Just Jul Lee

Museum and Aimless Wandering

Museum and Aimless Wandering
DATE: July 26, 2005

I will take no blame for late rising. That said, we leave the hotel at 11 am. We stop at Burger King (how NY is that?) and have burgers before subway hopping our way to the museums on Museum Hill.

Unfortunately, we won’t go to the Guggenheim today. Our late rising, ahem, prevents us from doing so. Walking along outside Central Park, we arrive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I will pause here to point out that I am not terribly into museums. Needless to say, although the Met is very impressive, and I eventually begin to enjoy myself, I am slightly bored. I see many great things but in the back of my mind I am grateful that the museum closes at 5:15 pm while wishing the clock would speed up its progress. I apologize to you museum and art lovers, you fine people who truly appreciate art.

We take lunch on the stairs from a hotdog vendor. The smell of hotdogs, unfortunately, makes me nauseous (the sauerkraut makes it worse) and so all I buy is water and a Mountain Dew. We eat and relax for a half-hour or so while I watch a longhaired hottie guy waiting for a patron. He drives one of those bicycle things with the little carriage attached to the back. Soon, he finds someone to give a ride too and he’s off so I begin to watch the pigeons search for food. I am, I must add, an avid bird lover though I can’t name species and I don’t professionally bird watch. I still love birds and I love pigeons too, even though folks often call them rats with wings. All too soon, it’s time to go back into the museum.

Once the museum closes, my mom and I sit on the stairs and wait for PJ. The beginning of the Met experience found all three of us together, later just PJ and I ended up together while my mom wandered about, then it was the three of us again (after lunch) and then it was my mom and I until it closed. So, we wait for PJ.

Once we see him, he and I get into a debate about women’s lib (him for, me partially against) while the three of us sit on the steps in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. How cool is that, I ask you? At last, we agree to disagree, you may say, and head off down the street.

We take a cab to a place called Tom’s Restaurant. For those of you who don’t know and some of you who don’t care, the outside of Tom’s is the same restaurant front used for Monk’s in the show Seinfeld.

We eat (great food, terrific service, by the way) and an elderly woman accosts PJ with a walker for holding the door open for her. Sadly, I am in the bathroom at this point and miss the whole thing but my mom graciously tells me all.

Apparently, my mom sees an elderly woman with a walker ‘struggling’ to open the outer set of doors to the diner. The walker is on the sidewalk and the woman’s hip is on the door as she maneuvers the walker inside.

“Quick, PJ, as fast as you can go and hold open the door,” my mom says.

PJ glances over his shoulder, sees the woman, gets up and proceeds to do so. My mom then informs me that the little old lady looked so sweet and nice.

When PJ opens the door, the old woman yells, “Don’t you open the door for me!” and the like, sending PJ red-faced back to the table.

“If you ever ask me to do anything like that again,” he says to my mom angrily, “I’ll kill you!”

As my mom struggles with her laughter, she looks at the cashier who is laughing openly and my mom loses the battle and laughs as well.

Can you believe I missed that? Me neither!

We walk many blocks before hailing a cab at last and taking it to our hotel. My mom and I do laundry in the basement of the Belvedere Hotel, watch some TV and go to bed.