This Upper Eastside Life (aka WWG-G-MaD)

What would Great-Grandma do, or think, of my recent ventures out and about the neighborhood?

On this Where We Were Wednesday (yes, just made that up so I could publish a catch up post), we have the photos from our companion Instagram posts "Blume, Blooms, and Botaniste" and "WWG-G-MaD" to provide a lookback at a fun evening Tuesday last week and a weekend in "the life" (this past weekend, to be exact).

Cụ Bà loved oranges. Ông Nội loved watermelon. Papa Rooster loves cookies and snacks.

Let's go in reverse chronological order and start with this past weekend, with a vase full of flowers from the Mother Garden for my great grandmother's giổ (death anniversary). She died over 75 years ago, in a very different time and world. What would she make of...

...Her great granddaughters graduating from Ivy League colleges? Her daughter-in-law's younger sisters (all but the baby, who was a mere 4 years senior to Papa Rooster) stopped their education at 8th grade, which was quite common in the first half of the 20th century in Vietnam, and their father was highly educated for the time.

The ivy in this planter off Park Avenue or thereabouts, as I walked home before driving out to the Mothership, is exactly like the kind I used to draw back in high school; it was a motif I was pulled toward, even before heading to college, and that college led to jobs, and law school, and a life I was able to build mostly myself.

Earlier that day, on Madison Avenue, it was the Saturday of gallery walks, of abstract art...

Plume Chaser happens to love doughnuts. This work had a price tag of $45,000. I texted him the photo and teased it was just a bit above my budget; he said he would have chastised me if I ever spent so much on such a thing.

... I must have been hungry.

In addition to snacks, Papa Rooster very much likes lobster. This isn't the depiction of one, but the piece was uncannily like a cooked crab, with the same coloration as our meals whenever Papa Rooster gets to call the shots.

And I respond to vivid colors.

This one reminded me of Sissy, who has gone full into her jigsaw puzzle hobby in recent years since the ease of getting new ones from Buy Nothing.

The gallery visits were broken up by bits of nature.

Mama Hen would have appreciated this sweet topiaried shrub in a planter on Madison Avenue.

And some of the art subjects themselves were natural. 

Asked Plume Chaser if he would have preferred this instead; he finds blue jays annoying, with which any gardener would agree.

Including by a Viet artist. How far - literally, figuratively - we've come from where, and when, GGMa died.

Back in the Jardin this same past weekend, a flower with a name that reminds me of travel by sea came into bloom - armeria maritima...

Though far we've come, still, we are not completely severed from the motherland - the rains left lush chickweed, and dandelion greens, also tía tô (perilla - so begins the battle for control of the planters) and kinh giới (Vietnamese balm - less ubiquitous than the tía tô), which I had dressed and tossed with chili lime cashews for lunch. And that was all I had for that meal; perhaps why I was drawn to food art at the gallery walk.

And from Madison Avenue gallery walks to talks at a Fifth Avenue synagogue... Could Cụ (Great Grandmother) ever have imagined her great granddaughters there! But how could we pass up...

JUDY BLUME!! Sissy and I were in the same (very large) room with THE Judy Blume! Who didn't read a Judy Blume book in their youth? Well, any Gen X'er, anyway. Got us tickets to see her right in our neighborhood (the chi-chi-er part, the southwesternmost edges of our neighborhood, far from where we plebes dwell in Yorkville). And Judy Blume (as she tells it, all the kids have always called her by both names) was delightful, and energetic, and still so sharp for age 87! (Far sharper than Papa Rooster, who is her age.)

And afterward we walked to find dinner, past St. Vincent Ferrer Roman Catholic Church on Lexington Avenue, with its most lovely rose garden out front. Just like a children's photographic picture book version of "Sleeping Beauty" we had growing up, of dolls as the princess and prince and witch, posed in settings with lots of vivid roses in the background castle garden.

We ended the night with a wonderful vegan meal at Le Botaniste - clean, delicious, ethical, reasonably priced - a nice bow-tied ending to an outing in the nabe.

I chose a half portion of African stew and zucchini soup, with a vegan brownie.

Sissy had a pasta with vegan Bolognese, the same zucchini soup, and a chia pudding with berry topping.