Before she left for home yesterday, Jamie bonded with a homeless man in a wheelchair who is allowed to sleep in the window of the Immigrant Bank on my block- like a guard, except no gun and he is tied to his wheelchair!. She was able to get a muffin to him through the late-night deposit slot and he responded with a picture he’d drawn of his home under the Brooklyn Bridge. New York continues to surprise.
It has been great having the family. . Buster-Charley (dba Barley) did amazingly well on the subways, especially since we learned to ignore the alarms that sound when you push his stroller through the emergency entrances and exits vs. our initial attempts to hand him over the gates that paying customers use. It’s fun, too, to gain street cred with gang members who also favor the free entry system.
All the restaurants I picked for dinner for Katey, Tom, Jamie, Barley and I were clear winners, except our last night (Monday) at Swifty’s on the very snooty Upper East Side. Very cramped and it seemed like we might have been the first non-regulars- and first visitors without a direct connection to the Mayflower- in many years. As Katey noted, it was our first meal ever in near total silence, as we all waited for Charley to erupt- he was crammed in his portable basket device between Tom and Jamie. The maitre d perfected raising his eyebrow and glowering at the sleeping child every time he passed our table- a dare of sorts- but Buster never stirred. (We still got kicked out, though, when Jamie interrupted the Henry Kissinger type gentleman at the next table to ask for gum during his hilarious theatre anecdote
