An ephemeral view of Philip Johnson’s “Lipstick” Building, not ordinarily visible on its flat side except from right across Third Avenue. The building site that has been cleared so as to make the view possible was once home to the Metropolitan Café, an agreeable if undistinguished eatery. (New readers may be asking themselves, “Why ‘Westphalia’?” It’s because that’s where we keep detritus.)

Yesterday, I had lunch in midtown, at the Bateau Ivre in the Pod Hotel, on East 51st Street. I chose it because partly the friend with whom I was lunching lives nearby, and partly because I’m crazy about the croque monsieur there. After I’d made the date, I saw that it would make sense to walk up First Avenue afterward, to our storage unit on 62nd Street. I could bring a bag and stuff it with odds and ends. The sooner we clear out of that expensive facility, the better.

If I lived almost anywhere but Manhattan, I would drive up to the storage unit, load up the car a few times, and proceed straight to the town dump. End of story. But I do not live anywhere but Manhattan. Emptying the unit one bag at a time is pretty much the only simple way of getting the job done.

So I dutifully went. I filled Bean’s largest canvas tote with cups, saucers, plates and a teapot in an everyday Laura Ashley pattern that we used in the country house. There is really no room in the apartment for more china, but I like seeing Alice at breakfast. “Alice” is the pattern. I also brought home a clutch of books, including two volumes of Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, one volume of the Reginald Perrin Trilogy, and a first edition of Edith Wharton’s late novel, The Children. (No dustjacket, alas.) As I recall, Hermione Lee, in her recent biography of Wharton, thinks well of The Children, which I read a long time ago. Not that it wouldn’t be almost unconscionable, given everything else in this house that I’ve got to get through, to read it again.

I brought home some videotapes, too, bummers all: Sunday Bloody Sunday; American Gigoloi; Rush; Body Heat; and The Mosquito Coast. I don’t have any room for videotapes, either. Oh, and how about this treat: Men, Movies & Carol. Not the excerpts from The Carol Burnett Show that one might hope for, this is a collection of parodies made with Scott Bakula, Barry Bostwick, Michael Jeter and, in one case, Tony Bennett. Anybody who wants to come over and claim it can have it. Better hurry! It’s outta here! (But only after I watch it first, just to make sure that it’s terrible.)

Have you seen The Mosquito Coast? The blurb on the slipcase calls Harrison Ford “the immensely popular hero of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones sagas.” How quaint that anyone would think that that needed to be spelled out. River Phoenix, still a pretty-faced little boy in 1986 (and, a fortiori, still alive), is not mentioned; nor are Helen Mirren or Martha Plimpton. With a screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on a novel by Paul Theroux, this Peter Weir epic is not your regular laff riot. No.

Okay, I brought home Polyester, too. Somewhere in the house I have the original scratch-and-sniff card that was distributed during the first theatrical release. Farts, old sneakers — the usual John Waters bouquet. The movie is best enjoyed without it. If you ask me, Edith Massey steals the show from Divine. In one memorable scene, she attempts to hoist a wispy cocktail dress over her blocklike torso. The frock does not survive. “Damn designers!” Edith mutters. Then, in a touching moment, she strokes her friend’s hand and coos, “Purr, purr Francine.” Is that when the two women go off their diets and consume a chocolate cake? I don’t remember. It has been a while. Of course it has been a while! Everything still in the storage unit has been untouched in nearly ten years!

Purr, purr R J!

(New readers may be asking themselves, “Why ‘Westphalia’?” It’s because that’s where we keep detritus.)

It’s official: 2008, according to the calendar that I got in Grand Street last night, is the Year of the Wedding.

We’re talking November. Sorry: they’re talking November.

Be happy.

Okey-doke: time to put a lid on this pile. Really, the idea of reading more than five or six books at a time is absurd. NO NEW BOOKS!

Looking back over the snaps that I’ve been taking of this heap since November, however, I note more change than I expected. If you’d like to check for yourself, simply click on the “Book Review” category in the left-hand sidebar, and scroll away.

The thing is, these aren’t the books that I’m reading every day. The books that I’m reading every day — every morning, after the Times — are in another pile, stacked alongside my favorite chair. I read so much of each one every weekday, and have been doing so for months now. As a result, I may get through the entirety of Aeneid and Decameron, in both cases, perhaps, before the summer! I’m still shy about this project, and have decided not to discuss it at any length until I’ve finished at least one of the six original titles. I can think of one at least that I’ll have done with by the middle of February, and possibly much sooner. But — not another word!

