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adventures / family / Thursday — Comments Off
30
Dec 10

Peas and carrots

The Yankee is back from New England. Picked her up at the airport, which is, I think, the low-water mark for people watching.

It could have been my mood. After the drive to Atlanta, which was fine, if drizzly in places, I found a traffic jam in the parking deck. I made it inside 10 minutes early, to see the arrivals board already had her plane on the ground. This was really a statement of confidence on the part of the airline and the airport. The plane was still in the air, but close. They were supposing that they could get the plane down, or that gravity would lend a hand.

Thankfully for all involved the prophecy proved true. I stood at the landing by the escalators that bring up passengers from the underground trains. There a woman was more than a little miffed to have to wait for her husband. It was as if, she implied to her children, that the entire unseen process of landing a plane, gathering one’s things, disembarking and traveling through an airport the size of a small city was entirely his fault and he was doing it on his own schedule with complete disregard for her.

No wonder he was taking his time.

Two other young ladies were waiting for their friend. There was a great deal of texting between them, the expectant waiters and the unseen traveler. When that broke down — “How did she get to baggage? Where’s baggage? Why isn’t she here? Where am I!?!?” — they reverted to an actual phone call. Their friend had exited the train and entered the wrong terminal. So they hung up the phone and left.

Sadly I’ll never know if they were able to find their friend.

An airport steward came along and instructed us to get out of the walkway. We were a fire hazard, he said. We were standing between an escalator and the restrooms. No one moved. He did not put up much of a fight, convinced by our logic that, in the event of a fire in the area, we would no longer be a hazard.

Finally The Yankee rode up the escalator. We were like peas and carrots again.

Picked up her bags, which were being belched onto the conveyor as we walked up and quickly left the airport before much more of this tragic comedy could hold us up. People are very stressed, inattentive and not really prone to thinking for themselves at the airport.

I know this because the stories she told of her entire adventure pretty much backed up the idea. Someone should do a study.

adventures / Alabama / family / iPhone / memories / photo / recipes / weekend — Comments Off
26
Dec 10

Catching up

And, now, the regular attempt to add more pictures that were somehow neglected over the course of the last week.

Studying. I’m doing it.

Lots of it.

This is the tree at the main entrance of St. John the Divine in New York, where we saw the Winter Solstice concert.

One of the nicer things about winter is that The Yankee sometimes wear scarves and I can take this picture.

I’m violating my food photography rule here, I know, but this is Pepe’s. This is serious. If you’re in Connecticut, or in Yonkers or anywhere in New England, really, you have to visit Pepe’s. This is one of the better pizza pies you’ve ever eaten.

Family photos are fun. These are my great-grandparents. That’s their youngest grandchild, which would put this picture in the early 1980s. They both look great here. She always looked great, though. And he was the very definition of a Southern gentleman and perhaps one of the finer men I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. We all miss him very much.

I don’t know that I’d ever seen the picture before. I took this on Christmas Eve at my aunt and uncle’s house, so this is a picture of a picture, and almost shooting from the hip, as it were.

Now I feel like I’m re-living my childhood. Punch and cookies, the staple food at my grandparents’ home.

Want the recipe? This is a delicious punch … but do cut back on the sugar.

adventures / family / iPhone / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
20
Dec 10

America runs on tennis shoes

“This is a good system,” The Yankee said.

We’ve been doing our mileage at the park near her childhood home. This is the park where, two years ago in nine feet of snow and a 17-degree atmosphere that we took our engagement pictures. It was the only day I’ve ever noticed that the wind chill was warmer than the actual temperature. Apparently strange things can happen in a nor’easter.

And it was too nine feet of snow.

There was a picture where we sat on a snow covered bench. We suffered for that particular piece of art. The photograph has never surfaced. I reminded her of all of this today.

Anyway, the system is the park and then down to the nearby Dunkin Donuts.

“On the other hand” I said, “we would go broke if we followed this system every day.”

How you know I don’t have a lot of Dunkin experience. I thought “Holiddays” cup was merely a typo. Apparently it is a code meant to entice a Pavlovian response to all the regular customers that they must run to the store for another coffee. I was unaware.

We spent much of last night working in Photoshop. Such is the chore for creating the modern gag gift. We have a friend who has a particularly morbid Facebook gimmick and we’re going to bring it to life. We printed the finished product today. I’m not saying it will win Present of the Year honors, but I will say I came up with this idea last Christmas.

The great thing is that we can recycle this gag every year.

We had prime rib and Kenny-Christmas tonight, since I won’t be here later this week. I got nice clothes, a cool book and a lot of fun stuff. The best gift was when my mother-in-law donated shoes to a nine-year-old boy for me. That’s the perfect age, really. Little boys are tough on sneakers.

I grew up in that time when sneaker prices were exploding to obscene levels. Simultaneously this was a period that your peers would judge you based on your footwear. Sure, they’d judge you for most everything, but shoes were important.

