Recent Posts
Basking Byron
Byron basking in his bed in our new bedroom. We often compare his habits to the bathing habits of the ancient Romans who would heat up in a hot bath (caldarium) before shocking their systems with a leap into a cold pool (frigidarium).
We like to say “Byron’s in the caldarium.”
Ten seconds of the caldarium
Sometimes Business Is Merely a Question of Endurance
Therefore David ran, and stood upon the Philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and cut off his head therewith.
1 Samuel 17:51, KJV
Up here on the northern boundary of the Upper West Side at Broadway and 93rd, there used to be a Starbucks around the corner from Byron’s day care. I’d only rarely go there, preferring the small kiosk coffee at The Coffee Place out front. The owner was always friendly, liberal in his sugar pours, and always greeted Byron while we waited. The lines at the Starbucks (across from a Soulcycle and an Equinox gym) were often pretty long with the Lululemon clad patrons of the fitness enterprises.
But Covid-19 came, and, some months ago, the Starbucks closed. With the Lululemon-clad retail market vanished and only the essential work of construction continued, this kiosk with its low (literally) overhead survived.
Survive, adapt, outrun, outlast.
Springtime, Housman, and My Grandmother
On the 21st, Riverside Park was alive with Spring and I noticed that some local had put up A.E. Housman’s poem celebrating the beauty of the cherry tree in a copse of cherry trees:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.