back togeth­er for Avery and Cici

The reunion was every­thing they dreamed it would be, I think, or at least from what I can gath­er judg­ing from extreme screams, much jump­ing up and down (even with­out the aid of the tram­po­line) and most­ly, obses­sive hair-doing. I did not real­ize the extent to which life as a (near­ly) ten-year-old involves hair-doing. Per­haps my friends and I were not so assid­u­ous in our groom­ing. But any­way, Cici came imme­di­ate­ly to us on our arrival, thanks to her gen­er­ous mom Kath­leen who brave­ly drove all the way from Mys­tic, Con­necti­cut, and thence back to the city to work on her upcom­ing Chelsea paint­ing show in the fall at Bren­da Tay­lor’s. Poor girl: she got caught in the now leg­endary “Tar­ry­town Tor­na­do,” on the Saw Mill Riv­er park­way on the way back into Man­hat­tan. Lit­er­al­ly a rare event: I think there has not been a tor­na­do in New York State for 50 years. Thank­ful­ly she was not injured.

Cici and Avery spent their vis­it shop­ping at the Gap, where fright­en­ing­ly it turns out they can wear extra-small wom­en’s sizes. Of course since cur­rent trends (I hes­i­tate to call such hideous­ness “fash­ion”) pre­cludes cov­er­ing most of the tor­so, it’s eas­i­er for wom­en’s sizes to fit small girls. They looked, as you can see, adorable. Then there was catch­ing up on their phan­tom rid­ing tech­niques. It turns out it’s pos­si­ble to have a phan­tom horse show ON a tram­po­line. We end­ed up for din­ner at Mag­gie McFly­’s, the “Unique Eatery” (this moniker always trou­bles me, list­ed as it is on their busi­ness card show­ing TWO loca­tions). The chief attrac­tion of Mag­gie McFly­’s is the light-up ice cube, includ­ed in some of the more nox­ious cock­tails on offer. Since I was taught from a tiny girl­friend by John that a true cock­tail includes only two ingre­di­ents, and one of them is ice, the thought of drink­ing some­thing with sev­er­al dif­fer­ent kinds of alco­hol PLUS fruit was pret­ty nau­se­at­ing, so I opt­ed to buy the ice cubes out­right, in glass­es of Sprite. Much eas­i­er on the dri­ve home, not to get arrested.

Oh, and the POOL. It’s only a lit­tle bit­ty munic­i­pal pool; I don’t know why I love it so much! It must remind me of some­thing in a for­mer East­ern life. We’ve spent many hap­py hours there, doing laps, watch­ing Mr Ado­nis the local heart­throb work on his tan and his pecs, hear­ing the inevitable Amer­i­can screams of “Mar­co… Polo,” lis­ten­ing to chil­dren whine at their moth­ers (mine at me), “You should come in! It’s so warm! Come on in, please?!” to moth­ers who are hap­pi­ly stretched out on tow­els read­ing Peo­ple, or in my case catch­ing up on Soap Opera Digest. Did Dinah cause the fire that almost killed Cassie, and will Sami admit she switched Lex­i’s test results before the Gloved Hand switch­es Belle’s in vit­ro embryo? I’m so glad to be in a posi­tion to find out, with­out transat­lantic postal charges.

We’ve been hang­ing out at the library, too, but more on that in my post to cov­er Tak­ing Care of Jane. That could be a blog all its own!