I never had good shoes. I had Walmart or Payless shoes. The imitations seldom fooled anyone, and they were less than durable. At the time, it mattered; maybe it still does. Perhaps that’s why I wear shoes today — the cheapest New Balance or reasonable loafers or boats I can find — until my feet finally reject them. Shoes, I feel, have to last. That’s probably the only way I can pay my mother back for all the shoes I ran through as a kid. (Once we bought shoes on a Friday and they were destroyed before school on Monday. I still feel pretty bad about that.)

So I hope that little boy gets a nice pair this Christmas. I hope they help make a great Christmas for him and that they mean something to him. I hope he takes care of them — as much as a nine-year-old can — because that’s a great gift.

My mother-in-law, in addition to her many other charms, is a wonderful shopper. She also buys me too many presents. I like this one most of all.

adventures / Friday / iPhone / video — 1 Comment
17
Dec 10

Video in the city

For all of your bathroom needs … I guess.

The guy’s best line: “Look at them! They’re making a beeline for the pee line!”

That’s the first thing you see when you climb out of the subway in Manhattan. I’d say this would be a great promotional way to use empty space, but then there’s all the plumbing to consider. Apparently it was free, though. So hooray for Charmin.

My father-in-law said “I can’t believe you didn’t take a picture of that.” It just struck me as too funny, I guess.

A quick look at a few of the nice windows at Lord and Taylor in Manhattan:

I liked the reflective glare because you can see a few faces of window watchers and the bustle going on at street level. It gives the entire setting an even more ethereal quality.

Below each display was a brief story about Christmas traditions in different people’s lives. The windows depicted the scenes. Very neat idea. Lord and Taylor could do this for years and it would be a winner. Saks did a steam punk child’s fantasy which was OK, but the Lord and Taylor series won the day. Here are a few other windows to check out.

The giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center:

The tree is illuminated by 30,000 environmentally friendly LED lights on five miles of wire, and crowned by a Swarovski crystal star.

The 12-ton, 74-foot tall Norway Spruce was donated by a New York City firefighter, and there’s an interesting tale in that link. After the holidays the tree will be recycled and three tons of mulch are donated to the Boy Scouts. Part of the trunk will go to the U.S. Equestrian team to use as an obstacle jump.

We had dinner at Ben Benson’s, a delicious Manhattan steakhouse. I snapped a few of pictures inside that will show up on the site later. Little plaques decorate the walls, apparently Al Roker and Boomer Esiason, among others, dine at that table. I was finally able to meet Jimmy, who is the afternoon manager. He’s a family friend — The Yankee used to work with his wife — and an incredibly nice man.

He introduced us to another couple who sat down right after us, also from Alabama. They’d just been married in Central Park and had taken a carriage to the restaurant. Very cute.

We took the subway back uptown for a concert, the 31st Annual Paul Winter’s Winter Solstice. Winter is a prominent saxophonist, bandleader, composer and performer of “Earth Music,” incorporating a wide range of instruments and influences to create what he calls “the greater symphony of the Earth.” So the show was a little bit different, but both full of energy and reflective. It might not be a concert for everyone, or even one that we would have picked ourselves, but it was well recommended and also well received.

St. John the Divine, where the concert is held each year, is a 19th Century cathedral and has a seven-second reverberation. Winter says it is like playing in heaven.

Near the end of the performance a giant globe was hoisted into the rafters of the old church. And he invites everyone to exclaim their “howlelujahs” for the new year.

None of the voices you hear there are mine, but that’s apparently a part of the concert tradition. People walked out into the cold night air, still howling.

This is the end of the concert.

That’s Winter playing the soprano saxophone. The supporting musicians are all virtuoso performers in their own right. The dance troupe was very talented. It’s a nice show.

The summer solstice concert takes place in the early a.m., timed so that at the dramatic moment of the concert the sunlight streams into this beautiful cathedral. They say it is worth the 4:30 start time.

adventures / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Dec 10

Special Church Christmas party

Santa paid a visit to the Special Church Christmas party. The guests lit the advent candles, ate cake, got presents and sang songs, including perhaps the greatest song ever written “Cowboys and Coyotes.” It involves a lot of howling and noise making and you would not believe how good or catchy this song is.

What was cute were the people coming up to Santa saying, “I believe in you, Santa.” And they really, really do.

“Smile, Santa!”

“I am, you just can’t see it through my beard!”

This is a project of my mother-in-law’s, because she’s just an awesome lady. She runs this program. It isn’t even her church. And she has a special inside connection to Santa, because she’s an awesome lady. Special Church is the neatest thing. I’m glad we get to be included in it from time to time.

We had dinner at Tutti’s. This is in one of the reviews on Trip Advisor: “We got the worst table in the place, a two top, which is almost in the kitchen and we didn’t even care.”

I cleaned my plate. I got the gold star. Just insanely good.

Late into the evening we visited a family friend. We were in the house of a man who has been featured in Sports Illustrated. I think that might be a first for me. He may have been on the short list for casting of the most interesting man alive campaign. The man celebrated Christmas as a child on Old McDonald’s farm.