A vacation from retirement 
July 21, 2006
By Marge Zap

Peggy Bell and I spent two very busy weeks in New York City in May. The weather wasn’t very good, but we didn’t care. We rented a small apartment on 14th St. and Fifth Avenue from a friend of Sandy Brooks, who spends three months a year in San Miguel.

Within easy walking distance were a new Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Garden of Eden, The Container Store, Bed Bath and Beyond, T. J. Max, Filene’s Basement, a lovely paper store and many others. We didn’t buy a lot, but we still had to borrow a suitcase to get back to San Miguel.

I had grown up in New York City and was there last year. There were so many changes. We often went from Greenwich Village to the upper 90s, and there was scaffolding everywhere. New high-rise buildings are going up on many blocks, and the city has implemented a code to prevent outside building structures from falling on pedestrians. This code also results in scaffolding.

We had breakfast or lunch with family or friends every day. My daughter, Erica, who lives in Newport, Rhode Island, joined us for the weekend. She had made reservations a couple of weeks in advance at the very popular Union Square Cafe. It wasn’t cheap, but Peggy and I shared a meal, as we often do. The next day, after the theater, we had an early dinner at Ruby Foo’s in Times Square at 49th St. and Broadway. It was huge and nicely appointed, and the food was good. It too was a little pricey, but the four of us shared all the dishes. When we left, the place was packed, and if we had not gone early we would never had been seated without a reservation.

We met my cousins, who live in New York City, and friends who have a house in Warwick, New York, and an apartment in Paris, France. Peggy and I had spent time with them in Paris, and we had been good friends when I lived in Warwick. I had introduced the two couples many years ago, and they have visited each other frequently since they have much in common. They all work as consultants for many US companies on employee problems. We had an early dinner at Oh Mai, a Thai restaurant on 9th Ave and 18th St. The dining room is small, and it is so popular they have no sign on the building.

I love dim sum, so Peggy and I went to GoGo, at 5 East Broadway in Chinatown, with a United Nations colleague who is Chinese-Indian. Pilan and I had shared an office in the 1940s, and we have maintained our friendship. I have visited her sisters in London, and she introduced me to some Thai friends in New York. They, in turn, introduced me to their family and a friend of theirs in Bangkok. I have spent time with them on my many buying trips to Thailand, and we often email each other. GoGo is also very small and fairly new, but we had my favorite dishes and, as always, we ordered too much but managed to eat it all.

We had lunch twice at a Japanese restaurant, Japonica, on University Place between 12th and 13th St. with George Bell’s grandchildren and then with Suzie Emmerich, who has been to San Miguel many times, and with another friend who now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

The card for the restaurant on 77th Street was in an envelope with all my notes that American Airlines security staff managed to lose when they inspected my bags at either La Guardia Airport or JFK Airport or Dallas Airport or Houston Airport. With all these transfers, we missed our flight to León and were put up at a hotel in Houston, courtesy of American Airlines. Security people at all these terminals have been looking for my envelope, but I have given up expecting its return. We took all this in stride because I have travelled so much—anything is likely to happen. (Once, when my daughter and I checked into a hotel in India, where we had reservations, we were told the room had not yet been built.)
We ate a delicious lunch at Isabella’s, on 77th St. and Columbus Ave., with Nancy Chase’s daughter-in-law, Margaret, and her cousin, Ellen Starr, the jazz performer, who is now in San Miguel for several months. We had lots of conversations with the waiters who know Nancy, and at the end of the meal they brought us two extra desserts without charge.

Friends of Peggy from California met us at Zabar’s, my favorite food and appliance store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at Broadway and 80th St. We then went to a delicatessen for breakfast and conversation.

Twice we had breakfast or lunch in our apartment on the 11th floor or at Sandy Brook’s on the 5th floor with a friend from Massachusetts and with my sister-in-law, niece and grandnephew. We bought wonderful food from Garden of Eden and Whole Foods. They were within two blocks of the apartment. Every meal was delicious and the reunions were fun.

We saw two Broadway performances. Awake & Sing is a depression-era drama written by Clifford Odets and originally produced for the stage in the mid 1930s, dealing with educated middle- or upper-middle class Jewish families living in New York and falling on hard times during the Depression. These people have pretensions of gentility and high culture, but quickly encroaching poverty grinds at that façade and leaves them without much more than primal survival.

Sweeney Todd, a 1979 musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, is about a barber bent on revenge who takes up with a neighbor. Together, they slice their way through London’s upper crust, slitting their throats and baking them into fast-selling pies. The music was great and the set inventive. All the characters sang and played instruments. It just missed getting a Tony award this year. 

Two movies seemed like good choices: Friends with Money, which we should have skipped, and Tsotsi, which was one of the most moving films I have seen. It portrays six days in the violent life of a young Johannesburg gang leader. The Biblioteca Pública’s José Luis is going to order the film to show at the Santa Ana Theater.

We went to museums on the days we were not going to the theatre, and we managed to visit nine of them. Our least favorite was the Guggenheim. Its exterior is being renovated, and it was not showing the David Smith sculptures we went to see. They were all packed in wooden crates with his name on them. There were only two floors with uninspiring art, and the remainder of the floors were being cleaned and painted for the next exhibit.

Nearby was the Asia Society, which has a fine collection of Asian Art collected by Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, III. There were 300 works of art, especially Buddhist and Himalayan. On some of the walls were photos of their gardens and rooms showing how the art was placed in their estate.
The Museum of Modern Art has a new building, which I like, especially the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the city. 
We didn’t spend a lot of time there, and since all their restaurants had long waiting lines, we went to a Japanese cafe on 54th Street that was pleasant and not crowded. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is still my favorite. 

