- Not bothering me in the morning to go out and buy him some vodka when the Chinawoman opens.
- He’s not compulsively inviting the handymen in on some minor errand every other day.
- I can get his bathroom halfway clean.
- I can bathe in the shower.
- I don’t have to kludge together our dual set of earphones with splitter and adapter to listen to audio books at night.
- His perverse and pesky habits online, which always meant he kept his iMac tilted at an odd angle so than no one could see what he was doing, not from the living room, not from the kitchen.
That is a very short list, about rather minor matters. I still love him very much. I am not mentioning the horrors of his last two months.
I keep remembering that blustery November day when he realized his driver’s license from Mass. had expired, and he had a short window of grace period to switch it to a NYS license. (Not that he’d ever use it.) Mid-November 2021. We thought of joining AAA up past Columbus Circle. That was not going to work. We found our best chance was to go up to the DMV on Fordham Road in the Bronx. We got there far too early before the appointment, had time to kill, and I said let’s explore Arthur Avenue, which we’d just passed. It was a cold day, and he got tired, couldn’t walk well (partly because he had overgrown toenails, as I found), sat down on a bench in a little park there. We found a restaurant that was open post-lunch. I had some wine and he had a beer. He was in good spirits. After a while we trudged back to the DMV. With minimal waiting and queueing he had his license within the next hour. He looked old, and with his shuffling walk, I thought he might be good for two years on the outside. Maybe only one. Well I called that right, but did sorely wish he’d lasted for five more. Or pulled himself back into shape and lasted ten more. Anyway, we walked back to the IRT subway on Fordham Road, rode downtown, almost certainly stopped at the Chinawoman’s for a liter of v.
I believe I have had a pint of v two nights running. Don’t feel too sick today. Not sick at all. What’s the deal there? Different diet. Tunafish and greens yesterday. I got around to making the crabcakes too, and while they were tasty and nutritious, they had no cohesion. The lumps were too big and the vegan mayo wasn’t enough of a binder. Put the remaining four of them, reassembled, into the oven today to cook another 10 minutes and brown. But they fell apart again. Next time, chop up the lumps. I may experiment with cheapo canned crab first.
Twice-cooked crabcakes
I made a discovery about the Chinawoman the other day. I was coming back from the NYPL, MM, with Céline books and odds and ends from the Bryant Park Whole Foods. And Francisco at the Chinawoman’s told me that she (Linda Kim) owns the building there. It’s a good-sized apartment building with lord knows how many units. So she doesn’t really have to make a living at wines and liquors. She can undercut her competitors slightly, who depend on the tourist trade and sometimes have longer hours.
