Glass, Cuba and Spring

Sometimes the stars line up just so, or maybe you just get tired of toting around these very heavy bags of expectations and ideas of what life should look or feel like and instead you just go live it, and this alchemy happens where you just let go and end up having an absolutely perfect day which is what I was blessed to have yesterday.

After a few days of rain, spring has shown up again and NY is in that sweet spot where it's sunny but not too sunny and warm but not too warm and people are smiling rather than grumbling about the heat and humidity. So after writing I went to the Philoctetes Center which is this amazing place affiliated with the New York Psychoanalytic Society that has these fantastic lectures and roundtable discussions centered around imagination. I went to see Scott Hick's documentary Glass, A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts, about the composer Philip Glass, which was beautifully done and inspirational. Then I walked around the Upper East Side which I never do because, well, it's the Upper East Side and ended up at Schaller & Weber which is a German grocery store that sells sausages and spaetzle and chocolate -- stuff that brought back all these memories of my grandparents' house in Germany. And then after that, I went to meet my new gay soul mate Juan for dinner where I marveled at how kind the Universe can be by introducing you to truly lovely human beings on a semi-regular basis. And then we went to see a play called ALL EYES AND EARS by the very talented playwright Rogelio Martinez which is set in 1961 Cuba in the period between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Really, really interesting -- I'm still digesting it and pondering it so I feel as if I can't write all that much about it yet, but afterwards we were talking about the idea of fear, and how living in that climate affects your behavior, and what you end up doing that you wouldn't normally do if you weren't afraid...(okay, I'm going to have to stop writing about this so I can go back to thinking about it)...And then after the play I went across the street with Rogelio and the cast and we talked about writing and writers and the filly from the Kentucky Derby who met a tragic end and a bunch of other stuff and it was...well, it was as delicious as the single piece of milk chocolate I bought at the German grocery store that afternoon and the perfect end to a perfect day.