The Green Man Diaries

This is how it like unfolded, O my brothers.

On Friday, having spent a pleasant few days largely taking it easy, I decided to go out and do something more active. This, I decided, meant visiting the Metropolitan Museum and then the Museum of Modern Art. The Met was alright – its Islamic Art exhibit, which I’d been looking forward to especially, was gutted for renovations, sad to say – but it is MoMA which concerns us, because it was at MoMA that I met this lovely girl. We played eye-tag a bit in the line for the coat check, and then she passed by me a bit later heading for the escalator, and since after all I am on an adventure, I decided the thing to do would be to swallow my shyness and approach her.

Well, she was fortunately of a very outgoing sort, and barely had I spoken a word when I found she had launched us into the middle of a conversation about which floors to visit first and why. This was all well and good – she knew which exhibits she liked, having visited several times before, and I was perfectly happy to let her lead the way.

Between comments about this painting or that, we got to know each other a bit. I told her about my journey, and she told me she was living as an au pair somewhere in Jersey. Her name was Eva, and she was a preschool teacher from Austria, cute accent and all. I was rather smitten, and she seemed to like me as well. We might have gone out for dinner that very night, but she was with friends who were visiting from Austria (they approached us only once and then gone elsewhere, for some reason or other). Tomorrow, said Eva, they would be returning home, and so she would be free to come to the Entheocentric Salon party at CoSM.

It’s a little confusing getting to CoSM if you don’t already know where it is, so I suggested we meet in Union Square, in front of the Whole Foods (simply because I’d passed by it a few times, and so was fairly comfortable with the environs). “Oh!” she said, “I don’t even need to write that down – I know where the Whole Foods is.” And here was my big blunder: I left it at that. No contact information was exchanged, not an e-mail address nor a blessed digit of a phone number. After all, what could go wrong, if, as it seemed, she were so familiar with the chosen location? The time chosen was 5:30PM, and then with a quick hug we parted ways.

You can guess the rest, O my brothers. She did not arrive. I thought maybe she was seeing her friends off, maybe there were delays at the airport, as oft there tend to be. And so I waited and waited, fully for two and a half hours as I had nothing better to do, and then feeling somewhat despondent I headed off to finish the night according to the original plan. (I stopped along the way to CoSM for some sushi and a glass of plum wine, which was comfort food and made me feel a bit better.)

The party was not amiss. I met some nice people there, and got to watch Alex Grey paint a woman (her organs and aura on display) smelling some grapes or flowers or something. It was fascinating to watch him build up simple shapes and then gradually flesh them and add detail – doubly so because he was kind of swaying with the music while he painted. I got the sense that his experience of painting was not unlike my experience of proving theorems: that it got him into the Zone as one might be in when solving puzzles or juggling or doing anything really well.

But I digress; the story of our fair Eva is not yet at an end. I decided I was not going to take this kind of shit from the universe without at least fighting back, without at least putting in an effort, even if it was all for naught, and so an effort indeed put I in! First it was the Craigslist post and the Google search (the latter getting me nowhere) and then the postings on relevant Livejournal communities. I revisited the Whole Foods at the same time the day after the party, although not for so long did I wait this time, just in case there had been some confusion about the day. In the evening I scoured Facebook and several au pair websites. And then today, for my final act, I put up a bunch of posters around Union Square. Probably most or all of these have been torn down by now, postering being apparently much less acceptable here than in Toronto, but the point is that the effort was made. It’s in the universe’s hands now – I won’t be able to do much more than monitor Craigslist after I leave the city. I am not hopeful.

Lest I be accused of obsessing, it is worth writing of some of the other interesting things that have happened while I’ve been here. On Tuesday or Wednesday, while cutting onions for a fried yam dish with a super-sharp knife of Japanese make, I cut my thumb rather badly – it went through my fingernail like air, and I think it actually touched the bone. Fortunately I got the wound under running water right away, put a bandage on with neosporin, and it is already doing much better, though it seems I might lose a bit of feeling in part of my thumbtip.

On Friday, coming home from my MoMA adventure, and immediately upon entering the door I was invited by my hosts (excellent people, by the way) to a play they were attending. This was a very underground, low-budget affair, and highly avant-garde. The second half, to give you an example, was (saith the director) inspired by the question: What if the city of Baghdad showed up to dinner? The answer involved wrestling, a pot of spaghetti noodles, and about a solid thirty seconds of women just screaming. This was all surprisingly entertaining.

Tomorrow, I continue on my way, and it may yet be awhile before I take a break nearly as long as this one. Despite the prospect of terrible hill climbing, it looks like I will most likely take the Blue Ridge Parkway after all, as everyone I’ve asked (fellow bikers included) has highly recommended the route for its sheer beauty. That, I guess, is as good a reason as any.