A Winter Visit from Marion

It was a cold weekend, but a wonderful one, because I spent it entertaining my dear hometown friend Marion here in the city! During a visit to her now-home in San Antonio in October, I suggested (somewhat hopelessly) that she should come visit. December, I said, would be a good time. Perhaps it was the margaritas we were drinking, but Marion pulled out her phone and, to my surprise, began researching plane ticket options then and there. After taking a bit of time to research her options-and to let the margaritas wear off, I assume-she'd booked, and I ecstatically welcomed her on Friday for a weekend of fun in New York!

Cozy!

Marion, who has lived only in Texas and California, was rather nervous about the weather that was forecast for her visit. But she spent the weeks leading up to her trip assembling long underwear, warm hats, and a sturdy-but-stylish pair of waterproof boots. We had a very nice dinner our first evening, then had a few drinks at a nearby lounge. It was cold when we'd set out and even colder when we made our way home, and we clung to each other for the last part of the walk. The next morning, we woke to steadily falling snow, strong wind, and a layer of white accumulating slowly but surely on everything that hadn't been salted. Marion mostly hid her trepidation as we bundled up. She borrowed a warm coat of mine, and we walked into the West Village for a late breakfast and a bit of shopping. As is often the case in New York, some streets were fairly calm, but others were invisible wind tunnels, just waiting for two unsuspecting walkers to wander down them. We made it to a restaurant unscathed, and enjoyed watching the snowfall, and people and dogs both bundled in warm coats, through the window. It was great to have enough time to really catch up! It seemed a luxury to have one of my wises and most fun friends around for long enough to really enjoy each other's company instead of frantically trying to fit in all the filling in there was to do from long months apart.

Snowy West Village

We spent a bit more time poking around the Village, stopping occasionally to mop ineffectively at the mascara that streamed down both our faces. It really was lovely; this part of town is usually quite charming, but it was made more so by Christmas decorations, and their charm factor was amplified by the picturesque snowflakes that continued to drift gently down. (Occasionally exfoliating blasts of flakes were less welcome.) If that didn't put us in the holiday spirit, the crowds of Santas certainly did. Saturday just happened to be Santacon (short for Santa Convention, an event many locals celebrate by dressing as Santa and getting drunk in bars all over the city), and we saw Santas walking in groups down streets, smoking cigarettes outside bars, and tipping back drinks on the other side of windows. We saw even more of them when we boarded the subway for the east side to get to our next stop: the Morgan Library.

Letter by Poe, who had lovely handwriting

I'm always cautious about taking people to museums when they visit NYC - that's not the kind of trip some people are after. But Marion has been here a few times before, so she'd see lots of the highlights already. And the Morgan really is one-of-a-kind, and just up Marion's alley. We saw A Christmas Carol in Dickens' own hand (I'd seen it before; they must haul it out for the holidays every year), letters by Washington and Lincoln, scores by Wagner and Mozart, and loads of ancient books of hours, stamps, and maps. The main exhibit in the Morgan at the moment is a collection of poems and letters by Poe, which we enjoyed very much. There was also a Da Vinci exhibit, which was interesting but somewhat disappointing, as a lot of it consisted of work done by his students under his supervision instead of his own drawings. We did enjoy marveling over his trademark backwards handwriting, however, and spent some time flipping through a digital collection of his analysis of the flight of birds. And it's always wonderful to see Morgan's lush study and his dream-worthy library.

That night was a full one. Our first stop was a restaurant on the Lower East Side, an area that's tough to get to via subway. Hailing a cab wasn't likely, though, since they are always in very high demand in inclement weather, so we ended up using a car service for which we had a gift card to get to the restaurant. After a nice meal, we walked to a bar to have birthday drinks with our friend Kumanon. As forecast, the weather had begun to warm up. This, alas, was not good news, as the gentle snow had turned into hard little pellets of ice that stung as the wind flung them at my face. It was tough to tell how Marion was faring, as she was wearing a face warmer that most New Yorkers would consider overkill, but from the small sliver of her eyes that peeked out between her hood and the mask, I could swear she was smirking. I was relieved when we finally arrived at the bar after more than 15 minutes of trudging with a lowered head. After a bit of time with the birthday boy, we set out for the final stop of the evening, a Christmas party at a friends' apartment. It also, alas, was far from a subway line, and the hard ice pellets had softened by now into a steady drizzle. These conditions are never ideal for walking, but without an umbrella, and with temperatures in the mid-30's, we were especially loath to attempt it. By some miracle, however, we managed to hail a cab after only a few minutes of huddling under an overhang. We made our way home from the party at the end of the night by leaping into a cab outside our friends' building just as a homecoming resident was vacating it.

