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Looking through cracks in train tracks
My hat broke in Brooklyn.
This is the grey-green flat cap which I inherited from my grandfather, age and provenance unknown; I have been wearing it since 2012 and it has survived rain, wind, snow, sun, and one memorable attempted drowning in beer by an idiot at a Rush concert. I knew the tweed had recently started to fray in front, leading me to think that I should take it to a tailor and see if I could get it carefully patched. I didn't realize there was a thin curved wooden reinforcement in the brim until it snapped, as apparently it did sometime between last night's reading and my realizing the fact around noon on 7th Avenue with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel. I'm sure the guy who left his heart in San Francisco had it worse, but if anybody knows a good hat doctor in the Boston area, I'd love to get their name.
We were out in the bright grey windy day because we had plans for our last day in New York: first they involved bagels. We found them at La Bagel Delight, which was mystifyingly not where I remembered it from research the previous night (spoiler: they have two locations; I was thinking of the one in Brooklyn Heights), but which offered very fine plain bagels overstuffed with cream cheese in Rob's case, with cream cheese and lox and avocado in mine. Basically, a Philadelphia roll on a bagel, but on a bagel I actually like the idea—cream cheese on sushi has always been confusingly pointless for me, whereas I look back on my childhood habit of eating bagels with unsalted butter when there was cream cheese and sour cream right there on the table in front of me and wonder what I was thinking. Thus fortified, we walked back up 7th Avenue, Flatbush, and Schermerhorn to the New York Transit Museum.
(We have just passed through Bridgeport, streetlight glittering on dark scales of water. Residential windows at diagonals to the train, curtained like lamps or open to quick-sliding diorama views. A platform beside the tracks, bare-lit with a single anglerfish bulb. Baseball fields at night look like movie sets, artificially spotlit, green and empty. A power substation beyond the chain-link, looking like science fiction in the night.)
I hope to post more about the museum when we get the photos off the digital camera my mother lent us for the trip. Neither of us had been before. We knew it was in a decommissioned—but still functional—subway station from 1936. We had assumed something like the exhibit on the building of the first subway line in New York City and the artifacts from New York's transit history, including tickets, signs, and turnstiles; we were not wholly surprised by the temporary exhibit on disaster response and were delighted by the cable car models and the decommissioned city bus for climbing inside; somehow neither of us had realized that at the platform level there would be vintage restored train cars from 1907 to the 1970's and a working signal tower. The cars are filled with period-appropriate transit maps and advertising. We were both very taken with the good-conduct mascot Etti-Cat, an expressive tuxedo cat who feels bad about graffiti and feels good about being nice to fellow passengers. I got several pictures of my husband looking like the time-traveling actor that he is. He got a couple of me with history in the background. We had planned to spend the early afternoon in Brooklyn and then make our usual pilgrimage to the Strand, but we binned the bookstore entirely in favor of staying until the museum closed and kicked everyone out, a decision I do not regret. We came back to my mother's cousin's house (which is a fantastic brownstone of four floors and skylights and original molding everywhere; the accumulation of libraries must be a trait that goes back to the great-grandparental split), collected our stuff, and headed out to catch our evening train. We had dinner first at Veselka, because they are a tradition with us. I should just start making borscht myself so that I don't have to wait years between bowls. They make the only sauerkraut in the world I like—I had it on their Reuben with krakowska. We ate macarons from Macaron Parlour while waiting for the train at Penn Station. We are still in Connecticut as I write.
Hat notwithstanding, I think this trip has been one of the best things to happen to me in years.
This is the grey-green flat cap which I inherited from my grandfather, age and provenance unknown; I have been wearing it since 2012 and it has survived rain, wind, snow, sun, and one memorable attempted drowning in beer by an idiot at a Rush concert. I knew the tweed had recently started to fray in front, leading me to think that I should take it to a tailor and see if I could get it carefully patched. I didn't realize there was a thin curved wooden reinforcement in the brim until it snapped, as apparently it did sometime between last night's reading and my realizing the fact around noon on 7th Avenue with
derspatchel. I'm sure the guy who left his heart in San Francisco had it worse, but if anybody knows a good hat doctor in the Boston area, I'd love to get their name. We were out in the bright grey windy day because we had plans for our last day in New York: first they involved bagels. We found them at La Bagel Delight, which was mystifyingly not where I remembered it from research the previous night (spoiler: they have two locations; I was thinking of the one in Brooklyn Heights), but which offered very fine plain bagels overstuffed with cream cheese in Rob's case, with cream cheese and lox and avocado in mine. Basically, a Philadelphia roll on a bagel, but on a bagel I actually like the idea—cream cheese on sushi has always been confusingly pointless for me, whereas I look back on my childhood habit of eating bagels with unsalted butter when there was cream cheese and sour cream right there on the table in front of me and wonder what I was thinking. Thus fortified, we walked back up 7th Avenue, Flatbush, and Schermerhorn to the New York Transit Museum.
