a wintry December Monday, our last in new York, we wandered through randomly chosen galleries of the Metropolitan with painters Michael Metz and Nancy Haynes, visiting, among other things, El Greco’s pinheaded, tormented anorexics; the “Assyria to Iberia”exhibit, notable for its maps but mobbed by well-behaved Jewish schoolkids with their loud and hard to avoid teachers; endless rooms of subsequent distractions, impressions, Impressionists…all this followed by lunch.

Michael and Nancy then went home, leaving us to our own devices, which allowed us to ricochet through Japanese and other Eastern Wonders to the Islamic Wing…

…finally alighting in the Contemporary for Amie Siegal’s “Provenance” videos until sufficiently rested to walk east into the wind to the Lex and then the Q to Brooklyn, cab through darkening streets to Lydia’s to await the end of her day and walk to a very fine little neighborhood restaurant [Lulu & Po]…then, soon enough, bed, realizing to our horror we’d forgotten the exhibition we’d most meant to see at the Met, Cubism.  Oh, well, Monday.

Tuesday rained exorbitantly; our goodbyes said we lugged overly large luggage down steep stairs to partake of an exuberant Jamaican taxi playing loud reggae radio all the way to Putnam Avenue in the wet, where Luz and Christine were entertaining grandpa Dean with little Izel, and us, too, until eventual Peruvian lunch delivered from Luz, the restaurant, preceded, soon…

…the Uber car that comes sloshing up at two, getting us to JFK in good time, particularly as our plane, belated incoming, departs an hour delayed but, as with the eastward trip, mysteriously makes up most of it in the air, flying over Delta, Utah, almost exactly a week to the hour before we pulled into it heading east by land on the 16th [see “Between the Storms”, soon]…

Wednesday L. went early off for a marathon day at school and I took the dogs foggily walking, anticipating disaster as the media’s gleefully touting the “Storm of the Century” for Thursday.

On the other hand the century being a mere fourteen years old and most of it constituting a drought in California didn’t make that seem too urgent, but it rained steadily from early Thursday through much of Friday nonetheless.  L., wisely cancelling her Thursday appointments, stayed home to draw and catch up…the dogs stayed in both days.

So, the Storm of the Century, sort of…

M