Nico
Muhly,

I know, I’ve been bad. But! I have an excuse. I went to England and had a piece played in Derby, which was crazy. I flew to Las Vegas and now, this is what I’m doing:

England, where I have just been for the last week, is one of the places I find myself in more often than not; I’m flipping through my passport and it says that I was there 7 times in 2008, another 7 or 8 times (if you count that fiasco stopover from Iceland) in 2007, and so on and so forth. So: more often than I am on, say, the Upper East Side, for example. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had slightly more money, so the usual inconveniences attendant to traveling on the cheap have fallen aside: I don’t have to freak out about how expensive the trains are, for instance, or if I want a meal, it’s not prohibitively expensive. I am naturally suspicious of places that require money to have a good time ““ my experience has been that New York is particularly kind to visitors who don’t want to spend a lot and just want to grab cheap plates of noodles and take the $2 subway hundreds of miles around the city. Rome, similarly, is a rewarding treasure hunt for the frugal. London, I have always felt, resists this slightly, and demands the expenditure of many pounds to reap that much weight in fun.

Just a thought.

The reason for this cross-country road trip is that my grandmother, 92, died last month, and my mother has been out there cleaning up her kitchen for the last two weeks. My grandmother (who was French) was an incredible cook; when I found out that she died, I made a very intense celeriac and cauliflower purée in Iceland in her honor. We are hauling a lot of kitchen supplies back home with us ““ there is a great copper salmon mold in the back of the car:

And tonight, appropriately, at dinner in Knoxville: