Back East in mid-April, I spent a few days in my old and forever home Manhattan with friends. We stopped for a quick bite at the sixth floor restaurant at the Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle before I caught a cab back to JFK. Yeah, believe me, I know and quite deeply that JFK is a pain, but please allow me to point out that once you leave the city some of your choices may be limned with the light of limitation, whose glow can cast a great pure magic and delight over the secret mundane details of your life.
Facing North-Easty and tucked in the corner of the dining room's long curved window wall, I found myself more or less face to face with Columbus himself. Egads! So I took out my camera as I ate a little tiny lobster roll (it was quick) and imbibed the sort of fantastic elderflower soda that you might more generally find on menus in my still-quirky-if-ominously-monetizing Portland, or poured from a vintage bottle spiked with the local moonshine and a messy bouquet of glorious wild herbs in someone's kitchen in the north of Ibiza.
Where's our man Columbus? Well, I haven't quite processed that one yet. But the relative lack of human presence on the West Side on that Saturday afternoon before Easter "there's no one here, there's no one here," my friend kept on saying as I sipped and peered, combined with beautiful light on the still mostly naked and always so so graceful early spring branches, made for this image of the West 59th Street Park entrance.