I have been to many museums around the world, and it is on the top of my list. They had special exhibits on the treasures of sacred Maya Kings, one on Egyptian Pharaohs, and another on the fabric of ikat textile. I was pleased to see how the ikat is made because I have collected it for many years from Guatemala and Bali. We walked to many other parts of the museum and were overwhelmed by the exhibits we passed. Among those we sought were the African collection donated by the father of the young Rockefeller, who disappeared during his journey in Africa. Then we moved on to the peaceful Chinese garden where I go to refresh myself. On many previous visits to the Met museum I would spend the day, clear my mind with tea or food and a book and go to many exhibits. It takes many days to visit all the galleries in the museum, and there are guides who will describe parts of the collection in detail.

We were told that we could not skip the Neue Gallery, which had a special exhibit of the work of Paul Klee produced in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States. It illustrated the collections between the avant-garde art of Klee and the art of the ancient Americas. We were advised to have lunch in their restaurant and sample their Austrian-style desserts. They were all right, but the Petit Four in San Miguel makes better ones.

Next was the Morgan Library, which has added a modern wing to its building. We saw drawings by Rembrandt and Rubens, medieval and Renaissance works and thousand-year-old Near-Eastern carvings. We also had lunch in the Museum in a simple and pleasant dining area.

After lunch with Nancy’s relatives, we went to the Museum of Natural History and saw an in-depth exhibition on Charles Darwin as botanist, geologist and naturalist with details on his theory of evolution. On display were live Galapagos tortoises and a huge iguana, as well as fossil specimens collected by Darwin on his extensive boat trips. There was also a panel disputing the theories of the “creationists.” We had wanted to see the live butterfly exhibit, but it was closing time and they made us leave.

Our next visit was to the Museum of Arts and Design, operated by The American Crafts Council. I thought it would contain works of US craftspeople, but it had an exhibit of the molded plywood chairs that were developed in the 1950s by Charles and Ray Eames. The major exhibit was 75 innovative works of turned and carved wood collected by Robert and Lillian Bohlen. For two decades, the Bohlens bought contemporary wood art from around the world, ranging from turned vessels to major sculpture. The exhibit included the works of outstanding wood artists.

Our final museum trip was to the Rubin Museum of Art that opened in October 2004 and is on West 17th Street, close to where we were staying. It is the first museum in the Western world dedicated solely to the art of the Himalayas and the surrounding regions. It had portraits of tantric Siddhas, flying mystics in Himalayan art, idealized human forms, plus a section on information about Himalayan art. It dealt with the major religions of the area: Hinduism, Buddhism and Bon, showing female Buddhas, meditational deities and protectors of conditions for spiritual development, such as wisdom, health, wealth, the environment and defeat of internal and external enemies. It was a suitable ending to our museum visits in New York.

We took buses and subways to the various museums and also did a lot of walking. On one of our hikes we went into the glorious St. Patrick’s Cathedral. 

On our way out, we picked up a notice about a forthcoming concert for which we bought tickets: a performance of the Mozart Coronation Mass with a large chamber orchestra and about 20 chorale singers with four soloists. You can imagine what that sounded like in that building.

We went to the Unitarian-Universalist Community Church with Sandy on two Sundays and saw on the bulletin board that Cindy Sheehan was going to speak at the UU Shelter Rock in Manhassat, Long Island. The three of us took the Long Island Railroad and a cab to the church. It was so large we went in the wrong entrance and saw the wealth of this UU edifice. It had been willed some land, which turned out to have oil wells. The church gives grants to other Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Cindy Sheehan, the war protester who traveled to many countries protesting the Iraq war, and who set up Camp Casey outside President Bush’s ranch at Crawford, Texas, spoke for an hour and a quarter without notes. The most moving part of her talk was her recounting of how she reacted when her son Casey died in Iraq. At first she was numb and withdrew into herself. What activated her was a poem written by her daughter Carla:

The Sounds of Hope
Have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?
The torrential rains of a mother’s weeping will never be done.
They call him a hero, you should be glad he’s one, but,
Have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?

Have you ever heard the sound of a father holding back his cries?
They say he must be brave.
The only thing he allows himself are long, deep sighs.
Have you ever heard the sound of a father holding back his cries?

Have you ever heard the sound of taps played at your brother’s grave?
They say he died so the flag will continue to wave.
But I believe he died because they had oil to save.
Have you ever heard the sound of taps played at your brother’s grave?

Have you ever heard the sound of a Nation Rocked to Sleep?
The leaders want to keep you numb so the pain won’t be so deep.
But if we the people let them continue, another mother will weep.
Have you ever heard the sound of a Nation Rocked to Sleep?


Cindy Sheehan’s book is called Not One More Mother’s Child. It has a foreword by Congressman John Conyers, Jr., and information about it is at www.koabooks.com. 

Sandy had also found a notice stating that Paul Robeson, Jr. was going to speak at a branch of the College of the City of New York on 34th St. We heard him give an indictment of contemporary American politics, stating that Black America has not received the liberty to which this minority is entitled. He described his book A Black Way of Seeing, which deals with 9/11 black and white; the war on terror; economics, race, and class; class commands; vote frauds in 2000 and 2004; black destiny and other issues. The book includes an appendix titled “The Anatomy of Two Vote Frauds” and another with statistics on “The Anatomy of the Switching Operation.” To find out more information on this book see www.sevenstories.com. 

We managed to attend all these events as we went to sleep pretty early, ate well but moderately (most of the time), and were inspired to do and see as much as we could every day. It had been Peggy’s first real visit to New York City, so I, and Sandy, who joined us many times, kept her eyes and ears full.
What a packed two-week visit! After that we were ready to come back to San Miguel to our meetings, charitable activities, phone calls, movies, art events, lectures, plays and good music.

It was a vacation from retirement?