I’d love more days like the one free day I had in New York. I loved being all by myself, walking block after block, looking in the windows on Madison, Fifth, and Lexington avenues, seeing what the museums had to offer, sitting down to lunch at a table for one, meandering along the clothing aisles at Bloomingdale's, and not having to answer to anybody. That is my idea about how to spend a day. Not that I’d want to do it everyday. It’s just that I’d like the freedom to do it whenever I wanted. But, that freedom is not yet on the horizon. In another year perhaps, but not yet.
Yet, everything about New York reminded me of Paul. Every place we went, there he was. We’d talk about a 5-story walk-up, and there I'd be watching the piano we gave him being moved step by step up to his fourth floor apartment. We ate dinner at Tabla, and there Bob was having an argument with him across the street. We took the circle line tour, and there I was walking the length of the island and across the George Washington bridge with him. We went into St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the organist played one of his favorite Bach pieces.
Even after almost nine years, I'm still not used to being back in New York -- in Paul's country. I probably never will.
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