(Door prizes for anyone who can identify from where I cribbed the title.)
In the end, there were only three disappointments, and in the great scheme of things, they were tiny, inconsequential disappointments—or at least two of them were. One was discovering that we could not make it out to Politics & Prose on Sunday and still have time to catch our flight. One was discovering not only that the Folger Shakespeare Library has a theatre, but also that Roger Rees would be performing in it on the same weekend we were in town. (Normally I wouldn’t think twice about changing our dinner plans, but considering that our dinner plans involved two other people, and considering that we were all sunburned, sore-footed and exhausted at the end of the day, I opted to say no to spontaneity—but dear friends, I have loved Roger Rees ever since he was Nicholas Nickleby and I was a teenager, and I am kicking myself, liberally, for not doing better research before leaving New York last week.) The last was arriving home, finding a fat envelope in the pile of mail that had accumulated over the weekend, feeling my heartbeat quicken and my head fill with the sounds of Etta James singing “At Last”...and discovering that the fat envelope was full of LuthorCorp annual report. Well, damn.
Otherwise, I could not have had a better weekend had I asked for it, from the cab that picked us up in Astoria without our even hailing it; to the nice lady at the Delta counter at the Marine Air Terminal, who put us on an earlier flight; to that earlier flight, less than half full, 30 minutes from runway to runway and nothing but glass-clear skies in between; to my first ride on the Metro in almost 25 years, which reminded me of how much fun I’d had riding the Metro when I was a 15-year-old summer intern at the Youth Policy Institute. Our room at the Watergate was big and airy and provided us with a clear view of the Potomac. My brother and sister-in-law arrived about an hour after we did; once we found each other, the weekend of Long Meals and Longer Walks got off to a roaring start. We had barbecue and French food—not in the same meal—in Georgetown, and, of course, we went to Nora on Friday night, where I ate a bowl of the fattest, creamiest mussels I had ever seen, followed them with a rack of lamb with an herb crust I can still smell, and finished it with a strawberry tart filled with a pastry orange cream that makes me want to wail, beg and shimmy my way into Nora’s kitchen until her pastry chef teaches me how to make it. I was so happy at the end of that meal that I was ready to make a deal with the universe in which I would work at the box factory for eternity if only I could eat at Nora once a month. (It has since been suggested to me that I might be able to go back to Nora without having to make any eternity-based deals with the box factory. What a lovely thought.)
(to be continued...)