As for this week’s Book Review,

¶ Say What You Will.

It appears that the big storm that we were told to brace for has passed us by. We can expect flurries tomorrow, according to the Times. I don’t know whether to sigh with relief or pout with disappointment. Part of me will always love the disruption caused by a major snowfall. No school today!

(I will kill, however, anyone who thinks that power outages are “fun.” Don’t try me!)

Did I mention the wi-fi voodoo witch doctor the other day? I’m too lazy to check. We were experiencing the oddest service interruptions in the bedroom, where the laptop lives. Was it the plaster that makes the cheek-by-jowl proximity of New York life bearable? I thought so. Or perhaps it was the Klipsch RoomGroove (the speaker system for the Nano). I asked my doctor. Tonight, however — before the doctor could get back to me — we found out. It’s the halogen lamps, especially the one that’s on a dimmer. “Turn it off!” I cry. “But how can I read without a good light?” Kathleen wants to know. My reply was objectionable. But as soon as they’re available again, I’m going to buy her a Kindle.

Has your attempt to get rid of unwanted pop-up ads made things even worse? Maybe you ought to have read this first.

So far, this is the second of Tom Perrotta’s novels that I’ve read. It is much heftier — richer & more satisfying — than the other one, The Little Children (good as that one was). Mr Perrotta has hit, I think, upon a way of critiquing suburban life that suburbanites themselves would be comfortable with.

¶ The Abstinence Teacher.

MP3    RSS

This is the first PodCast that differs from the Portico page. In the attempt to make the audio sound more conversational, I edited a bit and cut out a lot. My aim is to talk “ex tempore” from a series of talking points lifted from the page. As for the production side of things, I hope to upgrade all of the equipment, hard and soft. If nothing else, I’ll mute those plosives!

Now you know why there is no kitchen table in my kitchen. There is, in fact, no kitchen. What we have here is a walk-in closet with appliances. All that shelving in the distance took me years to dream up, and who knows when it’s going to fall down (not that I had anything to do with putting it up!). Seriously, there are nineteen-foot sailboats with larger galleys.

Okay, maybe not.

In 1963, when our building was put up, kitchens were a thing of the past, especially in Manhattan, where there were (and are) coffee shops on every corner, and caterers were affordable. Nobody knew that kitchens were also a thing of the future, the central room, in fact, of today’s better flats.  Correction: this room here is a pantry with appliances. That’s why I paid so much to have the swinging door installed. (The apartments in this building come with cute louvered half-doors that are beyond useless.) It’s not the heat of the kitchen that I wanted to hide, but the scullery.

Kathleen’s Aunt Marcia said after one of my very ambitious dinner parties of the Eighties, “I don’t know how all that marvelous food came out of that tiny kitchen!” Yes, and you wouldn’t want to, either. The sad fact is that most food preparation on our island home occurs within truly remarkable proximity to live human beings. At least you don’t have to wonder how many of them there are in my kitchen. There’s only room for me!

Although ill, I did squeak over to the movies yesterday. (Podcasts will resume presently.)

¶ Juno.

Getting back into the groove continues to be an easier-said-than-done sort of thing. Yesterday, I didn’t open my eyes until a little past eight, and getting out of bed for anything more than a run to the bathroom was out of the question. Eventually, I read the paper, but in bed — most irregular. The cold that had been skirmishing at the perimeter seemed to have breached my defenses. I hasten to add that it was hugely depressing just to look out the window. The roan-soaked twilight gave no indication of the hour, and the light seemed to dim as clock ticked toward noon. I was asleep again soon enough.

But by then I’d plucked a book from the pile — Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God — and turned on the Nano. With the Nano and the Klipsch RoomGroove, I have rediscovered the pleasures of the good table radio. When I was young, I came into possession of the family’s Grundig Majestic, a radio about the size of a toaster, complete with pushbuttons. That was my music source until, about thirteen or fourteen, I began to build my record collection. By the time I went to boarding school, I had a KLH portable — closed up, it looked like a then very smart Samsonite suitcase — and I’d have denied knowing the Grundig more vigorously than Peter denied Christ. I had embarked on the sea of Hi-Fi, on which even the smallest speakers were expected to make a great big sound. The Klipsch RoomGroove can make a racket, but it is not meant to be played very loud. High volume seems to advertise the shortcomings of MP3 compression. At a sound level that my grandparents would have been happy with, however, the unit sounds very nice. Yes, it is background music; I am not really listening. It would be almost impossible to listen closely, because I know the music as well as I know the feel of the chair that I’m reading in.

