Tag Archives: Jeff Bezos

NYMysteries – Nov. 17

NYMysteries  Nov. 17

Remember I Love Lucy ? I lived it the night of the Friday blizzard. I guess Mayor DeBlasio and Governor Cuomo were so busy giving Long Island City to Jeff Bezos that they didn’t have time to prepare NYC or NY state for the blizzard.  

 At around 4 pm in Friday I caught a crosstown bus to 2nd Avenue and 57th Street. There, I waited for 100 hours with about 100 people in the rising storm at the bus stop. Finally, one came. We clambered on. I got a seat! The bus moved slowly. Who cared? It was going south. You couldn’t see out the windows because of the mixture of snow, sleet and rain. At 47th Street the bus came to a stop and the driver announced that the bus was not safe to drive in these conditions. We had to get out. The bus driver stood in the middle of 2nd Avenue, arms outstretched to make sure we got from his bus, across the avenue to the ice ladened sidewalk.The cars were playing ring-around-the-rosie. They didn’t obey the traffic lights. No wonder the bus driver made his tough call BUT now what? I figured I had to walk from 47th Street to 14th Street.  I got moving slowly. There were mothers wheeling children. I saw a father holding on to three young children. People were crowded into bus stops. I didn’t join them because I figured the busses weren’t running. Who knew what was going on? When I got to 30th Street I saw a man getting out of a taxi. I speeded up and begged the driver to take me home. “Sorry. My meter’s not working,” he said. I assured him I didn’t care and told him I’d pay him $40. He took me home. When I got into my apartment, the toilet was overflowing. Water outside. Water inside. After cleaning up and after a g&t or two, I went to bed.  The blizzard roared outside. The wind’s force swept through my bedroom window and slammed shut my bedroom door. It was 2:15 am. I got up and pulled on the bedroom door’s knob. The door wouldn’t open. A plastic exercise band which lives on the knob had caught in the door, sealing it shut. I looked around my bedroom, now a cage, now a cell. All right. I’m exaggerating but it had been a tough day. At least I wasn’t locked in the closet. I emailed a wonderful neighbor who has my keys explaining my predicament and asking her to rescue me in the morning. Of course, she couldn’t, I realized. I had put on the front door’s chain. There’s nothing like fear and a need to go to the bathroom to motivate you. I tore at that exercise band. The door opened, finally.

A busy week. I was at the Frick Collection last Sunday for The Quartetto di Cremona. The musicians played their violins, viola and cello on the “Paganini Quartet” set of instruments by Stradivarious. On Wednesday a friend and I went to Curator Xavier F. Salomon’s talk about Luigi Valadier: Splendor in Eighteenth-Century Rome. Valadier, the son of French parents who emigrated to Rome, lived and died in that city, committing suicide because of debts. I suggest you go to the Frick website and watch on Youtube, Luigi Valadier: Splendor in Eighteenth Century Rome. It’s breathtaking. After that, you have to go to the Frick to savor this extraordinary exhibit.

On Wednesday, my birthday present to a friend was going to the Cloisters and lunch at New Leaf. The weather behaved, brisk and sunny. We wandered from quiet gallery to quiet gallery, garden to garden. A lovely experience and only a subway ride from Manhattan chaos.

 

 

 

Graphic Lessons: What do a thirty-four-year old, a nine-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have in common? Murder. 

Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a 

An Angel
The Cloisters
The Unicorn Tapestry,
The Cloisters
A Cloister
The Cloister

dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old, the only witness to the stabbing and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie. 

Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the  prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner being stabbed while Kulchek was buying cigarettes? Escaping an attempted car bombing?  His hated boss, Captain Dick Holbrook, being a trustee of the Windsor School?  Losing his girlfriend to Holbrook?