Lunch with Barbara

February Lunch with Barbara was today -- pastrami sandwiches or scrambled eggs? We are both creatures of habit and so we opted for eggs again. We love our same place, our same order, our same table, our same positions at the table. The waitstaff knows our wants and desires.

Waiting for Barbara, I took this photo:

 

I didn't notice it at the time, but when Barbara arrived, she said what I thought was, "the note isn't there anymore" and I was thinking, "What note?" She knew by the look on my face that I didn't understand what she said. What she had actually said was "Nonna's isn't there anymore." And that's the white building across the street with no more signage and the windows covered. Nonna's is where we have one summer dinner and our Christmas party (yes, just the two of us, but we wear our flashing necklaces and exchange presents -- that's a party, right?)

 

It's really one of the tragedies of city life when you see any independent store or independent restaurant bite the dust. I was optimistic and said that maybe they were just redecorating. We licked our wounds, ordered our scrambled eggs, and this man who works there and I have this thing about his making me hot chocolate, and today was a good day for it. I think one time I'd ordered it and told him he made it the best and it is now a point of pride with him.

 

 

One of the other tragedies of city life is how tiny the tables can get in a restaurant. This doesn't look too bad, but add on two dinner plates, two bread and butter plates and you kind of run out of room. In most NY restaurants, the tables are so close together and so jammed in that when I'm out of NY in a restaurant, I always think that the restaurant has removed tables for some reason due to the wide open spaces.

 

 

When I return home, I typically enjoy sitting on my front steps for a few minutes. I tell myself that it's to get some fresh air, but I have to admit, as I did today, that it's a way to procrastinate because if I don't have some pressing work thing to get to, I am in no particular hurry to run to work. I was sitting there thinking there's nothing to photograph, and the "artist" in me rebelled.

 

Are you kidding? I thought -- there's 1000 things to photograph from my perch on the steps and here are three of them:

 

There's no doubt an architectural name for this area above a front door, but this is the beautiful detail of the building right across the street. It makes me sad to think how many things like this were torn down in order to make some ugly new apartment building.

This is just to the right of where I sit. It started out -- literally YEARS AGO -- as a bunch of balloons that got stuck in the tree branches. Now it's down to two shredded balloons and it will probably take another decade to totally disappear. It's better when there are leaves on the tree to cover it up.

And finally, this is the building across the street which belongs to the church on 88th Street (and used as the location for one of the weddings on Sex in the City.) I'm not sure what this building is used for other than 12-step meetings which I can always tell are going on during certain evenings when there's a crowd outside chatting and smoking.