This is one of those horrible days when nobody in Manhattan is out and about who doesn’t need to be. Alas, I do. Not only am I seeing three performances tonight and tomorrow (Merce Cunningham’s Ocean, Basil Twist’s La bella dormente nel bosco, and another program by Pilobolus), but I have a houseguest arriving on Saturday afternoon and countless errands to run before I hit the road again first thing Sunday morning.
All this notwithstanding, I decided to visit an art gallery today, having learned from Ionarts that Salander-O’Reilly, one of my favorite New York galleries, is featuring several of my favorite painters, among them Milton Avery, Jane Freilicher, Arnold Friedman, Marsden Hartley, Albert Kresch, and John Marin, in its summer inventory show, “Scapes/Landscapes.” I scooped up two dollars’ worth of accumulated nickels, hopped a crosstown bus to 79th and Madison, and there discovered that the summer hours posted on the Salander-O’Reilly Web site are off by an hour. (Fortunately, the show is up through August 26, so I’ll get another crack at it.) I wilted briefly in the sun, then noticed that a branch of my bank was right across the street, thus allowing me to do one of my essential pre-trip errands, which cheered me up no end. I returned to my air-conditioned apartment on the next bus, not much the worse for the wear.
As many of you will recall, my upcoming trip to Missouri is neither for pleasure nor business. My mother is undergoing spinal surgery on Monday, so I’ll be spending the next two weeks in Smalltown, U.S.A., looking after her while she recuperates. Since I’ve got a couple of deadlines hanging over my head, I’m bringing my iBook with me, and I hope to be blogging at least intermittently. (I’ve already freshened the Top Fives in preparation for my departure.) I don’t expect to be back on line until Tuesday at the earliest, though, so I thought I’d wave goodbye now.
If I were going to be posting an almanac entry on Monday, this’d be it:
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
V