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mandatory in this city
Saturday, September 29 2001
I was just reading an AOL News article about the downturn in the music industry and was surprised by something. Usually the writing in such articles is blandly dispassionate and geared towards those without much education. But in this article they included two words I actually had to look up. This has never happened before! The words were scuppered and fillip.
Gretchen returned from her travels today, having been to Silver Spring for the high holies and then Woodstock, NY, for the sheer hell of it. We'd arranged to do dinner tonight at Uguale in the Village, and since Gretchen was coming in on a bus, I went to meet her in Manhattan. I found her at the appointed place, in front of a bagel shop at the corner of 14th Street and 7th Avenue. She had two heavy backpacks of loot from her parents and bouquet of flowers she'd just bought for me.
To get to our intended destination, we walked west to the Hudson River and then south down West Street. Streets are strange in the Village, with a long progression of named streets coming between 12th and 10th, but by then you're nearly to Houston anyway and the numbering of streets is an increasingly useless convention. Off in the distance, a little over a mile away, we could see the still-smouldering ruins of the World Trade Center all lit up for the non-stop recovery operation. I'd been watching CNN all day, and I was still obsessed with the terrorist attack but couldn't say anything more about it because Gretchen had forbidden it.
I'd called ahead and set up a reservation at Uguale, thinking this was mere formality since restaurants haven't been doing well for the past few weeks. But it was a good thing I'd called, at least at Uguale, at least tonight. The desire to eat out had evidently returned to New York and the place was packed. As we waited near the bar, we were told on several occasions that our table was nearly ready, but it was about 9:00pm before we were finally seated. Sal, the maitre'd, ordered us a round of free drinks to help us through the wait. I didn't much care; Gretchen and I had a lot to talk about and none of it was related to the World Trade Center.
Uguale is an inherently romantic place. There's something about the warm, dim lighting, the twinkling skyline of the Jersey shore, and the spunky, intelligent demeanor of the waitstaff that just reaches in through your sternum and gets you. If you were a cat you'd want to purr. The only thing that seemed out of place and improperly-considered was the paper American flag that had been hastily stuck to a front window with four pieces of transparent tape. Such displays are mandatory in this city. A more fitting tribute was visible across West Street, where hundreds of pieces of hand-labeled yellow tape had been tied to a cyclone fence, each presumably commemorating someone who was either dead or "missing."
As we'd been the last time we dined at Uguale, we were declared "the fun couple of the evening," and the management ordered us a free round of frangelica.
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