Weekend Update (Friday Edition):
Out All Day
As planned, Ms NOLA came up to Yorkville when her office closed for summer hours at one. M le Neveu, who was to come as well, was feeling under the weather, so he stayed in bed. It was a good day for staying in bed here in New York, and we wanted the late graduate student to be in a good shape for dinner. He is here for the weekend, and Kathleen and I took advantage of his presence in town to insist on a celebration at BLT Steak. What with her acquisition of a book, and his graduation from Columbia, there were ample grounds for congratulation. He is a genuine PhD now, and she an equally genuine editor in New York publishing. Both of them worked very hard to pass these milestones, and Kathleen and I are hugely proud of them.
So Ms NOLA and I had lunch by ourselves, at Tokubei, the Japanese pub across the street that is now open for lunch. Then we packed up enough Spode Blue Italian to serve six people. Once upon a time, I had twenty place settings of the pattern; it was our everyday china in the country. Kathleen kept saying that she didn’t like it very much, but I would always answer that, because it has been in continuous production since the year after Jane Austen died (or thereabouts), replacements are never a problem — unlike every other pattern in our pantry. Ten years after selling the country house, however, all that Blue Italian has turned into something of a white elephant. I was going to take a stack of it to Housing Works, but Ms NOLA expressed an interest, so we stashed stacks of plates and bowls in plastic grocery bags and stashed the plastic bags in sturdy LL Bean totes and (most important) grabbed a taxi to Hamilton Heights.
It was my plan to take a look round and then head home. But the weather outside was frightful, and it was much more agreeable to sit in Ms NOLA’s flat and talk about Aquinas and Kant with my nephew (who, in English, is really my cousin). Because our dinner reservation was for 6:30, I looked at my watch at 4:20 and decided just to hang until it was time to head for Park and 57th.
It has been a very long time since I just passed the time of day, as the saying goes, at home, much less at someone else’s house. Given the company, I found the experience most enjoyable, and my friends, who don’t get to spend enough time together these days, were most gracious about sharing themselves with me.
Just before lunch, I told Ms NOLA that I’d discovered a site that gives pronunciations for the tricky names of certain New Yorkers, and I’d learned that Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker contributor and dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, pronounces his name to sound like a well-known citrus fruit. Ms NOLA nodded her head with slightly melancholy smile, looking on the bright side of my catching up, once again, with the rest of the class.