A Rainy Day in New York   I allowed six nights for the business trip to Eden Bay Resort in the Dominican Republic, and happily, we accomplished what we needed to do. On Beverly’s first anniversary we had a little toast to her at our table, and I showed the Beverly in Blue picture around. Resort Manager Patricia Gorden, who had brought me the news one year ago, gave me a hug.

On the flight back, just as we were revving up to take off down the runway, the revving suddenly stopped and we returned to the gate. This was the first time I’d ever experienced an aborted takeoff. The pilot explained that a red light had suddenly gone on. It took them an hour to replace a fuel filter, during which time a few nervous Dominicans got off the plane. The flight to New York was otherwise uneventful, especially considering all the reports of rain that I’d heard. There might even have been talk of building arks. I was lucky, because the day after I got back I’d heard that there were major delays at the airports due to the rain, and that service on the lower part of my subway line # 1 down to Rector Street and further south had temporarily been suspended due to flooding, trains temporarily being replaced by buses, yet I had gotten home without trouble.

But the second day after returning I had some chores to do, so I decided to make a full day out of it, adding a movie, a museum, and dinner. As a follow-up to Hurricane Vince and Cabo de São Vicente, my first stop was at the Saint Vincent’s Hospital Medical Building in Greenwich Village, for an appointment I’d made well before the hurricane came to be. After finishing up my business on 13th Street, I decided to walk uptown to the movies on 23rd Street. It might surprise some worthy out-of-town readers that people do actually avoid driving and still walk serious distances in New York, and that people actually do use umbrellas. The view from above of multiple bobbing circles of color must be impressive. Since the bubble of your umbrella extends your private space considerably, on a busy sidewalk you have to get used to deciding on raising, lowering, or tilting to avoid collisions.

Walking up Seventh Avenue, as I crossed West Fourteenth Street the story of Jean and John down the road on East Fourteenth Street all those years ago came to mind. I was on the edge of the Chelsea neighborhood, named after the Borough of Chelsea in London. Chelsea, like many other neighborhoods, is “coming back”, with a lot of nice restaurants and such. The Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex, built on former piers over the Hudson, has gotten well-known. The Chelsea Piers have gotten so well-known that I remember someone asking me recently if the neighborhood was named after the piers or vice-versa!

Chelsea is in the West Teens and Twenties. Adjoining it to the north in the Thirties and Forties is Clinton, named after DeWitt Clinton, former Mayor of New York City and Governor of New York State, who opened the Erie Canal in the 1820’s. The name therefore has no connection with President Bill Clinton, although during his tenure, it was pointed out that a local newspaper, named after the two neighborhoods it serves, is called the Chelsea Clinton News, and it was joked that it was “really” named after the First Daughter. I’ve also heard that the Clintons named their daughter after London’s Borough of Chelsea, so what goes around, comes around.

Passing some interesting restaurants on Seventh Avenue, I went to the Chelsea Cinemas complex on 23rd Street and saw “Capote”, which was somber in tone and matched the dreary weather outside. Philip Seymour Hoffman has a good chance of being nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal.

In the early evening I took the (underground) Iron Road back up to the Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue, and walked in the rain past the Neue Galerie on 86th and Fifth, up to the Guggenheim on 89th and Fifth. You may recall that on the subway back from my first visit at the Neue Galerie, as I was reviewing its brochure, a Russian-American woman and her adult son chatted me up about both museums. They had just visited the show at the Guggenheim called Russia!, which Vladimir Putin had just dedicated, and we discussed it. I was intrigued, and so I was back to see it.

Beverly and I have been fans of Frank Lloyd Wright for some time. A few years ago, in a rural area south of Pittsburgh, we saw his most unique house, Fallingwater, which is built over a waterfall. We’ve also enjoyed several of his buildings in Oak Park, Illinois, in the western Chicago suburbs. But the Guggenheim Museum is his only building in New York. I recall only visiting it once, although it would be logical that I must have gone again to show Beverly, but I don’t recall. When I was at Queens College (of the City University of New York) in the mid-fifties, it was a graduation requirement that upperclassman take the Language, Literature, and Arts Exam (LLA), which included a number of projects in preparation for the exam, including seeing a Broadway show and visiting a museum. I went to the Guggenheim, which had just opened.

The building was and is impressive. Outside it looks like a giant, white, child’s top. The interior consists of a huge, six-story (or more) rotunda below a skylight, and the exhibition rotates in a vast spiral round and round the sides of the rotunda, with a few side galleries. It’s best taking the elevator to the top and working your way down. I enjoyed the building, but I didn’t care for the museum’s collection of very modern art, and I don’t recall returning for all these decades.

