Honeysuckle

When I tried calling HD today there was a 25 minute minimum wait. They said to go to the website. The website said to call. I sent an email and gave all pertinent information. Am not wasting a minute more on this. I did my part over and over again. Refuse to play Groundhog Day with HD.

Sunday night Lucia, Little Luce and I remembered when The Boat Basin Cafe was yet to be discovered, and we could get tables outdoors with a minimal wait. But even inside is outside as it’s an open catacomb. Always reminds me of the Coliseum in Rome, on a much smaller scale. The menu was upgraded a year or two ago, and the tuna entree was had much more zest and was way more interesting than the second to last time I was there just before the rain week.

Little Luce did her community service for the GMHC. She was on stage during the AIDS Walk. I am so proud of her. Her class presentation begins with how she has lived all her fifteen years in the apartment that Lucia and our friend, soul mate, whatever, Patrick lived in before and during his sickness. While we had dinner, Little Luce gave her presentation and we talked about Patrick who will have died 21 years ago next October 9th

Lucia was in the GMHC’s pilot support group for caregivers. Lucia gave up much of her life. Patrick was the most difficult of our friends for me. He was the closest and the first. But I learned.

During Gay Pride Month please think of all the straight women who nursed Gay men during their sicknesses.

I think of Riverside Park as my country club and The Boat Basin Cafe is the clubhouse. I’m in Riverside Park everyday and eat at the Boat Basin at least four or five times a week in real summer, Have been a bit preoccupied and not into going out lately.

We had walked down to the river on the South side of the West 79th Street entrance. It’s disgraceful that the stairs are rotting, sand filled with deep holes. It’s a giant law suit waiting to happen. The North side entrance has been modernized for at least two or three years.

We walked up on the North side and when we reached the top tier of the park, I smelled the faint smell of new blossoming Honeysuckle. By Wednesday it will have blossomed, and by Friday, Saturday at the latest, it will take over Riverside Drive and the park and would be cloying if it didn’t last such a short time.

My neighborhood is like no other in Manhattan. It doesn’t have the modern planned feel of Battery Park City or the strange mix of industrial zillion dollar edge on West Street–runs from Tribeca though the West Side, forget exactly where it ends. Isn’t up here.

Though I lived on the East Side, 63rd and Fifth for fifteen years, I would walk across Central Park to go to Riverside Park because it was so solitary and peaceful. The park that runs parallel to the East River was always unfriendly to me, I didn’t want to walk near cars when it was water that I needed.

Riverside Drive is long and stately. I know how rare it to live across from Park land in Manhattan yet I always have. There’s no place like New York from sometime in June to sometime in August, and then again in September and October. I am so privileged and I know it. But the yearning for amenities in my primary, or even secondary, residence keeps growing.

The Drive is mellow as is West End Avenue just to the East, but Broadway is one block from that, and I love Broadway, I do, but I yearn for a smaller scale. This weekend Broadway seemed empty to me but I knew that most people from other places would have thought it crowded.

I was at the dentist(s) for four hours today so I’m more than a bit out of it. My dentists and their staffs are incredible but by the end I felt as if I were going to throw up and pass out. probably at the same time. Took a nap, and woke up with a feeling that I have only experienced several times before.
“Oh wow, something feels different”
“I feel great.”
“My life has just changed forever and ever.”

I feel so blessed that I could do this at all, and then without incurring debt. Wow. Each day for the next month, I will feel slightly different, and have to go back on Wednesday, and I’m sure often for the next month. It’s over and I stayed the course, with only a minor meltdown this past month. I think, maybe, because I have run out of excuses.

But his two year journey did teach me patience and to measure success in small increments. Thank you, the so many of you, who have taken this with me, and wow does that feel weird and vain to write.

Now you can vote for me…Kidding. I just won my own lottery, and a few other major life battles.