Belly of the Beast Plus Old Pals

Veritably, the belly of the beast!

Mysteries of the Long Island Railroad are mysteries no longer, so I've been venturing into Manhattan more. Best case scenario: Country Mouse visits the Big City once a week to hang out in museums. There are like a billion of them in NYC, many of them – the Museum of Natural History, the New York Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art – haunts from my half-a-century gone girlhood so there's always the chance that I'll turn a corner and bump into hungry little Patty, standing in front of Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

Three times in the last two weeks I've dreamed about the Tenement Museum (where I've never actually been) so I guess I'm under some kind of psychic indictment to visit there too.


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Anyway, yesterday being the most glorious autumn day in the approximately 4.5 billion year history of the planet, I decided to integrate walking into the Big City trip. Walked to the New Hyde Park station. Walked from Penn Station to the French restaurant where I was to meet Jeff Watson, my decade plus LJ friend for the first time.

Jeff Watson is this great guy who surfs and trades commodity futures, mostly grains. He's a Randian – rather adamantly Not My Cup of Tea, though I do tend toward extremes of fiscal conservativism. We've squabbled aplenty over that throughout the years – at one point so bitterly, we called each other a slough of nasty names and stopped talking to each other for a year. Eventually though we patched up the quarrel. Jeff has a great spirit, upbeat and positive. It's fun being around people like that; even a late night trip to the store for a quart of milk becomes an adventure.

Our neeting was like meeting up with an old college buddy, nonstop talk fest for two and a half hours. He took me to this great French restaurant where I dined on onion soup and ground steak with Mornay sauce. He's about to remarry -- his wife Denise died a few years back very tragically of cancer. They'd had a truly great marriage, and he mourned her with an intensity that just broke my heart, so I am pleased that he's getting a second chance for happiness.

I eat red meat so seldom that it was interesting to see what it did to my system. It didn't make me sick exactly, but I could feel National Guard lymphocytes mobilizing in the region of my duodenum. It digested very, v-e-r-y slowly. Couldn't eat dinner last night. Even this morning I feel uncomfortably full.