Helluva Town

So we had a lovely couple of days in the old stomping grounds, seeing the sights (including the clash of Beaux Arts and Moderne seen here) and meeting up with old pals inexplicably grown grayer and more, well, mature's perhaps not quite the word, but goodness aren't we all grown up?

My dear cousin, the Serious Architect, took us to a lovely, a quite entirely NewYorky sort of dinner, at the kind of restaurant against the windows of which we once we pressed our noses.  It's nice to know that rich people's food still consists, as wise old Truman Capote once noted, of "little fresh born things, scarcely out of the earth. Little baby corns, little baby peas, little lambs that have been ripped out of their mothers’ wombs..." not to mention meats primarily from parts of the body not normally stocked in supermarkets.  Still, we did enjoy ourselves immoderately.  Cousin SA is just about the only non-sibling who's known me from day one (we are six weeks apart); together, now, we are a walking illustration of the fact that after a certain age, you choose your face or your figure.

In a fit of nostalgia de la boue the following night we hied down to the West Village, where everyone seemed about 17, but where the cheap Chinese is still divine.  Am I the only one who remembers the way Westside low-end Chinese places used to offer free white wine from vast gallon jugs?  Sadly, that seems to have gone the way of Five Oaks and all the other other vanished destinations.  Still, we had cold sesame noodles (unobtainable in the Sandlands) and enjoyed the contrast with the previous evening's foams and artisanal parsleys...

Now we've wended out way up the East Coast a ways and are enjoying this holiday in dear old Sodom on the Sea, staring out at the bay in Provincetown.  We're occupying the ground-floor flat (always a good idea for a pair of portly types in an old wooden house) chez our friends the Stately Lesbians.  I write looking out at the water, as Mr. Muscato prepares one of his trademark elaborate salads, the Stately L's three dogs of various ages nap here and there, and the divine Dalida sings her heart out in the background.  Not the most traditional of Fourths of July, I suppose, but deeply, deeply pleasant.

A Happy Fourth, then, to those celebrating; a lovely Wednesday, to the rest of you.  I'm not normally the most outwardly patriotic of persons, but this morning, listening to NPR's annual recitation of the Declaration of Independence, I felt very grateful for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...