It's Deja Vu

Well, Derek Jeter duly got his 3000th hit on the day after our game was rained out. " It should have been us!"  He did it on his second at bat and with a home run. The fans went wild, the game stopped for 5 minutes while everybody hugged him, while we watched it on TV in our apartment. He is the first ever Yankee to do this and as you can imagine it was huge here in New York. We were passing through Time Square (AAAAAARGH, never go there!) and they were selling Jeter 3000 T shirts. We went into the Yankee Store it was jammed, and yes the hat did look ridiculous.

Went to Arthurs Tavern in the village on Sunday. The Hot Creole Cooking Band were playing to a crowd of 6. The music was good, Dixieland/Swing/Blues and the 6 musicians (cornet, trombone, clarinet, piano, double bass and drums) must have had a combined age of over 400, but we were getting ripped off at the bar by 2 gum chewing tarts. $30 for 3 beers! We made our excuses and left.

Monday was our anniversary, and it was a pretty perfect day, culture at MoMA, pastrami on rye and a beer for lunch, afternoon nap, jazz and dinner at the Blue Note, a few beers at the Half Pint and gelato in the park on the way home.

I've been looking for a silver bangle for Teresa, and we made the mistake of going to the diamond district, as recommended by Time Out. I thought there would be some artisan jewelers or stores that sold simple jewelry. But no, it is just a huge marketplace for gems, and everything is being bought and sold based on the weight of the metal and the carat of the diamond.Everyone is trying to entice you in. There are even pretty girls sitting near the windows, waving to you as you walk by. If this was Amsterdam, there would be a completely different transaction going on. It was also strangely dated. There were lots of elderly Jewish men in big hats, waistcoats and tailed coats walking from shop to shop. We could have been in the early 1900's. Interesting.

I was reading an article about Yogi Berra, the legendary Yankees catcher, who is better known for his Yogi-isms (pithy sayings that he probably never said, like, It ain't over till it's over) than for being the greatest winner in baseball history, and I was thinking about when we honeymooned here, and all the places that we have seen again. We were talking to the others at our table at the Blue Note about how NY has changed in the last 30 years. They were a diverse group. Two regulars, one in the music business and the other a personal trainer, and a couple from Austin, Texas. She is a Professor of Music at Austin University and he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. (I love the way they say things like, " I went to school near San Francisco" "Where was that then?" "Stanford"). School??? Diverse they may be but the Stanford guy and the trainer guy both hail from St. Kitts. Its a small world but I wouldn't want to paint it. Back to the story. I told them that I thought New York was safer now and that I felt less threatened here than I do in some parts of Guildford, and the reply was "Yeah, that stockbroker belt can be pretty rough."

As Yogi said, "It's deja vu, all over again"