At the holiday concert

Sunday was a day of performances. After breakfast, Marion and I went for a walk around Central Park and browsed in some shops and in the Christmas market that had sprung up in Columbus Circle. The snow had mostly melted from the sidewalks and pavement around the city, but it remained on the lawns of the park. This was lucky, as Central Park is always especially bewitching when covered with snow. We must have seen at least twenty snowmen, and it was fun to watch the squirrels scurrying about over the soft, white blanket. We went straight from the park to nearby Lincoln Center for a performance of holiday music by a brass band from the philharmonic. They were joined by a trio made up of a piano player, a percussionist, and an upright bass player. This was Marion's treat to me, and it was a really wonderful show. We listened to music from various traditions and parts of the world. I particularly enjoyed watching the piano player. Set at an angle to his grand piano was what looked like a standard wooden upright but turned out to be a celeste (the instrument that makes the high, tinkling notes you hear in The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy). The musician would turn from one instrument to the other, and sometimes played the celeste with his left hand at the same time as he pressed the piano keys with his right! It was quite amazing, and I left feeling nearly full of holiday cheer.

Luckily, I still had room for a bit more seasonal merriment, because after dinner with Ed we headed to Radio City Music Hall to see the famous Christmas Spectacular. I confess that I was a tiny bit skeptical about this excursion. When Marion suggested it, I decided I'd be happy to see it with her because it was a classic New York experiences I'd never had, but I didn't expect to enjoy it much. It seemed like the kind of thing tourists come to do because they don't know any better, to say nothing of my feelings about the commercialization of Christmas. Instead, the show was a surprise and a delight. The famous Rockettes dominated the first half of the show, sometimes dressed as reindeer, sometimes as toy soldiers, and sometimes in other spangly costumes. I loved a lengthy tap dance to The Twelve Days of Christmas and was blown away by their precision in number after number. It really was mesmerizing.

The famous Rockettes-cum-reindeer

Stars of the show

The show was incredibly intricate. The sets were wonderful, the costumes dazzling, and the music (sometimes live, sometimes recorded) was of the highest quality. I marveled at how many parts of the stage moved. One number included a male and female figure skater who performed beautifully on what I can only assume was a real oval of ice decorated to look like a frozen pond in Central Park. The show had a few scenes dedicated to a fairly weak storyline about a girl who wants a video game for Christmas to the dismay of her mother who laments the days when kids played outside and read books. Santa saves the day, of course, but it was rather corny and forced. I much preferred the dance numbers, of which, luckily, there was plenty. We were in for another surprise as the show reached its end: a procession of the three kings and their entourages, dressed lavishly in beautiful costumes led live camels and a donkey across the stage! The animals reappeared, accompanied by about six real sheep, in a final nativity scene. I imagined them retiring to the green room afterward, where they'd relax and graze at the refreshments table with laughing Rockettes.

After fighting our way out of the throngs leaving the theater, we stopped to see the tree in nearby Rockefeller Center, which was just as lovely as always. The city really does a wonderful job of decorating this part of town for Christmas, and even though it was crowded I found myself filling with a deep contentment quite unlike the overwhelming irritation I feel whenever I have to walk through Times Square. Looks like all those carols paid off.

It was, of course, fantastic to see Marion, and I feel lucky that we'll be together again before too long when I head back to San Antonio for a friend's wedding in April. And it was wonderful to spend a wintery weekend experiencing New York through her eyes, thus gaining fresh perspective on the city I love.

