1) One feature of aging: sleeping badly the night before travel. I ended up starting the day at 4:45, well before the 9:15 departure of my train. The advantage: being able to proceed in relative calm, knowing I had acres of time to do what needed to be done.
2) I was able to write and publish a column on the trip down to New York. The atmosphere on a train isn’t always conducive to writing. Not in the quiet car this trip, I was surrounded by people on conference calls; the lady sitting next to me was actually on a Zoom call for about 20 minutes, but at least she was off camera. It amused me to realize that, whatever conversation I was overhearing, they were all of an identical anonymous corporate language. I couldn’t distinguish anything to identify an industry, field, or occupation!
2a) It all sounded so dead.
3) Then whoosh, off to Brooklyn from Herald Square in a pungent kaff kaff F train. Very few people seem to be masking still on the subway, but Excessive Personal Odor is still a very good reason to mask.
4) Every time I arrive to stay with my friends in Brooklyn (this is the third time I have been their guest), I think of the Countess Olenska going to Skuytercliff to stay with the van der Luydens in the Age of Innocence: “. . . and these kind friends have taken me in . . . You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe here.” A cup of tea and half an hour of conversation is such a calm way to begin a trip to New York.
5) Those, and a NAP. Mercy, having been up so early!
6) And then some minor plastic surgery, and off on the F train to a gathering of Interlochen volunteers. Arriving at Holiday Cocktail Lounge, I learned there had been some debate as to whether or not I’d’ve been the first person there. In fact, I wasn’t; another volunteer who had to leave early showed up five minutes before I did.
7) By the end of the gathering, the joint was jumping, as they say, and I had met some engaging personalities in the younger generation of Interlochen volunteers. We are in good hands.
7a) The real bonus for me, of course, was that the presiding genius of the lounge was my old schoolfellow Drew, who with secrecy and some ceremony presented me with a deep-fried Oreo. All I can say is, bury me with a halo of deep-fried Oreos.
7b), Also, oh my God, the deviled eggs there are beyond ambrosia. Om nom nom.
8) Back at home with my hosts en pyjama as Chips Channon would have said, we got to catch up and talk about Massachusetts museums, 19th-century interiors, and Things of That Ilk, and of course books.
9) For bedtime reading I was handed Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral. And I did read the first chapter before I turned out the lights. Very amusing, but it’s mighty clear that Lake Charles is not even close to the Mississippi Delta. Still, there was more than a whiff of my granny and her sisters, the atmosphere of their homes, and their ideas of How Things Were Done. That said, I do have to wonder how many of the stories given are factual. They name names!