Crazy For God has been in a pile for a few weeks, ever since a friend read Jane Smiley’s remarks about it somewhere (The Nation, 15 October) or, more likely, heard about them on NPR. Or perhaps he heard Frank Schaeffer himself. I was told that the book offered an insider’s view of the Himalayas of cash that Christian-Right philanthropists contribute to the cause, and when I put the book down about half an hour ago I was just getting to that. Crazy For God portrays a world that I was unaware of until well into the second Reagan Administration, and it is very strange to read about extremely famous figures of whom I’ve however never heard before. Someone has been on another planet — and I’m pretty sure that I know who put me there. That’s for another time, though. For now, the code in my nose prevents me from saying more than that Mr Schaeffer is a very likeable writer.

To borrow is another day.

The top of One Gracie Square, which presents two façades to Gracie Square (the easternmost block of 84th Street). Nice little terrace up there.

Yesterday, I put Christmas away. I removed the ornaments and the lights from the tree, which I single-handedly wombled into a very large plastic bag made for the purpose. As a result of this successful operation, I was able to transport the green but very dead tree to the freight elevator room without carpeting the corridor in fir. That was just the beginning, of course. Boxing up the decorations and sliding them back into their hard-to-get places took a few hours. The music that I listened to while I worked was distinctly un-seasonal: Schoenberg’s lush Gurre Lieder.

¶ James Wolcott on Books About Bush.

This spaniel, clearly too old (or disabled) to make any unnecessary moves, gazed at me with trademark mournfulness for quite a while before I responded by taking its picture. It had eyes for me only. Millennia of breeding made it impossible for me not to be warmed by such extravagant interest.

In November or December, I forget which, I watched Emmanuel Carrère’s La moustache. I had read the novel years and years ago. (Unsurprisingly, it took a while for the writer to make his own picture; the surprise was that he made it at all.) I wasn’t crazy about the book, and the movie, while quite a bit more engaging, was still too haunted by a paranoia that seemed forty or fifty years out of date. Accompanying the vivid camera work, however, was a striking score by Philip Glass: his Violin Concerto. The concerto, premiered in 1987, suited Mr Carrère’s story of a man who seems to have run through a bizarre temporal discontinuity (his father, much to his surprise, has been dead for two years, and his wife has no recollection of the moustache that he shaved off the night before). I wrote down the performance details as the final credits rolled by, and, sure enough, the soundtrack made use of the only recording, on Naxos. I ordered it from Amazon right away, but for some reason or other wasn’t in the mood to listen to it until last night.

The CD is a measure of how the classical music record scene has changed from what it was when I was a kid. When I was young, a performance by unknown artists on a budget label was extremely unlikely to be better than tolerable, and many were not even that good. Yet there is nothing less than first-rate about the Naxos offering, which features violinist Adele Anthony and the Ulster Orchestra under the direction of Takuo Yuasa. Ulster has an orchestra? Ulster has an orchestra that sounds this good? When I was young, the sound quality on an inexpensive recording would have been mediocre to awful — awful. The Naxos issue is clear as a bell and every bit as rich as it ought to be.

La moustache explores the fragility of the construct that we call the “self.” In my experience, this construct isn’t remotely fragile, but rather constituted of the grimmest granite. So inalterably stuck am I with the character that I wake up to every morning that the idea of a sudden singularity is more intriguing than frightening, as perhaps the reality would be, too. If I couldn’t dislocate my persona with a daily diet of LSD (senior year in college), then I’d like to know what kind of dynamite might have worked. One of the boons of growing older is that I no longer wish to escape an all-too familiar self; on the contrary, I’m prone to count my blessings, such as they are. But the notion that identity is tenuous doesn’t really sell in my vicinity. 

What I’m really reading….

As Édouard writes, “la danse continue.” Although I absolutely refused to enter into the giddy Obamaphoria that seemed to have infected so many friends over the weekend and beyond, I was looking forward to the simplification that a Clinton defeat would afford. I’ve nothing against Hillary, but her persistent unpopularity in some quarters makes me sad, because it reminds me that in 2000 I was the only person I knew who loathed and feared George W Bush. Where were all the haters then?