Just Peachy: Selected Shorts and The Lucky Peach

I would never go so far as to describe myself as a foodie but I do enjoy trying new restaurants and cooking. And who doesn't love eating? So I was very excited for last night's Selected Shorts program, which was produced in conjunction with the food magazine Lucky Peach. I confess I'd never heard of Lucky Peach before purchasing tickets for the show. It's a collaboration between Peter Meehan, a writer prior to Lucky Peach and David Chang, the genius behind the Momofuku (translation: lucky peach) restaurants. They co-authored the Momofuku cookbook years ago, and have now moved on to magazine production. Lucky Peach is a quarterly collection of fiction and nonfiction writing all about food. Each issue has a theme. Meehan acknowledged that he doesn't cook recipes from most magazines, and feels that most other people don't either. Part of the reason is that sometimes the recipes are just not that good, certainly not as good as the recipes you'll find in a good cookbook. And the ones that are good are usually too complicated to make at home. Something David Chang would make his kitchen, said Meehan, could take several days and would usually require complicated equipment the average person is unlikely to have. For this reason, their magazine doesn't really have recipes; rather, it has literary descriptions of recipes written by chefs that evoke the experience of cooking. The magazine started in 2011 and has been very popular and successful.

Peter Meehan

David Chang

The show started later than usual last night. People seemed intrigued by the new theme-Selected Shorts usually focuses on a particular author or something a bit more abstract-and it took forever to get the long line of ticket buyers through the door. As Ed and I, who'd had our tickets mailed to us, waited in our seats, I eavesdropped on conversations around me. Lots of people seemed new to Symphony Space, which normally tends to draw more or less the same lit-loving crowd. 

The show began at last with an introduction by our intrepid host BD Wong, wearing his usual bowtie and vest. Next, Meehan and Chang took the stage. Meehan opened with a self-deprecating joke about how they were not performers and had no stage presence. As it turns out, this was absolutely true. I really enjoyed hearing their commentary throughout the evening, but they seem slightly awkward in front of all those eyes. Chang is a tall, chubby Asian man; never trust a thin cook, they say. Onstage, he stood with his feet apart as though he were steadying himself on a rocking ship's deck. He looked anxious. He wore Timberland boots, jeans, and a gray cardigan, which he unbuttoned and buttoned over course of the evening. Meehan wore jeans and blazer, his hornrimmed glasses perched just below a strange, pompadour-like mound of brown hair. He was probably about my age, but stood slightly stooped. He was pretty funny, but had a serious, deadpan delivery; a deaf audience member would have had no idea there was humor in his words. He seemed like the kind of very intelligent person who is always slightly scattered, and we got confirmation when he later told us that it was his four-year-old daughter's birthday that very day, and that when he'd scheduled this performance months ago he'd totally forgotten. He said she was pretty forgiving about the whole thing...

This was the first Selected Shorts performance I've attended at which I've recognized all of the readers. Often, most are local actors who've gotten parts in movies or TV shows here and there. One or two is usually quite famous and I'll generally recognize some of the others. But there are always unfamiliar faces. I recognized all of last night's line-up, though. It was headed by David Cross and Mario Batali. David Cross was simply hysterical, and did a bit of his own comedy routine at the end of a reading when he congratulated us for raising lots of money for a charity, then pretended to have a conversation with someone in the wing who told him that this wasn't a fundraiser. "But tickets are $28!" he exclaimed. "To listen to people read?" He wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and his beard made scratching sounds against his body mic as he read. 

Mario & crocs

Mario Batali was the only one of the bunch who was not a professional actor, but he was a very good performer anyway. I guess he's done enough cooking shows to have a stage presence, and he seems like a man who likes to entertain in general. No shrinking violet here. He spoke perhaps a little faster than would have been ideal, but he was expressive and entertaining. He read three pieces, all in the first half of the show, and we didn't see him again after intermission. He wore a massive vest over his protruding belly, and a thin red scrunchy (it had been a very long time since I'd seen one of those) held his somewhat limp ponytail in place. On his feet were his ubiquitous orange crocs, even though temperatures outside the theater hovered around thirty degrees.

