This is something that sounds weird to say: I signed up for a continuing education course in project management at NYU. My job is paying for it, and I enrolled at the not-so-subtle urging of my higher-ups. ("You... need help with this.") I'm not sure why I chose the section that meets from 9 AM to 5 PM on consecutive Saturdays, but that seemed like the only time I'd be able to pay attention without falling asleep. Plus, it turned out to be a great way to stay out of the heat without missing out on too many summer activities. Professor Shapiro has a wide, toothy mouth and a sharky way of interrogating her students when they're equivocal about their past experiences with project management. She pronounces "ask" as "ahsk." Her favorite way of describing a project with a confused deliverable is as a "family-friendly house that's being built into a bachelorette man-trap." The class is held down on Park Place at one of NYU's downtown satellite locations. It's actually in the Woolworth Building, which is one of those huge, ancient buildings in lower Manhattan with crazy ornate exterior texture. The Woolworth is the one with the green pyramidal top. It's also got a cavernous, cathedral-like lobby covered in marble and gold leaf, with ceilings so high that they create an interior hollow into which the windows in rooms on the first several floors can peer, including our classroom. It looks like a bit like a geode growing inside an office park. The area around the building is a true wasteland, to the extent that I couldn't believe the Woolworth was actually where I was supposed to go on the first day and so passed it by several times. We get a few breaks to grab coffee and a longer break for lunch, and I spend almost all of that time trying to figure out what people who work down there eat if not pizza. I mean, if it's pizza, then, great. But I find that I feel polluted enough on a Saturday at noon. The best I could come up with was a bánh mi place way west of Broadway that puts lettuce on the sandwiches. Oh, the humanity.
On the Friday before the final class, my sister texted me at work to let me know that my grandmother had had a stroke. Or at least, something like a stroke: The staff at the nursing home wasn't able to wake her up that morning. My dad booked a flight to Sarasota, turning down an offer of company. I knew it probably wasn't going to be okay, so I kept my phone on with the volume turned down in class on Saturday. When my mom called in the afternoon, I knew that she had died. What to think about that. I sometimes (often) think of my experiences in terms of how much of my time on earth they account for: I have been dating Nina for 20% of my life so far; I have been in Bel Argosy for 10% of my life. I think of my grandmother's decade in her room in the medical wing of Plymouth Harbor, effectively a dorm room looking out over the fountain in the parking lot, decorated with a fancy antique credenza and bureau from the luxury apartment she'd lived in briefly before becoming ill, in the less "assisted" wing of the facility. Certain parts of life are like a bad dream -- not necessarily that their experience is so unpleasant, but that they have the sick permanence of bad dream. Temporary arrangements turn into long-term configurations. This is not what I was supposed to be doing. And so on.
That evening Nina and I shopped for a party we were going to throw at Eve and Jon's new apartment on Pacific St. (We're taking care of Sam and Sasha while the humans are on vacation in Canadian wilderness.) It felt a bit weird to be doing it that night, but we'd already invited people over and there was nothing I could do to assist in Florida. Nina'd bought hamburger meat from Fleisher's, where she'd observed a truly horrifying pageant, a toddler pissing on the floor while its distracted mother selected a cut of grass-fed steak. (People, it does not get more Park Slope than that.) So we went to Key Food and bought an assortment of condiments and breads and the Brooklyn Brewery Party Pack, which never disappoints although it is ungainly. Eve and Jon's new apartment is a duplex, absurdly luxurious. Among other amenities, it has a back yard, accessible down a set of stairs from a small wooden landing which is where the grill lives. Nina mixed in the requisite "perfect burger" ingredients -- egg, breadcrumbs, Worcestershire -- and after some hand-wringing over the right amount of lighter fluid to use, we cooked the meat, plus some Chik Patties for me and Jerry. We all ate down in the yard, in the dark, sitting on lawn chairs. Mercifully, the mosquitoes kept their distance. The charcoal died before we had a chance to roast the marshmallows we'd bought, so we did those in the kitchen with a little hand-held propane starter, using it like a pastry torch.
I'm counting it as a birthday party.
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