GREAT DAY IN NEW YORK CITY

Hooray, hooray, we are in New York.  Yesterday was very inauspicious for starting our trip.  I hd been up for about an hour when I had such a horrible pain in my back that I couldn't move and had to drag myself into the bedroom and kind of fall on the bed.  It was excruciating pain, enough that I was crying.  And of course thinking that in 12 hours I had to get on the plane and sit for six hours. 

To make a long story short, I think it was some horrendous muscle cramp, because after Naprosyn, heat, and gentle walking, it was more or less okay by the time we went to the airport.  

There's some new thing TSA has called pre check.  It's kind of a lottery.  If you get it, you don't have to take off your shoes or belts or open your computers, etc.  I won!  Just breezed through.  John didn't.  But he doesn't have to take off his shoes anyway because after 75 you are apparently too old to be a terrorist.  However, while I was feeling bad earlier in the day, I ordered a limo so we didn't have to take the subway into Manhattan.  By the time we arrived, I could haves one the subway, because I'm perfectly fine now, but I didn't  know that then, and it certainly was nice to have the car pick us up.  

When we arrived at Martha's, her viol group was here, which made me miss our harp group I would have been at were I at home today.  They were just starting, so we went down to EuroPan and had breakfast.  

One of the things we do a lot of with Martha is have afternoon wine, so our first order of business was to get our subway pass and head down to Trader Joe's to stock up on wine.  It's usually crosstown bus and subway and walk three blocks, but this time we did one subway and a crosstown bus at the other end,  and it was easier.  

TJ's wine store is near Union Park.  There was a farmers market in Union Park, and I really wanted to stop there,but one of the disadvantages of being in NY is that you need to plan your journey based on how much you can carry, and we put our carrying ability in wine.

We came back to the apartment, read the Saturday paper and took a little nap.  John actually woke up before I did and went to Starbucks and took a walk on his own!  

We went to the Manhattanan Diner with Martha for dinner tonight.  

We all had various forms of pasta.  John had salad with his, but Martha and I had matzoh ball soup.  Why, you ask?  Because we could, and they have good matzoh ball soup.  And on the pasta, the servings were so gigantic that we have tomorrow's dinner.

Afterwards John and I went to a very interesting and quite wonderful concert at St. Ignatius church by a women's choral group called Amuse.  (www.amusesingers.org) They did a program called Hildegarde, then and now, which used Hildegarde Von Bingen's chants as a jumping off point and put them in more modern contexts.  It was a lovely concert.  Since putting the work of someone born in 1098 into a modern context can simply involve adding harmony, it wasn't ear-jangling modern, but it was fresh and interesting.  Most pieces were a capella, a couple had organ accompaniment, one included tambourine played by a choir member and finger cymbals played by someone somewhere else in the church, I couldn't tell where, and one had organ and violin accompaniment.  I liked that one the least, but that was primarily because the main soprano was too operatic for my taste, with a kind of wide vibrato.  But then, I suppose it was what the modern composer was looking for.

We stopped and bought tiramisu on the way home, but ended up putting it in the refrigerator for tomorrow because Martha had had a  canola and wanted to have some wine.