The other two readers were Gaby Hoffman (if, like me, you're not exactly up-to-date on pop culture trends, you'll know her best as Kevin Costner's daughter in Field of Dreams) and Sarah Steele (who played Adam Sandler's daughter in Spanglish). I recognized both women, though they were much younger in the movies I knew them for. Both read very well. Interestingly, two of the writers whose work was read came to speak briefly about how they came to get the assignment they'd gotten, or the experience of writing the piece.

David Cross

Steele read the only fictional piece of the night. The style of the pieces was really varied, reflecting, I imagine, the hodgepodge found in each issue of the magazine. We heard several personal narratives, one about eating snake in a small African village and one about the emotional implications of seasoning cast iron. There was the fictional short story, and there was an essay about "perfect moments" in cooking, such as the brief week or two during which you can use fennel buds before they bloom and are gone until about the same time next year. Cross read a verbatim narration to a magazine writer by a chef in the South Pole. Hoffman read a short love letter to Seville Orange Marmalade. Batali narrated a series of comics drawn for one issue of the magazine as they were projected onto a screen above him. One piece, from the Chinatown issue, was all about Chinese drinking games. Meehan read a piece of his own, a meditation on crab rangoons and the period of his life when he was young and poor enough to think they were wonderful. (I still secretly think they are, though I know, deep down, that anything that combines cream cheese and imitation crab meat should not be wonderful.) The quality of the writing was good, particularly Meehan's piece, but not nearly as good as Ed and I have come to expect from Selected Shorts. But we both really enjoyed the evening and the performances very much. 

The show ended at about 9:30, and we were starving for several reasons. Eager to get to a restaurant and order half the menu, I was dismayed when it took forever to get out of the theater. When we reached the exit, we discovered the reason: Ushers were frantically handing out individually wrapped chocolate chocolate cookies from Momofuku to each member of the audience. I was eager to taste mine, having never been to Momofuku, but Ed and I ended up eating so much at a nearby restaurant that I couldn't imagine trying even a bite of my cookie. It awaits me on our kitchen counter, a tasty morsel to remind me of the deliciously good time I had last night.

The Walking Wounded

It's been a long time since I've posted, but I have a good excuse. I promise.

About a week after the marathon, I went under the knife. What began as a slight, nagging pain in my right wrist whenever I was in the push-up position got slowly worse over months and years. Eventually, it was hurting whenever I carried a heavy bag or even held the phone to my ear for a long time. Forget downward dog in yoga. An x-ray revealed nothing, but an MRI showed that I had several ganglion cysts and a small tear in a ligament in my wrist. So I scheduled a surgery to fix all this and showed up at the crack of dawn on November 13th to get it done. I was quite nervous the night before and all morning, and my panic peaked when I walked into the operating room. I wasn't wearing contacts and they'd made me take off my glasses, so I could hardly see as the nurse led me into a room filled with terrifying gadgets with a table at its center. Standing in the doorway, I started to tremble and nearly bolted, but figured that I wouldn't get far half-blind with no shoes on. Things were hairy at first. I climbed onto the table and felt obligated to make pleasant small talk with the distracted OR team while the trainee assigned to IV duty struggled. (Why I felt pressured to follow social norms while blind, gowned, strapped to a table, and terrified I can't tell you.) He couldn't get it into the back of my hand, and after about five minutes of jabbing and flicking had equal difficulty with several spots on the inside of my arm, eventually prompting the anesthesiologist to cluck sympathetically, "Oh, your poor vein!" But he hit pay dirt with the vein on the inside of my elbow at last. I remember saying, "Here it comes," and went out like a light as the powerful sedative kicked in. 

