We got invited to Jay's Superb Owl party, and I fixed in my mind that I would make an enchilada casserole -- vegetarian, mind you -- to compete with something called the Porkestra that we were told was going to go down. I have an embellished memory of similar enchilada dish that my old colleague Mike Jurney made for a party at Joel's house many, many years ago, a layered preparation with alternating strata of tortillas, chicken, cheese, and green chiles. I've been trying to reproduce it ever since I first tried it in, like, 2005.
I found this recipe, which was irresistible to me and my particular fetishes: Unorthodox components; lots of them; a claim to cultural authenticity. I went out to Sunset Park the morning-of to collect ingredients. It was 10 AM, and there was a spectacular pile of vomit in front of the benches on the southbound platform at Union St. The first stop I made was at the Key Food, which looked dirtier than I remembered and kind of visually desaturated. (I'd worried that I'd feel that way after moving back to Park Slope.) Store manager who looks like a dissipated Boy Scout. Weird guy talking to himself in the produce aisle who turned out to work there. There's a section of one aisle devoted to Mexican spices and dried herbs packaged in very small quantities: Chamomile flowers, yerba buena, various thistle-like things. There was one small package of hibiscus flowers there, labeled flor de jamaica, far too small an amount to account for the two cups called for by the recipe, but at least I knew I was on the right track. I found the rest of it a block away at "Sam" Grocery, the dusty Mexican provisions store on the corner of 43rd St. Practically the entire back wall of the shop was given over to pillow-sized bags of dried hibiscus.
I treated myself to a celebratory tornillo from Angel's.
The enchiladas came out well, though I realized after getting them into the oven just how obsessed I'd been with their successful execution. Hibiscus flowers are pretty good. I don't know if I'd describe them as "meaty," the way the recipe does, but they're good. Imagine eating the contents of a Red Zinger tea bag. There were also turnips, grated carrots, and enchilada sauce made from canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. That stuff is hell of spicy, in case you'd ever seen it at the grocery story and wondered.
For Nina's birthday, we returned to the Museum Of Natural History. This time we visited the Hall Of Minerals, gray-carpeted gymnasium of, I should hope, every Manhattan childhood. I made her watch the short movie about gold that plays in a loop in the little room right to the left of where they keep the the Star of India. She said she'd never seen this movie, but I've seen it dozens of times. I know what the narrator's voice sounds like and what all the musical cues are, and I can picture the nugget sitting submerged in a riverbed that serves as the movie's unifying visual motif. It's funny to think of it playing over and over again day after day. The young geologist who gets interviewed in one part is middle aged now. The middle-aged economist who gets interviewed in another part is probably dead. And there's the part where they show you what it would look like if all the gold in the world were molded into an enormous cube and placed at one end of a football field, the stands empty, the sounds of the game played over the loudspeakers from an audio tape.
On our way out, we walked through the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians. The "human being" exhibits have never held my interest as a kid, but now that I'm older I've become more curious about them, in part because of how resistant to change their curation seems to be. Same atlatls, same silly putty-colored mannequins year after year. And here is one of the few remaining mysteries of my adult life: I have a vivid memory of walking through one of the Indians halls as a kid and peering down at one of the waist-high, glass-topped display cases that contain cutaway views of longhouses and other structures. Inside the longhouse, I remember seeing a tiny model of a firepit and cooking utensils, and that the model firepit had a light underneath it so that it glowed red and yellow. I wind up walking through one of the Indians halls (how many are there -- three?) whenever I come to the museum, and I always check for the glowing fire. I've never been able to find it. Did it really exist? Is it like the issue of Astounding magazine that Philip K. Dick knew he shouldn't find?
The museum was closing at 6, but our dinner reservation wasn't until 7:30. We decided to walk through the Park to the train. I slipped on the ice at one point and landed hard on a bony part of my leg. Am I getting old? We rounded a corner near the southeastern edge of the Park and came upon Trump (nee Wollman) Rink (ugh). Babies, it isn't easy for me to ignore the mental alarms that go off when I think about slipping off schedule, but I could tell Nina was looking down wistfully at the turning wheel of skaters. Hey, I said. We have a few minutes. What if we just went skating? A few isolated flakes were falling when we left the museum, but by the time we laced up our skates and got out on the ice, the air was full of glittering snow. We went around and around with the other skaters, feeling the skates negotiate with our ankles as we took the curves. The rink staff dudes darted here and there through the slowly turning wheel of skaters, sometimes stopping to flirt with teenage girls windmilling their arms and clomping their skates. I re-learned how to kind of flip around real fast (make a T with your skates) and even managed to skate backwards for a little while (not sure how that works). The snow fell all around us and mixed with the powder carved out of the ice by our skates. It was charming and fun.
We ate dinner at Kin Shop. Their deal is that they serve fancy Thai street food. Nina ordered a kind of duck curry thing that you could roll up in a piece of roti. It was really good.
The final stop on the birthday express was at the Regal Union Square, where we sat for the 10:30 show of Inside Llewyn Davis. It was beautiful but made me feel like shit. The predicament of Mr. Davis -- cursed to be a salesman for a product that nobody wants to buy -- was very distressing for me to contemplate. I mean, that's what I am, right? I hope that's what it feels like for everyone. I don't think I'll ever really know. But I left the theater humming Dink's Song: Fare thee well, O Honey, fare thee well.