Day 400…
In the last ten days or so, we have had artichokes twice. I think that accounts for at least 50% of the total times that I have ever had artichokes in my life, possibly more.
I haven’t fully developed an opinion about artichokes yet. I don’t dislike them at all, but they do involve a certain amount of work. I’m a little uncertain about the texture, but I made the decision last night to get past that and I actually enjoyed them a bit more. I’m still not completely sure which parts to eat and which to discard, but I got into the heart of it. I was too leery of venturing in past the fibery covering the last time to fully enjoy them.
There’s a trace of desperation that’s becoming noticeable in Michael’s voice when he says, “so what should we have for dinner?” A week or two ago, when he made artichokes for the first time, he was excited. They were a wonderful novelty. They’d caught his eye in the store and he bought some on an impulse. They were something that we hadn’t had before. We’ve had a rotating cycle of asparagus, broccoli, brussels sprouts, green beans, cauliflower and other vegetables but as we are now 400 days into this pandemic, that cycle has repeated itself more often than either of us can count.
Michael has always been a very good cook and I think he enjoys it. At least he used to enjoy it. I am guessing that at times he does and at times he wishes that he didn’t have to do it. Over this year, he has gotten even better at it. The kitchen is set up efficiently and we have gotten rid of a lot of stuff that we never used. We’ve also added in a few tools that have made the cooking easier.
400 days into this pandemic there are few parts of New York City that I have not walked in now. I readily admit that I’ve covered downtown far more thoroughly than I’ve covered uptown, but I’ve done a pretty good job of hitting most of it. I often tune out as I’m walking and find myself drawn to familiar paths so I will purposefully try and veer off in an unlikely direction when I catch myself doing that.
Yesterday I went to the Morgan Library which is down on 34th Street and Madison. I have been there before but rarely and I couldn’t tell you the last time I was there. A four-story entrance atrium was constructed in 2006 and I think it’s possible that yesterday was the first time I was ever in it.
The Library was begun in 1906 to house the financier J.P. Morgan’s collection of rare books and artwork. The main building was designed by Charles McKim and the 2006 atrium connects it with several other buildings including a 19th Century Italianate brownstone house. At the time that brownstone house was built there were many enormous private homes along that stretch of Madison Avenue. The Library is almost the sole survivor of that era, clinging on among the roots of a forest of glass and steel skyscrapers that have grown up around it.
During this past year, I have walked past it several times, but it has always been closed. The other day I noticed somebody coming out of it and realized that it was open. It took me a few days to line up one of my walks to get there, but I finally did.
J.P. Morgan’s actual library is still set up inside. If I was fantasizing about what I would do with too much money, having a library just like that one would be near the top of the list. It’s three levels tall with secret staircases behind the shelves to get up to the top. The cases themselves are all dark wood with glass-fronted doors and the ceiling is ornately painted with everything from the zodiac to portraits of famous writers. It manages to be inviting and magnificent at the same time. If it were suddenly mine, I’m not sure I’d change a thing about it beyond moving my own books into it. Sitting and reading in front of a fire roaring away in the huge marble-covered fireplace in that room while it was raining or snowing outside would be my idea of a certain kind of heaven.
Would I still think that it was heaven after 400 days?
In August of last year, I was desperate to travel somewhere. Anywhere. Early in that month Michael and I went to Provincetown up on the Cape and then later on in the month I took a ten-day road trip to North Dakota just because. Those trips helped.
I’m not feeling that kind of pent-up energy now. I’m just ready to be doing something else. I’m not desperate for it. I’m just ready.
The CEO of Pfizer announced today that those of us who have been vaccinated with their shot would likely need a third booster shot after about a year. This isn’t surprising because nobody really knows yet, how long any of these are really going to last. Like the flu, we may need an annual shot against it.
The Johnson and Johnson vaccine has been put on temporary hold while 6 women’s cases of blood clots are investigated that seemed to be linked to it. That is 6 people out of 6.8 million vaccines. Women are far more likely to develop blood clots from being on the pill than they are from this vaccine. 6 people out of 6.8 million people is beyond a microscopically small percentage. Compare that to the risk of getting COVID itself where up to about 16% of ALL of the people who have contracted the virus have experienced some sort of blood clot issue.