My memories of the hours after surgery are hazy. They brought Ed to see me in the recovery room, and he reports that we had a conversation about a blister on my toe (leftover from the marathon), which I do not remember. I was wearing a different gown than I'd fallen asleep in, which was somewhat disconcerting, my hair net was gone, and my right arm was encased in a half cast (plaster on the bottom and cotton and ace bandages on the top) and completely numb from just below the shoulder on down thanks to a nerve block. I fell asleep again for a bit, then dressed with the help of Ed and the nurse, manually wrangling my arm into place, gleefully immodest about donning my undergarments in front of a stranger due to the sedative. I was wheeled to a cab and dozed on and off during the ride home. Ed helped me down the stairs to bed and I went right to sleep. I woke for a snack and hour later, then slept again for at least three more hours. My arm gradually regained feeling over the course of the evening. It hurt, but really not too much.

Modeling the foam thing. Usually it rested on a tabletop with my hand sticking straight up in the air - suspending it like this while standing sort of defeated its purpose.

I worked from home the next day, and was back at work the day after that. I hadn't believed my doctor or my father that there wouldn't be much pain (doctors aren't great judges of this in my book), but I must admit that they were both right: it really wasn't bad. At first, my hand would throb a bit when it hung at my side for more than a minuter or two, and it helped to keep it arm elevated with a huge foam contraption they gave me, especially while sleeping. Eventually however, no longer needed it. It was nice to be rid of the foam thing, but the cast was still cumbersome It was so wide that I couldn't fit any long shirt sleeves over it, and in November this was a problem. Around the house, I was able to wear Ed's sweatshirts, but at work I made do with short sleeves and a space heater. I tried my best, but productivity was tough that week. My fingers were free, but the bulky piece of plaster under the heel of my hand made it tricky to do things like type. I relied on dictating text into it the body of an email message on my phone, then sending it to myself, copying the text into the document I needed to work on, and editing it on the screen. My handwriting was abysmal. At home, I couldn't wash or blow dry my hair without help, or do a million other things easily, and Ed was very patient and helpful. Walking around New York with one-and-half useful arms is awful. I will not miss grocery shopping or trying to wrestle an umbrella with a half-casted hand.

Stitch removal: less gross than expected.

Ten days after the surgery, I returned to the clinic to have the cast removed (yay!) and my stitches taken out. There were four incisions (arthroscopic surgery = shorter recovery time) and a small hole on the outside edge of my hand which was used for "drainage." Ew. It was so small that it hadn't needed to be stitched. I was given a removable splint, for which I was grateful, as my wrist felt fragile without the protection of the cast at first. A fellow who I'd met in the office before and who had worked with my surgeon in the OR popped his head into the exam room just as the nurse finally got the last bit of the cast off and asked me if I could move it. I obligingly held up my arm and tried. It was shocking how much mobility I had lost. After being immobilized for only about ten days, I could scarcely bend it. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it was unbelievably tight. Bending it felt like trying to stretch a very tight muscle. I felt that if I pushed it too far, something inside my wrist would snap. All four scars were perched atop a swollen lump about 1x2 inches, too.  I was eager to begin physical therapy.

Heat wrap

Currently, I'm slowly but surely getting my mobility back by doing a series of stretching exercises (basically bending it backward and forward as far as I can a bunch of times) each day and seeing a physical therapist twice a week. During my sessions, my wrist is encased in a heating wrap for a few minutes, then massaged somewhat painfully before I do some more stretching exercises and head home. I've made progress: at my first session, I could bend it only 10° in one direction (can't remember which), and even less than that in the other, but now I'm up to 45° one way and 40° for the other. I can use my wrist and hand for almost any daily task now, though I'm not supposed to lift anything heavier than a quart of milk for a while.  After a few more weeks, I will begin working on strength, and then I can slowly get back into my regular routine of yoga, weightlifting classes at the gym, etc.

The surgery was much easier than I thought, and the recovery has been much more difficult, in that it has been slow. But I am making progress as far as flexibility and my scars are looking smaller and less noticeable. The swelling is also diminishing, though I'm told it will fluctuate a lot over the next few months.

My scars today, almost a month after surgery

Just wanted to provide an update on my status. I recommend taking very good care of your scapholunate ligaments, dear readers. The surgery is a hassle, and the pain medication that comes with it is certainly not enough for a soma-holiday.