August 6, 2009

Whirlwind trip to Atlanta with DJ. The reasons were to see the High Museum and the Aquarium, and we saw them, but also found a choice neighborhood bar called Sidebar and sat in the Hyatt Regency lobby with a convention of investors from Morgan Stanley. I don’t know what to prize most. The draw at the High was Monet’s Waterlilies, which is big and atmospheric, but I wonder how good the painting actually is. I suppose it doesn’t matter if you’re good when everybody loves you. Saw my beloved Bellini. She understood why I couldn’t dance for her this time. Was impressed by the American landscapes, especially the moonlit ones, and a lovely image of Ninsun on loan from the Louvre. Loved the aquarium. It was full of happy kids. You watched them watching the happy otters. They fed the whale sharks by rowing a bucket of krill before them in the water. The belugas are not organic creatures, but mystical apprehensions shared equally by all.

When I took a bus from new Orleans to Atlanta in 1981, I stayed in the Georgian Terrace, where I made my room into a kind of joyful brothel, with the gleanings of the local bars and the basswood-perfumed streets below. It was a glad time, and I remember it smiling, and I remember how the vast window of my room opened onto a parking lot, all the winged insects of the South beating around the white street lights. I was happy. Robin. Gary. Eddie. I remember some of their names. One night I walked to the new Hyatt in my jeans and grubby t-shirt. I assumed they wouldn’t let me in, but they did. The lobby was a swirl of beautiful women in evening gowns. I looked up into the soaring atrium and thought it was the sort of place that would be forever closed to me. I was wrong. I don’t know that I was fully recalled to that ancient moment when I picked the Hyatt off the list of possibilities, but in any event, there we were, lifting our vodka glasses under the soaring oculus, beside the cream of Atlanta and the pin striped warriors of Morgan Stanley. My secret is that it was exactly the thrill I hoped it might be.