(We have just passed through Bridgeport, streetlight glittering on dark scales of water. Residential windows at diagonals to the train, curtained like lamps or open to quick-sliding diorama views. A platform beside the tracks, bare-lit with a single anglerfish bulb. Baseball fields at night look like movie sets, artificially spotlit, green and empty. A power substation beyond the chain-link, looking like science fiction in the night.)
I hope to post more about the museum when we get the photos off the digital camera my mother lent us for the trip. Neither of us had been before. We knew it was in a decommissioned—but still functional—subway station from 1936. We had assumed something like the exhibit on the building of the first subway line in New York City and the artifacts from New York's transit history, including tickets, signs, and turnstiles; we were not wholly surprised by the temporary exhibit on disaster response and were delighted by the cable car models and the decommissioned city bus for climbing inside; somehow neither of us had realized that at the platform level there would be vintage restored train cars from 1907 to the 1970's and a working signal tower. The cars are filled with period-appropriate transit maps and advertising. We were both very taken with the good-conduct mascot Etti-Cat, an expressive tuxedo cat who feels bad about graffiti and feels good about being nice to fellow passengers. I got several pictures of my husband looking like the time-traveling actor that he is. He got a couple of me with history in the background. We had planned to spend the early afternoon in Brooklyn and then make our usual pilgrimage to the Strand, but we binned the bookstore entirely in favor of staying until the museum closed and kicked everyone out, a decision I do not regret. We came back to my mother's cousin's house (which is a fantastic brownstone of four floors and skylights and original molding everywhere; the accumulation of libraries must be a trait that goes back to the great-grandparental split), collected our stuff, and headed out to catch our evening train. We had dinner first at Veselka, because they are a tradition with us. I should just start making borscht myself so that I don't have to wait years between bowls. They make the only sauerkraut in the world I like—I had it on their Reuben with krakowska. We ate macarons from Macaron Parlour while waiting for the train at Penn Station. We are still in Connecticut as I write.
Hat notwithstanding, I think this trip has been one of the best things to happen to me in years.
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(Hi, I've been reading you for the past few months. Found you by way of RushThatSpeaks' friendslist.)
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Pleased to meet you! I appreciate the hat advice. I've also been recommended to Salmagundi, which I didn't even know existed.
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And about now, you might be sliding through Old Saybrook. Wave to the north and I'll wave back. Good journey and safe home.
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Nah, Eastern Standard. Hello! And thank you!
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Your friends rejoice with you! May it enliven and inspire you for months to come.
Nine
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Thank you. I hope so.
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I've never had avocado on a bagel with lox and cream cheese, but now I want to.
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It really was. My life has felt very small lately, with nothing in the future but even more pain and no alternate choices except bad ones; these last two days did not feel like either of those things.
I've never had avocado on a bagel with lox and cream cheese, but now I want to.
It's very good! I'm not sure I find it a necessary component (unlike roast beef sandwiches, which I could happily eat with avocado for the rest of my life), but I was not at all sorry to have tried it. I might try just avocado and lox on my own time and see how that works out.
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Now I'm trying to think of the appropriate mid-century wrapping, but my brain keeps toggling between some kind of vol-au-vent pastry and aspic and I refuse to contemplate the aspic.
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I hope you can find a suitable hat doctor.
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That is an excellent icon for this discussion, even if it is London.
(I did get to the Strand, because I was staying in Chelsea and could therefore just walk over one evening.)
Fair enough. I'm telling myself I'll just have to go back to New York.
I hope you can find a suitable hat doctor.
Thank you! I will certainly report to the internet if I do.
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Do you think that Salmagundi's would know a good hat doctor? They seem like they might also do preservation/restoration.
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My mother said cheerfully, "Of course you had a wonderful time in New York! It's your ancestral city!" It is true that it feels more that way than anywhere else in the country. Boston is where I was born, but
Do you think that Salmagundi's would know a good hat doctor? They seem like they might also do preservation/restoration.
I'd neve heard of Salmagundi, but I just looked them up and now I'm planning a visit on Sunday! Thank you for the pointer.
[edit] They looked at my hat and said they could fix it and I am supposed to get it back in two to three weeks!
*hugs*
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Thank you!
(And I got the review of "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" the next day, so, yes!)
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I love you.