But I can’t stay sad for long, because the following scene is stuck in my mind:

Their sidewalk procession had already attracted the stares of passers-by who were startled by the sight of the body flopping from side to side as the two men tried to prop it up, the police said. The late Mr. Cintron was dressed in a faded black T-shirt and blue-and-white sneakers. His pants were pulled up part of the way, and his midsection was covered by a jacket, the police said. While the two men were inside the check-cashing office, a small crowd had gathered around the chair. A detective, Travis Rapp, eating a late lunch at a nearby Empanada Mama saw the crowd and notified the Midtown North station house.

If you ask me, the perps in the case, James P O’Hare and David J Dalaia, both 65 and unemployed, ought to be cleared of all criminal charges and awarded the $355 that they sought to obtain by posthumously cashing Virgil Cintron’s Social Security Check. They have entertained their city no end, and deserve some sort of prize. Whether or not they’re bright enough to remain at large is another question, but jail is definitely not the place for these guys. (Read the story, “Corpse Wheeled to Check-Cashing Store Leads to 2 Arrests,” by Bruce Lambert and Christine Hauser.)

The pile would be even taller if I slipped in the two books that Miss G gave me for my birthday. It’s the damnedest thing, but I can’t remember whether I’ve read V S Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.  I’m absolutely certain that I’ve read the first couple of pages — can I possibly have stopped? O age, I know thy sting. 

Interestingly, there are only two novels in this heap. The new Coetzee, which I wasn’t going to read until a critical mass of reviews convinced me that I must, and Daniel Martin, which I’ve wanted to read ever since Thanksgiving in Ste Croix.  (I’m willing to say “Sant Croy,” but writing “St Croix” is illiterate. My inner tween thrives on such problems, and it’s best to indulge the less obtrusive ones.) That hasn’t stopped me from reading three or four other novels first. The rest of it is — arduous-looking. You can see Peter Gay’s new book near the bottom. I hereby vow that I shall not open it until I’ve finished Mr Krugman’s book. A few other impetuous purchases are beginning to stale as well. Ay di me.

“Ay di me” is my latest affectation — do admit (my second) that it has been a while since I sported one. I’ve no idea what it means, beyond it’s being an Italianate expostulation that somehow found currency among the British. Which British, I don’t yet know. I’ve stolen it, as anyone can tell, from the Mitford sisters, who had it, probably, from Violet Hammersley, their mother’s impossible friend — but perhaps not. To me, “ay di me” means, “I’ve got to sit down for a minute,” but only as spoken by someone who does little or no physical work.

And just what do I call making dinner — even if it is burger night? (Well, especially if…)

As for this week’s Book Review,

¶ Islam.

More odds and ends: my favorite reading chair is in pressing need of reupholstery. The patch of sunlight on the right arm sort-of hides a nasty wear, from which stuffing threatens to emerge. I shall miss this gay, Bermuda-colored pattern. But not the French nails.

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rooting for the Republican Party in this year’s American presidential race? It would seem so. Units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps — the muscle behind the Iranian president’s mountebankery — harassed a convoy of American warships in the Straits of Hormuz, the bottleneck at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It was a classic case of playing chicken by rattling sabres, but an American destroyer, the Hooper, came very, very close to firing upon one of the Iranian speedboats. It’s all very reminiscent of the Agadir Crisis of 1911. Well, not really — but you know what I mean. (Here is the somewhat hastily-filed story by Thom Shanker and Brian Knowlton.

Almost as old as the Agadir Crisis, attorney Martin Lipton, of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, appears to have been dishing out advice more suited to the run-up to World War I than to our better-ventilated times. The ageing mergers-and-acquisitions consigliere has even become the butt, according to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s column in today’s Times, of one of those Wall Street jokes.

The joke on Wall Street is that companies that hire Mr. Lipton eventually outperform their peers in the stock market because their entrenched C.E.O.’s end up getting fired. Call it the Marty Index.

You’re right: this picture is out of focus. More out of focus than usual. Another thing that I have to see to pronto is the amassing of a collection of stock photographs that I can run when I’ve nothing more — timely.

So much to do. So many small things. I need to learn more about the iPod/Nano, for example. I turned it on the other day, and let it work its way through the music that I’ve uploaded. For some reason, it decided to clump the composers. It played all of the Mozart offerings before moving on to Poulenc’s Sinfonietta and then all of the Ravel — and so on. I’d put the thing on “shuffle,” but that doesn’t work with classical music. From the earliest days of digitized music, no one has ever bothered to teach player devices to treat symphonies and concertos as units. To the iPod and its CD predecessors, a symphony is just an album of four-odd songs, not “movements” meant to be played in a fixed order. Here is my prayer: let me shuffle the Mozart piano concertos, but don’t shuffle the movements.

