Sunday, January 6, 2002

Rockefeller Center and buddies

"It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing in the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."

Edward Gibbon, Memoirs

We have made a pact to get up and pack and meet to checkout at noon. Mags has to fly away to London tonight. SuRu and I will use a certificate that FFP bought in a charity auction and stay the next two nights in the Four Seasons.

SuRu and I finally have everything buttoned up with an hour to spare and we wander around to 53rd Street to a diner called The Pallidium where coffee is good, hot and $1 and there are generous omelettes and a serviing of bacon is four slices. I can't eat much but the bites I have and the coffee cheers me.

We get our stuff, check out, get Mags and go off to the Four Seasons.

Our room is enormous. I check up on Mags' plane on the WEB. SuRu has an exhaustive conversation with the bellman but forgets to tip him. (She'll spend the rest of our stay looking for him to tip him. I'll kid her about wanting to marry him.) The room is huge with push buttons for the drapes, a huge bathroom with shower and tub and a walk-in closet. High speed Internet access, too, that actually works. Nice.

We go out for a walk along fifth and then Lexington. We have a drink with Mags while she has a slice to fortify her for the long plane ride. We find a gourmet grocery where she buys some stuff for the road.

We relax a few minutes and it's time to see Mags off in the car. It's like a dream seeing her here, in this city, and now she's gone.

We figure we will go out somewhere for dinner. When we look out the window in an hour or two, it's raining.

I sit down and surf the WEB, asking SuRu what kind of food she'd like. We decide on Chinese or something of that ilk. I discover that there is a restaurant just outside the 58th Street door that has kind of eclectic food from the Orient. We duck across a few feet of rainy sidewalk, pull on a door and emerge in a dark restaurant several stories high. A several story high Buddha oversees the scene. The food is OK, but the scene is bizarre.

JUST TYPING
One envisions things.
Expecting less.
Expecting more.
Changing the experience.