Friday, December 4, 2009

The New York City Marathon

I am writing the morning after a day that left me with sore feet and so tired I didn't even want a drink before bedtime. The Ks took Manhattan.

We took the subway up to Rockefeller Center to check out the Christmas tree yesterday. The weather was beautiful - somewhere in the 60s - and there were crowds jamming the area around the tree and ice skating rink.

After obligatory pictures, we went into the Metropolitan Museum Shop to buy a Christmas gift we had seen in their window. Once inside, we got upgraded significantly to a really cool gift. The only problem was that the original gift weighed about 2 ounces and the new gift is big and weighs about 20 pounds. Can't say any more or the surprise will go away for someone, but we left it to be picked up at the end of the day.

We then wandered around in search of a restaurant for lunch. Unfortunately we were wandering around Fifth Avenue, and there aren't any restaurants there. Once we figured that out, we wandered down a side street and ended up at an Irish pub where we drank Harps with our lunch.

Then the day took a new turn. LK and I have had a 25-year fight going on. It's about who will be responsible for what we do. Neither of us wants to do it. It used to be enough to be the first one to ask, "What do you want to do?" to win, but now LK cleverly counters that with "Whatever you want" and from there it generally goes back and forth until we have exhausted our "I don't care, whatever you want to do" and one of us made a decision.

That, of course, means if the decision is no good it's your fault. Which is also the reason we have the fight.

LK won yesterday - and last night reminded me quite strongly that I had first broken her original plans for the day and then made the decision to do the things we did, so any pain I felt was my fault. We walked north along Central Park to the Whitney. That's about a mile and a half, which is no big deal on such a beautiful day.

Then we walked around the museum for about two hours. The only time I sat was when I visited the men's room. When we left, I was game for a taxi back to the store where we left our gift and a bar until our play started. LK - who was also complaining about sore feet - saw no reason that we couldn't walk back the mile and a half.

"But we can take a taxi if you want to," she said. I recognized this very clever ploy. Either wuss out and admit you're tired without me having to, or suffer, fat boy. Of course I couldn't take a taxi.

Walking back down Fifth Avenue, we came upon one of the scariest sites I have encountered in New York - Tiffany & Co.

It was crowded and the clerks were not their typical all smiles and patience. They were busy and crabby. LK picked up a gift for someone on behalf of someone (more Christmas secrets) and even she was getting crabby about Tiffany by the time we left. The crabbiness also may have had something to do with her comment that she was a bit surprised that I hadn't picked up on her comment and bought something for her.

I played dumb.

We got back to Rockefeller Center and picked up the gift, which now appeared to weigh about 3 or 400 pounds. We had tickets to a show at 8 and had to kill 2 hours. I had fantasies of a bar stool and a very cold beer. And we found just that two blocks away from our show.

Rested and refreshed, we wandered down to see Carrie Fisher's one-woman show "Wishful Drinking". She was very enjoyable, but this post has gone on so long I won't write a review now. Suffice it to say, we grabbed a quick pizza and salad after the play, definitely grabbed a cab for the trip back to the hotel and slept very late this morning.

This morning I am feeling great, my feet are ready for action and the weather remains good. Last day in New York. Time to go.

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