I have the feeling that while I might just have made myself clear to other classical-music listeners, my don’t-shuffle-the-movements problem means nothing to most iPod users.

That’s just one thing. Then I have to call the appliance repair people who fixed the oven two years ago. At that time, the igniter was broken, and the gas wouldn’t necessarily light. Not good. Now the oven has a different problem: it’s not “cycling.” Gas ovens, you see, burn at only at the maximum. The temperature is regulated by a thermometer (a coil of metal, I believe) that shuts the gas off when the oven reaches the desired temperature, and then turns it back on when the oven cools. When this thermometer malfunctions, the oven simply broils everything. Not so bad, but, still, not good.

Then there’s the wi-fi reception in the bedroom. Too mysterious for words! Call the wi-fi doctor!

Several Christmas cards await responses. Not many — fewer than a dozen. I believe that the Christmas card season does not end until Martin Luther King Day.

Speaking of Christmas, there’s the Christmas stuff to put away. Surely one of the wonders of Christmas is that putting the Christmas stuff away is every bit as satisfying as taking it all out.

There are a few thank-you notes to write. Vainglorious ambition is my undoing when it comes to thank-you notes. I always want to write something immortally complimentary. Now that I am elderly, however, and actually receive than-you notes, I asm reminded that the delight of such missives lies in the receipt. If I weren’t afraid of being fearfully indiscreet, I’d thank LXIV right here for the smashing cocktail party that he threw for my birthday (and for the second year in a row!) at his jewel of a flat overlooking — a well-known open space. The only detail that I feel entirely free to divulge concerns one of the hors d’oeuvres, wickedly well-seasoned shrimps wrapped in bits of bacon! My two favorite food groups in one bite! It was too magnificent.

So much for tasty tidbits. It’s back to real life and its laundry list of chores. No wonder I let the holidays stretch out until the second week of January!

The “holiday season” ends with my birthday (Twelfth Night), and, because that’s my birthday, it doesn’t end any sooner. Where most people return to reality on the second day of the new year, I give myself an extra clutch of days.

Having thrown myself into the spirit of the season, however, I am now so sick of the sound of my own voice that I can’t even write. Sadly or not, however, I expect to recover, perhaps as early as tomorrow.

In search of an image to represent my exhausted state, I turned, not unnaturally, toward the unmade bed from which I had temporarily arisen. “Take a picture of that!” But I have no eye for mess. I don’t know how to make it cohere — as cohere everything must — for a photograph. So I wound up making the bed, and now I don’t think I’ll be climbing back into it. Might as well get dressed!

I mean, that’s how hopeless I am! I can’t do “pooped”!

Portrait of the artist as a Labrador retriever.

How did this get to be sixty? I actually have fewer double chins.

It’s not my favorite picture of me in the Garden of Eden, but I ran mine a few years ago on the old blog (you can see it here)*, and this is Kathleen’s. For some totally crazy reason, the photograph was printed on frosted glass, and I was about to throw the thing out when Kathleen cried NO! In my favorite picture, you see, I’m in bed, so it’s okay that I’m smiling, but in this head shot — oh, it’s so hopelessly… hopelessly quelque chose.

Well, anyway, happy birthday to me. Sixty! It’s not possible. I accept the fact that I’m older than God &c. But sixty? What I mean to say is, I haven’t completed my merit badges! I didn’t pass the test yet! To be sixty, you have to be Really Grown Up, and I, alas — well, Kathleen said that fifty would have sounded more believable. She is not trying to compliment me, I assure you. This is not about my youthful skin! It’s about how totally inadequate I feel now that I have been called upon by Father Time to sit on the Board of Graybeards. My beard has been grey – white! – for years, but I’m still not up to the task. Doesn’t anybody remember being eight years old and wishing to be ten? Imagine being ten and finding out that it was all a fraud — that you were really eight! “Oh, the horror!”

The worst thing about my being sixty is the implications for the near and dear. They’re not happy about it at all. Neither the elder nor the younger. Especially the younger — who are suddenly not so “younger.” They’d all much rather have seen me dead before this embarrassment.