I did enjoy the Russia! show. It has a very complete collection of all periods of Russian art. I wanted to work my way down the spiral, which meant going backward in time, which intrigued me. I didn’t care for the abstract ultra-modern, but going back to Soviet realism, although not usually attractive, is still impressive, with musclebound male and female workers fulfilling their quotas. After all, it still is a part of Russian art. There was a huge bronze statue of an idealized man picking up a large paving stone, and the title was something like “The Ammunition of the Proletariat”. A few pictures included Lenin and Stalin.

I found most enjoyable the pictures from the 1800’s up to 1917, which included Russian impressionism. As for Realism, I recall a huge picture of Volga Boatmen, dressed in rags and wearing harnesses. 18C and 19C pictures were also of interest, and the 15C and earlier were represented by icons and wooden church panels.

You may think lightning doesn’t strike twice, but on the subway going to dinner I was looking at the Russia! brochure, and this time it was a young Ukranian-American man and his date, who were also coming from the Guggenheim, asked what I thought of the show, so once again I had a museum discussion while rolling south underneath Lexington Avenue.

It had crossed my mind to go back to Café Sibarsky at the Neue Gallerie, but I had been there twice last month, and I had become intrigued with a restaurant I had passed on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, so I took the subway back to 18th Street. I had found a very pleasant French bistro called Le Singe Vert. I didn’t like the name (The Green Monkey), but the (very wet) sidewalk café and interior, as well as its menu, had looked quite interesting. It was very French, with a full bar and small tables close to each other, with a typical bistro menu. The waiter recommended an excellent, dry white wine, dinner was great, and very French, the atmosphere as I came in out of the rain was very cozy, and it was a good end to a rainy day in New York

Pau   I have a large backlog of stories, and have been wanting to talk about Pau for some time. Since the main Pau story involves a rainy day, it seems appropriate to bring it up now.

When you say Po in an Italian context, you’re probably referring to the major river in northern Italy. Say Po in a German context, and you’re referring to your butt, as in “Get off your Po and get busy”. But in a French context, Po refers to a city in the southwestern corner of France, near the Pyrénées. Of course, given the oddities of French spelling, Po in this case is actually spelled Pau. (In Reflections 2002 Series 4 it was pointed out similarly that the cities of Mo and So are actually spelled Meaux and Sceaux.)

1971-2 was the year Beverly and I were both on sabbatical. We were to start that trip with a three-week session of French study in Pau, and then drive on to other activities further east, including crossing the Iron Curtain to drive through southeastern Europe.

We sailed to Paris that summer to pick up a car that we’d be using for several months. We had found on a number of trips that, rather than renting for such a period, it was wiser and cheaper to get a short-term lease on a car, which we had done a number of times quite successfully. The lease in the summer of 1971 worked as well as any, except for one thing. Being on sabbatical, we each were on half salary, and would be traveling for some time, so we looked for the cheapest lease we could find. It seemed to be for a Simca, and we decided on that. The mechanics of the lease worked fine. The mechanics of the car did not. We accomplished everything we wanted to during this trip, but with a certain amount of grief almost every day.

They no longer make the Simca. I’ve looked it up online, and googled specifically Simca 1971. Try it if you’re interested.

On arrival in Paris, on a Friday I believe, I recall we had to go to Passy, to the west of downtown, to pick up the car at some sort of a dealership/factory outlet. We waited hours. They claimed the cars promised to all the people waiting were coming right from the factory (!?). Finally, they said to come back Monday, which was the day classes started in Pau. We made a fuss, did get a car, a red one as I recall, and drove off immediately to the southwest for arrival in Pau on Sunday.

The worthy reader will have a concept of our troubles when I say that, during that drive, as we came back to the Simca at one point to open up the car, I put the key in the lock in the driver’s door, turned it, and pulled it out. The lock came out of the door on the end of the key.

A few days later in Pau, we drove to the Simca dealership. The manager himself waited on us, and promised to have the car looked at. As he touched the mirror on the driver’s door, it came off in his hand.

It went on like that during the whole trip. We had some sort of a constant oil leak, so that when you’d lift the hood in the back of the car you’d see frothy, light brown bubbles on top of the engine, looking something like a cappucino. And we were to drive behind the Iron Curtain with this? I also remember being in Yugoslavia and having to keep on filling the radiator. Yet, it all worked out in the end, but let’s get on to more pleasant things.

German and French were the languages Beverly had come into the marriage with, and she learned Spanish on her own shortly after that. But for me it was German and Spanish, then adding French on my own. This was the first time I was to take actual courses in French, and it worked out well. I recall that one evening, an instructor was giving an informal talk in a large room. I say informal, since Beverly and I were sitting on a table off to the side. I was thrilled that I pretty much understood what he was saying. I learned that the old provincial name for this corner of France is Béarn (bay-ARN), and that sauce béarnaise is named after it. The quirk is, though, that it’s not a local recipe. It turns out that béarnaise sauce was invented by a French chef in New York, and he named it after the province he came from. I later found out that crêpes Suzette were also invented in New York.

