Weekend Update, early edition

The weekend started with a sleep deficit on Thursday. After napping, I re-grouped with the Poet Friday evening. As I suspected, those hotel walls were thin, as thin as Japanese screens. We eventually ate a very late Middle Eastern meal, had a post-prandial drink in the East Village. Lately I’ve been sipping Oban with one or two pieces of ice in it. I’d been in that bar before, years and years ago. For a late Friday, it was relatively un-crowded, but there were still amateur drinkers bellowing. I love sitting on a stool with my knees touching someone else's.

As sleeping together -- the literal definition -- didn’t work so well the night previous, we regrouped on Saturday, wandering some of those same streets again. She wanted to get a little shopping in, and ended up purchasing a woolen hat in preparation of the next winter. Turns out she’s a bit of a bag whore, too, lusting after over-the-shoulder wear. My girl-shopping abilities are extremely limited, but those little East Village places are more than tolerable with a cutie by your side. Earlier, though, I did have to issue a rare fashion fatwa: down in the climes she hails from, those stiff colorful headbands you see at street vendors’ pushcarts are all the rage, but I decreed that nobody living here actually buys them, much less wears them, besides B&T tweeners and their grannies bused in for B’way treacle. Getting back to my masculinity, we found a cool store called Obscura on 10th between 1st and A full of taxidermy, birds, cats, a dog even, a very rodenty dog; the place had the atmosphere of the beginning of a Twilight Zone episode.

When she found out a car service would be nearly $60 to the airport, I offered to accompany her all the way out on the A train. $7 via public transportation, although you might not have your own personal Red Cap, just under an hour and half from hotel door to terminal. Hey, I’m a licensed NYC sightseeing guide: we deliver. By then, the completely clear blue day had clouded over, and the air coming off the ocean and the bay at Howard Beach was chilly and highly suggestive of the Atlantic’s surliness. Nonetheless, the moment, and spring, were things worth celebrating. A fitting ending to a really beautiful weekend was a common egret, snowy white, stalking the JFK boglands on long black legs.