A week's things

Good things...

Last Saturday Vince arrived with spring. It was the first day where the sun was so bright that I had to hang the kikoi on the terrace as a shade.

Other thing: I was on the subway platform last Tuesday night, the day before I had to do the NBC shoot for Open House New York. I felt for my cellphone. Not in pockets. Not in bag. Not not not. I knew I hadn't thrown it away, as I had a long-ago one (still beeping in a landfill in Staten Island perhaps?). Shit. I really, really did not need to lose it just then. I don't remember phone numbers anymore! I rushed back out of the subway and back into the office. Maybe it was there. Nope. Had I dropped it in Wholefoods? I called it from the landline. Ring ring. It picks up. Silence, noise in background. Is the voicelessness thieflike? Hello? I say... My name is Marie and this is my cellphone, where are you?

...er, I'm at the ticket booth at 2nd Avenue, said the voice at last. Stay there! I yelped in joy. I'm tall with red hair, I added (incentive?). It was the MTA guy in the ticket booth, which was, miraculously, manned. Someone had handed it in to him. It is the Someone to whom I owe thanks. I had $25 in my pocket which I gave him. I would've given him more. His name was Alex and he was very embarrassed, but I was leaping with spring lamb-like joy. He gave me a free pass into the subway. I went home.

Good, good thing.

Another good thing. The LXTV shoot for NBC (airs the 27th): I arrive at Union Square early Wednesday to meet the crew. I tell them I'll be at the NW corner. I get there, but there are no flowers. Anywhere. It's usually a RIOT of flowers. We're here to shoot the flowers. WTF, mate??? Panic. I walk south. I see little white tents. The flowers, and market, have moved. They'll be there for two years while construction constructs...something, at the other end. Good thing. Mr Van Houten of Van Houten's is a darling. He lets us store our gear on his trucks, doesn't mind that we use his market-spot as our home base. Another nameless vendor practically implodes when he sees a camera. As if, in the past, we had never spent a penny there. No future pennies, then. We beat a retreat.

The worms of worm compost fame didn't mind a bit. Good worms.

Things: my climbing Iceberg has six buds. There will be more. My blue violet that arrived two years ago as a seed dropped, has three flowers. All the pear trees, everywhere, are in bloom. So are the magnolias. The cherries are starting.

Things. The croissants from Bococa, of all places, are still delicious. Vince discovered and bought them for breakfast when we first met last September and again this last weekend. Now he's gone west. But he will be back. Croissants, coffee, and Vince are a combination made in a very, very good place. An impossible dream factory where wishes are, improbably, granted.

Things: there are gardens busting out of my head. The seams are stretching. In my head, they are all complete. I can see the clipped hedges, the billowing roses, the apples on the trees, tall grass waving in August. They don't exist yet, but, happily, many of them will, and soon.

Thing. A patch a white violets has escaped the city's weedkilling efforts last year on a consequently-barren strip of earth on East Houston between 1st and 2nd Avenues.

Things. Lamb ribs bubbling in the oven, the smell of roasting rosemary. Cold olives in a cold martini. Mstislav Rostropovich playing Bach. Nabokov on the subway with me, in Bend Sinister, doing with words what Bach and Rostropovich do with notes. Brooklyn absorbed by cold mist. Ships' horns booming through the blind water. A weekend ahead. A charged cellphone, the promise of coffee in bed with a book in the morning, kept company by the cat who has returned to sleep off his breakfast.

Thing: the scent of millions of blossoms in the breeze blowing down West 56th Street as I walked east at noon today. Not a flower in site, but Central Park a few blocks north pumping perfume into the city. I breathed deeply in and out and in two more times, and must have been smiling, because for once a knot of construction workers turned, didn't catcall, and smiled, and stayed quiet.