That time Michelangelo was at my door

Could have been 1974 or 75. Not sure about the year but I remember the event so clearly.

I was living in a dump apartment on Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn NY, between Hoyt and Bond streets. That block was the antique furniture center of NYC. My neighbor, Danny, was a dealer, with a store across the avenue.

Danny knocked on our door one night. "Hey, you like that art shit, right?"

"Yes, I do."

"Well, go sit in that chair and close your eyes."

He places a heavy thing, wrapped in velvet in my hands and I can feel him hovering close by. Danny had that kind of energy. 

"Open your eyes."

This object is maybe 16" wide and 20" tall, but I wasn't thinking about measurements because Danny was pulling up the velvet covering, revealing a gorgeous drawing by Michelangelo. I'm in a drafty dump holding one of the most beautiful objects in the world. 

"Turn it over," Danny said. 

On the reverse side was another drawing. 

"That's one of only two in the world." 

I'm sitting there with an incredibly rare piece executed by one of my heroes. With the noise of Atlantic Ave, the drafty windows not the only reason for the chills I felt.

I thought about that night, those drawings, when I saw that a newly found Michelangelo drawing broke sales records at Christie's this week. 

"There are fewer than 10 drawings by Michelangelo which exist in private hands," Helene Rihal, director of Christie's ancient and 19th-century drawings department, told AFP ahead of the auction. The sketch was last put up for sale in 1907 at Paris's Hotel Drouot.