Which is what makes Fossil Darling such a dear old friend. He’s the only one who’ll admit it.

Update: I got some very nice presents, including a knockout: the English edition of the Mitford sisters’ leters, autobiographed by herself, the D of D. That was pretty terrific, and all by itself it would have made this a red letter birthday, a standout among, er, many. But then something happened after the birthday dinner that put the day in class by itself. Correction: there is one other day in my life to which tonight may be compared. It was the day that I learned that I’d be able to marry Kathleen in a Catholic Church, something that was very important to the two of us. It wasn’t until I had the news that I actually bended my knee and proposed marriage. I was accepted.

Tonight, it was my turn to say “yes,” and a happier man has never breathed.

* Goodness! I just read the entry that goes with the snapshot of me in bed. I’d forgot! It’s my coming out story., And, that being the case, I have to tell you that the value of N is “2.” As in “second-rate.”.

It was too cold, yesterday, to wander far from home in search of film fare, so I didn’t head downtown for The Orphanage or across town for There Will Be Blood. So I went across the street and gorged on the latest box of romantic comedy from Hollywood. Tears poured out of my eyes all though the movie, so perhaps it was in revenge that I came home and dished it. Don’t listen to me, though. Be sure to see Hilary Swank pull off another boffo performance.

¶ PS I Love You.

The three façades of One Gracie Square. Can you tell which one is Neocon? Theocon? Anti-tax?

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, a little focus won’t hurt you. I’ve tried to put Michael Tomasky’s election-in-a-nutshell into an even smaller nutshell.

¶ Michael Tomasky on the Republican Faction, in The New York Review of Books.

MP3      RSS

It is, at last, very cold — very. I have brought inside the bottles of wine that chilled for the party on the balcony; later today, I’ll bring in the beer, the soda (a few eight-ounce cans of Coke and Diet Coke — nobody drinks soda at our parties — and the bottled water, although where I shall put the bottled water is anything but clear. The beer and the wine will go back outside as soon as the air stops being frigid. It will take me a while to go through them, but go through them I shall, and long before the weather turns warm.

The party on Sunday was a success. I’ve become binary about this sort of thing: a party is either a success or it isn’t, and modifiers, such as “big success,” make no sense anymore. It comes down to this calculus: was the party worth the trouble? This, in turn, depends on a three-pronged question. The first part is relatively simple: did the guests seem to have a good time? (I can’t, of course, ask if they really did.) The answer to that would have to be “yes.” Almost everyone who showed up found someone to talk to with an animation suitable to “the holiday spirit.” The few exceptions appeared to enjoy themselves while they were here.

The second part is: did Kathleen have a good time? This is the question that I can ask directly, knowing that Kathleen’s answer will be honesty itself. For a long time, I was disinclined to give parties for the simple reason that Kathleen complained that she never got to talk to anyone at any length. In those days, our parties were rather more raucous, evening affairs. Now that my model is the vicarage tea, however, Kathleen (and the other guests as well) can do some serious catching up. That, in the end, is what the party is for. Only a few of our regular guests see one another outside of our living room, but they have been seeing one another in it for so many years — the living room itself has not been changed (however mildly redecorated) in nearly a quarter-century — that an agreeable amount of mutual interest has accrued. I am rather relieved to report that none of our friends has so far undergone the kind of transformation that makes the Princesse de Guermantes’s party, at the very end of Proust, so positively exciting and even bouleversant, but we have certainly reached the point where just showing up in one piece is interesting. Illness and disease have, so far, not begun to take their inevitable toll.

Kathleen enjoys herself because the guests don’t have to be made to feel at home. They already feel at home (or so they tell me) the minute they walk in the door and see once again all the familiar clutter. By the time they’ve deposited their coats on the bed, they’re ready to party — even if it’s in a decidedly vicarage-tea sort of way.*

Finally: did I have a good time? And I daresay you can tell from what I’ve already written that I most certainly did. So it was all worth the trouble — which wasn’t very great: by the next morning everything had been quite easily tidied up and put away.

Except, that is, for the drinkables out on the balcony. A few minutes ago, I was interrupted by a loud, sharp report, as one of the small cans of Diet Coke literally blew its top. Clean off! Now everything but the bottled water is in the kitchen, where further explosions, if any, will do the least damage. 

* Please bear in mind that “vicarage tea” is an ideal that no crowd of durable Manhattanites can ever attairn. The dim hush is quite beyond us.