more ed!

 

It was great to hang with the gang. Bill Dowell, formerly Time bureau chief who worked with Ed from Cairo to Paris to Hong Kong (may be the wrong order, and many more places) drove up from the City of Brotherly Love for lunch in Brooklyn with Ed. Barb came down from the Bronx, and neighborhood friends dropped by. All of us have had lunch with Ed roughly ten thousand times over the last 40 years, and we are expert at it. We talk about the old times and the new times. Which are not, frankly, as exciting, except for Ed, who has more excitement than he bargained for and not the kind he likes. Cancer has stripped many of his pleasures away, but old friends are an abiding one.

Another pleasure is favorite restaurants, even though he can't eat or drink much—chemo fucks with your taste buds. The owner/chef was delighted to see him, and buzzed around, allowing us to change tables three times without fussing.

You have to schedule out lunches with Ed, because radiation makes him tired. So does chemo, but it also makes him poisonous—he can't touch his dog Sammy in case the dog licks his skin. So the optimum time for a visit is when he is on hiatus from both procedures. He never does get a vacation from his special electromagnetic hat with accompanying battery pack. Ed ate dates wrapped in bacon. So did I, and they were very good. (I mean, bacon!)

   Anyway, you know it was a good lunch because we wrapped it up around 8 pm, eight hours after we'd started. And Dowell drove Dowling home and stayed over at the Dowling Intercontinental.

It was a perfect day. And just for fun, here are Pavoratti and Lou Reed singing Reed's "Perfect Day," surely one of the oddest duets ever.