The center of Pau was pleasant. On a clear day you could see the Pyrénées about 60 kilometers to the south, especially when standing on a large overlook over the valley. From that overlook one day we saw the Tour de France going by below. On the map of Pau we found, and went to visit, a certain Rue Béverly. It did seem like a happy sign.

We had been assigned a room in a large old private house near the school and near downtown as well. I mostly remember how hot the weather was in those non-airconditioned days. We would come home in the afternoon, throw open the large French-door-style windows, lie down on the bed and try to cool off. But then there was that one rainy day.

A Rainy Day in Pau   With the Pyrénées seemingly within arms’ reach, we were all eager to get into the mountains, and we were glad when an all-day bus trip was planned for one Saturday to the top of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre. Pic is “Peak”; Midi is “South”, so that much makes South Peak; since there are plenty of South Peaks in mountain ranges, this one was named after the Bigorre plain, so Pic du Midi de Bigorre is “Bigorre South Peak”, as opposed to any other South Peak. I didn’t have a Michelin at the time, but checking one now I see it gives it the maximum of three stars, meaning “worth a trip”.

But the hot weather had broken, and we got up that Saturday to a low overcast, a constant drizzle, and cool temperatures. On any other day we would have been glad to get into the cool mountains, but here, even before leaving Pau we needed jackets, and zipped up all the way, at that. It was with a feeling of frustration and futility that we boarded the bus for the hour-and-a-half trip.

[Actually, trips to specifically see mountains are frequently preordained disasters. Although over the years we had managed to see from below mountains such as the Matterhorn and the Zugspitze, even taking the cablecar up Mont Blanc didn’t get us to see any more than the fog we had seen from the valley, and we never saw Denali (Mount McKinley) in Alaska either, which is why I was so glad to see it in the distance from the plane in August (Reflections 2005 Series 13).]

The bus went east from Pau quite a ways, then turned south into the mountains. It was a modern tour bus, with large front windows. The huge wipers went swish-swish, swish-swish. But you couldn’t help feeling: what a waste of time.

Sense memory is a curious thing. As the bus slowly climbed, going through a village there was smoke coming out of chimneys, not surprising considering the weather, and I still remember the pungent smell of burning, wet wood.

The more we proceeded, the worse it seemed to get. We eventually reached the overcast in the form of a fog bank. Swish-swish, swish-swish. How could the driver even see the road ahead? Look, even out the side windows you could hardly see the edge of the pavement!

The burst of incredibly bright sunlight hit those large front windows first, and the driver turned off the wipers. Gradually the rest of the bus lumbered out of the fog as well. Incredibly, we had driven through the cloud cover.

Anyone who flies with any frequency has experienced something similar—you take off in rain, the plane climbs and climbs, then eventually breaks through the clouds; the reverse can happen when landing. But that’s in the sky, at thousands and thousands of feet of altitude. We were on land! In a bus! The feeling of exhileration was palpable.

The landscape under the bright sun was to some extent a moonscape, since we were already above the treeline, a brown landscape with the occasional shrub, and snow patches up higher, all under a bright, blue sky. After a while the bus let us out, to walk the rest of the way to the top.

My mind’s eye (that liar) recalls just a couple of structures at the top. In the back was a weather station, observatory and broadcasting tower. In the foreground was a café with a large terrace. I can picture black wire chairs and tables.

In those years Beverly and I were into Orangina, the French orange soft drink in the squat round bottles. I picture us sitting on that terrace under that blazing sun, in sunglasses, with now open jackets sipping our Orangina through straws. There was a fresh breeze.

I usually use Michelins in English, but the one I’m looking at is in French, and describes the three-star view. It says this térasse is “un admirable belvédère sur les Pyrénees", which indeed it was. I see now that we were at 2865 meters or 9400 feet.

Looking down in the valley, there was a layer of cotton between the mountains, similar to what some people put under a Christmas tree. I suppose on a day without the overcast (was it now an undercast?) you’d see more of the valley floor, but this was fine. We were close to the Spanish border, so most of what we saw ahead of us to the south would have been Spain. Looking to the left, then to the right, Pyrénées, one after the other, some with snow patches, stuck out of the cotton below like fingers sticking out of a fingerless glove. We were on Top of the World, and in more ways than one.

But all good things come to an end, and we went back down to the bus, which then lumbered downhill. We broke back into the fog bank. Swish-swish, swish-swish. The sunglasses came off. Jackets were zipped up. Everything was gray again. We caught the scent again of burning, wet wood on the way back to Pau. Swish-swish, swish-swish.

But this time all of us on the bus had a feeling of fulfillment and accomplishment.

On this rainy day in Pau, we had been on Top of the World.