My Bold Bonus Life: 12

Food report from my bonus 18-day life in Manhattan: above you’ll see a lamb kofta burger from a fine establishment called 5 Napkin Burger.

It was impressively good. And as juicy as advertised. In fact, 5 napkins were not enough; I needed a bib, really wrecked my shirt.

Speaking of wreckage, here’s the update on yesterday’s crisis with the plant that I’m supposed to be plant-sitting for here that I allowed to dry up. (All the other plants around it were fine?!) Thank you for the sympathy and advice that came pouring in. People all over the country have pondered over this plant. No one has yet been able to identify it, including the person in the library at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens where I took it this afternoon for a consult. She’s going to do further checking and get back to me. I’ve yet to hear back from the vacationing Audrey Hepburn who owns this apartment and its plants.

In the meantime, I bought a nice jasmine at the BBG to fill the space in the bank of terrace plants that was like a missing front tooth. And have done what I can to start the wounded one into recovery; in the days to come, we shall see….

And I am pretty much psychologically recovered. I suppose there had to be a crisis if this was going to be a real mini-life. I hope I have that covered now.

Rest of the day quite busy. I’d decided I had to get a grip on my schedule. Without office hours or Husband Bob to keep me in line, sleep had been sliding all over the place. (Probably not surprising in the setting up of a mini-life. At first, it’s like going off to school….)

Today I was up-and-at-’em by the not-too-taxing hour of eight. Had time for a cruise through Saks and some perfume testing, before hitting the Matisse show at Moma. (Bathers by a River repeatedly caused me shivers, don’t know why; but it’s widely considered a masterpiece so there’s something at work there).

A very strange installation by Bruce Nauman also stopped me. It was a room full of recorded voices repeating the names of days over and over. The idea at first seemed to me somehow sophomoric, and then when I first walked in: insane. And then I was very taken by it. The names of days coming from every direction felt like time hurrying, something I’m quite conscious of, more in my regular life than in this bonus life.

After my afternoon gardening consult in Brooklyn, I headed for “home”, but took the wrong train. Wound up zooming out to Queens. When I realized this, I decided to just keep going. I’d meant to go out to Astoria anyway, had heard it was the largest Greek community outside of Greece, and seemed important to my multi-national tour of the boroughs.

My short walk in Astoria, hauling two large plants still, was in a pleasant downtown largely-residential neighborhood, with Greek and Latin people seeming to predominate. Lots of Greek names on businesses, but no Greek-Island-style houses climbing hills from the dazzling blue sea. I was only there about an hour, maybe I missed them.

Food report from this afternoon: a cup of chocolate frozen yogurt in Astoria and one of chocolate ice cream in Brooklyn. A traveling feast.

Back in Manhattan, still hauling the two plants, I browsed through Bloomingdale’s which was an elegant Friday night carnival. As I finally headed to the apartment, one of the drivers of the Central Park horse buggies,nodded at my two plant sacks and called out to me, “You better clean out those bags. There’s stuff growing out of them.”

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Categories: Matisse, Moma, New York travel