Last night, Bob and I drove down to West Village to have dinner with a common friend of ours, Mitch, who lives in Queens. I was hoping to eat at Anton's, a restaurant I've enjoyed ever since I started coming to New York in the late eighties. But I've never tried to find, by car, a specific intersection in the higgledy-piggledy one-way streets of West and Greenwhich villages. In the past, my feet have always found it for me. It seemed that we could never quite find the exact location of either West 4th or Perry, and each time Bob slowed down his big boat of a car to ask someone for directions, someone would start honking at us.

Despite our problems in direction, we managed to park and make our way to the intersection only five minutes late, only to find Mitch standing outside the shuttered Antons. It mustn't have survived the recent recession. Not too surprising. The food was aways wonderful, but the service was very hit and miss, and you'd often wait over an hour for your entree to follow your appetizer. So we found a promising looking restaurant whose name I forget, catty-corner to the sad looking Antons. (I can see myself becoming more and more hopelessly American with each passing year. That expression "catty-corner" came to me naturally. In the past I'd have probably said "diametrically opposite." It never used to bother me in the least that nobody would know what I'd mean with that phrase.)

After an indifferent dinner (probably good that I don't remember the restaurant's name), we took off on a walk through Greenwich Village, in the beautiful evening. Mitch is a jazz musician, and earns a living running bands for private and corporate events around New York. So he probaly knows every cabaret and piano-bar in New York. He took us to one of the very few surviving piano bars that still play show tunes, "Annie's Crisis" When we got there, there weren't many customers. A couple of men, and a thin old woman gathered round the pianist, and a couple of guys at the bar.

But things soon gathered speed as the big female bar tender belted out a great song complete with staging, and a couple of large bunches of enthusiastic tourists arrived. Soon, Mitch and Bob were joining in with the songs they recognized, and a few of those they didn't, and an old woman with a sad, droppy face and kind eyes kept leaning over and singing along with Bob. The best sight was this hunk-of-muscle young guy in a t-shirt, who sang with his fey-looking boyfriend, the two of them arm-in-arm. My excuse for not singing is that I didn't know the words. I've always been more into standards than show-tunes. I'm glad the pianist didn't play Frank Sinatra, or I'd have run out of excuses not to sing.

Over the last few days, as my energy levels have increased, I've grown determined to get back into the shape I was last year. So I had the hotel wake me up at 7.45 this morning so that I'd be coffied, dressed and awake by the time of my 9.00 appointment with a personal trainer at the gym round the corner. My trainer was a cute, young straight guy of indeterminate ethnic origin. My best guess would be that his parents were Turkish. I'd told him not to go easy on me, and he didn't. He put me through one of the hardest workouts I've had in a long time. It made me realize how soft on me my trainers back in San Francisco are. Going to have to tell them to toughen up. After the work-out, he led me to the stretching table, and worked on me a little, to help my tight muscles relax. It really felt quite intimate in the little room, as he contorted me.

Afterwards, Bob and I drove downtown to park in Battery Park City so that we could see Ground Zero. Even as you approach the area down the West Side Highway, you can see the huge gap in the mass of buildings, and, as you drive past, you see scrapes in the masonry of the buildings of the World Financial Center across the street from where the Trade Centers were.

Once you're up to the chainlink fencing surrounding the site, the scale is a little overwhelming. Level upon level of surviving infrastructure; surviving floor beams, stopped-of sewer pipes, huge posts still stuck in the earth, and tiny little trucks on the bottom of the site really showing you how big a hole it is. I didn't really feel any emotion other than a slightly dazed remembrance of a sticky humid day fourteen years ago when I stood on the top-floor observation deck of one of the towers with my then girlfriend. It's still hard to wrap your mind around the fact that such a huge structure could be eradicated in just two hours last September.

Ground Zero