I just got back from a whirlwind visit to Manhattan to attend the memorial dinner Dalton held for his mom. I got Ed to go with me and despite grumbles early on, he did have a great time.

We stayed in Lila and Terry’s loft next door to the one I used to live in on Lower Second Avenue. They are in China. Their friend, Julia, met us at the door and gave us the keys. Then we had a great dinner on 4th Street.

The culture shock was severe but I drank in every sight, every sound, every nuance of the place where I spent 36 years and no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t see enough.

Lila and Terry have a bed high up with a little step ladder to reach it. I let Ed have that all to himself and slept on the futon because I get up and down during the night and didn’t want to kill myself groping for the ladder with one foot while half asleep. It was okay. I used a fan to cool me down and Ed wouldn’t have been comfortable with that.

The neighborhood is being greatly gentrified and big money renters are moving in so that the Bowery behind the building, that housed a homeless shelter and CBGB, a famous trendy bar and whatnot, now has a high rise with a boutique at street level that sells $1,000 dresses. I don’t see that as an improvement.

But looking up Second Avenue toward midtown, the view is the same. Old buildings, old everything, despite new restaurants catering to yuppies.

We ate every meal except breakfast with friends. We ran around midtown so Ed could find quality shirts he likes. We wore ourselves out doing that.

I reconnected with Louise, a charming southern belle from my Times Books days. She dated the president of the company. She dumped the president. My kind of gal. Louise is from Kentucky from a fine family and our backgrounds could not be more unlike. But she is totally unspoiled and we will stay in touch. For just Louise, the trip was a big winner.

The memorial dinner was a mixed bag. Dalton’s plans to have a huge gathering ran afoul of logistics. Most of his mother’s friends don’t live in New York or nearby anymore. And they are older than even me, and I don’t think they can easily travel for one night of honor. So it was a small group. Ed and I, Louise, who worked with Dalton’s mother as a free-lance editor, Alice, who was an edit assistant at Harper & Row at the same time as I was, and a woman named Francine, who wrote a book for Virginia, but has spent her life dropping celebrity names most of whom, Louise thinks, she never met.

And there was Cindy, Dalton’s wife, tall, dark-haired, beautiful and accomplished and a treat to meet. She is a neuroscientist who is ceo of a biotech company she started and also plays classical piano.

The food was marginal. Dalton chose a restaurant that could serve food his daughter could eat (she has an allergy). And then, of course, the daughter acted out and had to be taken outside and we got to see little of Dalton as he tended to her and her shy twin brother.

But Ed really enjoyed himself talking to Louise and thinks she is my most elegant friend and can’t get over her. We’d had dinner with her the night before so we could really reconnect without distractions. Went to a little French restaurant near her apartment on 60th Street on the East Side.

Another highlight was lunch on Friday at Cibo’s on 2nd Avenue and 41st street near the UN, with Krishna, Ed’s former partner in the ergonomics company they ran for a while. Krishna’s wife, Saras, head of the policy division of UN Women, headed by the former president of Chile, was able to take time from her duties to join us. It was a lovely place, really great food, New York style in the grandest sense.

On Saturday, we ran around to Saks and Bloomie’s (Bloomingdale’s) and wound up at a high-end men’s store going out of business and Ed finally bought a shirt. The price, was, despite the sale, equal to the national debt of Uganda, but, hey. As for Bloomie’s, it’s getting really full of itself with directions on the elevator signs in French. Enough, yes?

We also ran into Krishna and Saras again, having lunch – we could see them sitting near the café’s open window, so we joined them and had tea. Serendipity.

Sunday morning, we heard from Anthony, whom I had phoned on impulse the day before. Anthony was one of the mainstay nurses on Jay’s case, working in the loft to take care of him in those dark days as he slowly left us. Anthony lives on 4th street near the loft. We got together at The Bean, between 2nd and 3rd sts. On 2nd Avenue, a trendy coffee place where they allow dogs. Great treat to have coffee and a bagel and watch all the dogs coming and going while their people got coffee and a bagel to go. Anthony, a caring nurse if ever there was one, now works for a Catholic charity that runs a hospital and takes no money from its patients. His brother is an actor, Tate Donovan, who works steadily on various TV gigs (Law & Order, for instance) and once came to the loft while Jay was still living to see his brother and (I was at work) had a limited chat with Jay about visiting Egypt, that they both had done.

Sunday noon was lunch at Katz’s deli on Houston Street, greatly popular since its Eastern European ambience. It was mobbed. Marc and Susan joined us (Susan was my pal from the NYT Syndicate), driving down from the Bronx and wending their way through the West Village (a mistake traffic wise) and being late, but it all worked out. And I had corned beef.

Sunday night, Julie and Irwin (Julie, my pal from Harper & Row) came in from Brooklyn. It was pouring rain, but we got to the Ukrainian National Home for dinner and Ed got to have goulash and borsht and was happy as a clam.

Other than the frantic schedule, the great treat was watching New Yorkers just walking around lower Manhattan – the yuppie 20-something moms, three of them out together, with tots in strollers, wearing spandex workout clothes and looking fabulous. Old men looking fit and striding in their jeans and sweats with somewhere to go. Young girls, in tights and leotards and loose fitting dashiki like shirts, and tattoos, and wild hair and energy up the kazoo. And all of them with a purpose and you could tell it wasn’t grocery shopping.

And I saw a townhouse for sale off of St. Mark’s place that, if I win the Lotto, I will go back and buy.

Monday was clean up and laundry and make up the bed day, and then an early ride to the airport. It all went well, the cats have forgiven us. Our friend who stayed with them came and got us at the Fort Myers Airport, and today, Tuesday, I am undone.

So it goes.

xx, Teal