managed most of a quick Glenmorangie port finish, one icecube, which beat the Red Label and Dewars from the last parties, before wistfully leaving it half-full as the last member showed up and we were off for dinner.

Which was at one of New York’s most famous steakhouses. And me a vegetarian. One walks in past the deliberately windowed meat curing room full of darkened slabs of aged and tagged meat. A macabrely repetitive scene of bizarre simplicity, floor to ceiling beef. Despite that, we forged ahead, and later, my ordering the “Seasonal Vegetable Platter” was a rollicking moment of irony, the wine good, the stories entertaining, ranging from my growing up in Venezuela to one of the reps’ it-only-gets-worse tale of misbehaving and being serially thrown out of a Jimmy Buffet concert for his increasingly insane attempts to get back in after the first transgression forcefully separated him from the clients he was entertaining.

It wasn’t all fun and games, as some business and politics were slid in subtly, but after we left, we declined the last stop at a swanky bar and instead wandered back to our hotel through Times Square marvelling at the excess, and hit the hay about 1:00 a.m.

We also declined our last offer, breakfast at The Rainbow Room the next morning –†probably a mistake, but Lukas, father of two small children, never gets to sleep in, and that seemed more enticing. So he and I went to a small cafe for a leisurely breakfast, then checked out, and got back to the Javits about 11:00. Many more familiar and long-lost faces, and more in-depth conversations, the pressure to see it all dispelled by the first day’s efforts. I was less effective than Luke, staggering about on legs that were quite done yesterday, thank-you-very-much, and randomly hitting up interesting booths. Our separating both days was good strategy, though, as there was little overlap in our efforts.

Perfunctory lunch there again, some political intrigue to do with reps and firings and Machiavellian scheming, more old friends, then off for Penn Station for our 7:00 p.m. train., home about 11:00.