Last week I spent with Teri and her family in Manhattan. Teri had been in Portland for a few days so we flew back to New York together. The plane ride was pretty good. I was sitting next to a young woman with a 2 ½ year old little boy. He was a real sweetheart and had just recently completed his potty training successfully. We were on the plane for over 5 hours, and he went to the bathroom 4 times! His mom said he’s doing so well but doesn’t yet realize that you can pee and poop on one visit. What was that? How come no one ever told me? So it was back and forth, back and forth. But I didn’t care because he was so cute and well-behaved, and I had learned something from him. Now if he’d been ugly and obstreperous, I wouldn’t have felt the same. Directly behind me was a woman with a little infant who was crying as soon as we got on the plane. The only time the baby wasn’t crying was when the mother was nursing the child. So it was a little crying, and a little nursing all the way to New York. I think the airlines should look into that. Why not have a wet nurse on all long flights who could nurse anyone who was crying and behaving badly. I’ll bet they would have a lot of takers . . . and not just little kids either.

Everyone in Manhattan walks so fast. The stockbrokers rush by with their briefcases and a worried look on their faces, probably because they just lost their jobs and are on the way to the unemployment office. The women rush by in their stilettos, stylish suits, perfectly coiffed hair and usually talking on their cell phones or texting. They probably just picked up their unemployment checks and are meeting “the girls” for a drink. Everyone is always on the cell or blackberry or something similar. Teri always has her blackberry in her hand, reading texting from God knows who. Then she immediately begins texting back. When I watch her little thumbs clicking on the blackberry, I wonder if in the years to come she’ll have calluses and bloody thumbs. Pretty soon there will probably be a new affliction called textaphobia, and Teri will be a textaphobic and will need to check into a rehab facility. I’ll have to tell all my friends that Teri’s in rehab, but there’s not such a stigma about rehab anymore as nearly everyone has done it at least once. So I don’t imagine my friends will stop inviting me to lunch. Or, rather, maybe they’ll start inviting me to lunch just to hear about my daughter’s rehab. It could be a plus either way.

Teri, Mark and Harry were so good to me back there. They took me to see “Blithe Spirit” with Angela Lansbury who was fantastic! She’s 83 years old and danced around the stage like someone 60 years younger. We were in the second row, and she came right to the edge where you could see everything on her face – her expressions, her eyes. It was thrilling. She was close enough where we could have almost touched her. But if we had, we’d have been thrown out and missed the rest of the play. After the play, they took me to dinner at Patsy’s, a lovely restaurant in the theater district known for its association with Frank Sinatra. I loved its name. There should be more establishments with that name.

The picture is of Teri and three of her pets. Two of the cats are elsewhere. I’ll write about Mark and Harry in my next blog.