Life Is Good, 2nd installment

In the final years of the first decade of the twenty first century, as the financial institutions of this country collapsed from their own criminal bloat, my husband and I were forced to make drastic revisions in our plans for "the twilight years."  What we did was to take a bunch of money out of the bank targeted for plans now derailed and fly to Sarasota, Florida of which we had little knowledge other than that it was supposed to have "culture," and it was warm in the winter.  We blindly bought a condo big enough for a couple who wanted intimacy, yet individuality (i.e., 2 bedrooms, 2 baths) on the top floor with a galleria running the length of it, accessible by sliding glass doors; we knew we were not in Massachusetts anymore.  The move to sunshine was predicated upon the experience of the previous two or three winters, specific memories of not being able to cross the street from our apartment building's front door to the subway stop because the intervening space was literally a sheet of gleaming ice, of being marooned in our Manhattan apartment regretfully clutching tickets to Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center because the deep snow or melted snow turned to ice made locomotion impossible.  The problem was exacerbated by my recent decline in physical stability so that I needed a cane to get around.  The gloaming of old age seemed to be increasingly impenetrable.  But, Sarasota in the winter, wow!  First off, we found the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club and our trainer Mike Vega, who has literally transformed my life.  Six months under his aegis, the cane was gone, I was walking not all that slowly to the Club from our condo, mounting the three flights of stairs easily, and shortly thereafter standing from a sitting position without support.  And it was easy to take the bus as I chose, and for the first time in years I could drive the car on quiet streets as I chose.  I was free and independent again, and the sun was shining and the breeze was balmy, and life was good.
Last month I flew to New York for a weekend of art where I saw the fabulous Abstraction show at MoMA, a dazzling wall of Kazimir Malevich, a chronological grouping of Mondrians, ravishing Delaunays from both husband and wife, and so on and so forth.  And then to the Frick to see a small but intense show of every Piero della Francesca in the United States plus a marvelous loan of a matching panel from Portugal.  I always thrill to Piero ever since I saw the singing angels in his Nativity in the National Gallery in London who illustrate what Walter Kaiser characterizes as Piero's "serene immobility." Then on to the Met for the exhibition of Matisse and his reworking of themes in his paintings.  The two versions of his Young Sailor painted within a few months of each other in 1906 , are always a dramatically thrilling insight into a great artist's sudden, dramatic aesthetic rethinking of color, shape, and detail.
So, there we have it, two bits, one large, one small, of a life that is good.