Having gotten the vaccine, there doesn’t appear to be anything more that we can actually do other than wait for everyone else around us to catch up. After lagging behind the world in everything having to do with containing this virus, we seem to be ahead of most other places when it comes to getting vaccinated against it. Countries that were beating down their curves seem to be struggling to distribute enough jabs for their citizens.
For us to really be able to start up again, we are all going to need to be inoculated - here in this country and abroad. The shame about these 6 cases is that they are going to make people shy away from wanting to get it. Whatever the Governor of Texas says, we are not anywhere close to having achieved herd immunity from people actually getting it. Unless we want to fill our morgues to overflowing, that’s not a direction we want to take.
I don’t really have a sense yet of what my industry is going to look like when we start going back to it. I don’t think that I am going to be doing exactly what I was doing before. Partially that’s because I think that the structure around what I was doing is going to be remade with fewer people and the work is going to be meted out in a different way. That’s already started with some of those things that are in their early planning stages. I’m already not being asked to do some of what had been my work before.
The other part of it is that I simply don’t want to do everything that I was doing before we stopped. I’m not sure what it is that I actually want to do, but I am looking forward to finding that out. So far, everything penciled in on my calendar is something that I actually want to do. Most of it is either new or a fresh variation on an old theme. Some of it will get cancelled and rescheduled and some other things will pop up and some of it may actually happen. I have a sense of anticipation about it all that I haven’t felt in quite a long time.
As the Derek Chauvin trial winds begins to come to its close, we are all, regardless of which way it goes, faced with learning how to work within our industry differently. There’s been a lot of active discussion about racial and gender politics this past year and now we are going to have to put all of that into common practice. Up until now, there has been nothing practical that we can do with all that we’ve witnessed and experienced. We’ve been learning a new language and we are about to have to actually speak it out loud and see how we do. It’s going to be bumpy at first and there are going to be missteps and mistakes aplenty. Until we actually start, though, what it’s really going to be like is clouded in mystery.
I’m not sure that we will fully know what we’ve lost this past year, either, until we are back up and running without it. When you start something new, the first day is always nerve-wracking. You don’t know what to expect and you don’t know who all the new people are. You look out at a sea of strange faces and you think that they won’t possibly ever be as good or as fun or as close to you as that last group was. Then you realize that you thought the same thing about that group when you first saw them.
This next period of time before everything starts seems to stretch ahead endlessly. How many more routes can I possibly find through this city and how many more meals can Michael possibly come up with?
It was raining today in the city as I walked so there were not all that many people out. The ones who were, were all intent on either avoiding the rain or reveling in it.
I chose to revel in it.
I ended up down by the East River between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges on some streets I had never seen before.
When I got home and dried off, Michael served up the artichokes as an appetizer. As I said at the beginning of this, I chose to enjoy them. And I did.
One of the most beautiful songs that Stephen Sondheim ever wrote is the song Move On, from Sunday in the Park with George. In it, an artist is stuck, and he is being given some advice:
Stop worrying where you're going
Move on
If you can know where you're going
You've gone
Just keep moving on
I chose, and my world was shaken
So what?
The choice may have been mistaken
The choosing was not
You have to move on
Look at what you want
Not at where you are
Not at what you'll be
We are, all of us, the sum of our choices.
Whether we are choosing how we want to spend our lives or whether or not to give a poor artichoke the benefit of the doubt, we have to keep making every single one of those choices.
More often than not, in my experience, the best choice is just to say yes.
It’s often the time when you least want to do something or change something or repeat something, that you break through into something new.
How many walks can we take and how many meals can we possibly eat?
All of them.
If you want artichoke eating advice- give me a call
💞”Look at what you want”
after this...going to listen to that song...COVID afforded me all the time and space for exactly that.
And in addition
to what I don’t want..
Artichokes?! I have the best recipe of my Mother’s...to share
💞💕