A Short Walk

I left the restaurant and headed up East 70^th Street. The challah bread French toast was particularly good and unavailable at home. A minor detail I will always miss about New York City. Challah bread. I’m sure there’s some upstate somewhere, but finding it would be a mission requiring some planning and it’s not quite that important.  This particular visit inspired more reflection than usual.

Perhaps because the garden is full of weeds.

I’d left the house at 3:30 a.m. to make my 8:00 appointment and arrived with time to spare. I was pleased to see Maria enter the waiting room. She called my name and gave me an affectionate hug. I hadn’t seen her for about two years. She was always the attending nurse for the procedure back when I was making this trip every three months. We’d gotten to know each other well as she prepped me for the doctors poking and prodding. But now, seven years later I’m on an annual schedule and the past two visits had me in another’s hands.

We can skip the details. I’m fine. Hopefully I’ll see Maria again next year.

I passed a man walking a Chihuahua, then a woman walking a Welsh corgi. I realized that all the dogs I’d seen that morning were small dogs, tiny dogs who wished they had longer legs. You could tell. They were made for lying on laps, not trying to keep up. Besides, they used to have longer legs. In my memory, dogs in Manhattan were big dogs; German shepherds, boxers, English sheep dogs. They matched their owners. Now they don’t. The man with the Chihuahua should have had a Labrador, the woman with the Welsh corgi an Afghan. No one in the city has big dogs anymore; a consequence, I guess, of the law that changed the street signs from “Curb Your Dog” to “Clean Up After Your Dog.”

One had to watch where one stepped before that. No longer. That’s good, I guess. The city is lessened without big dogs, though.

I brought up some older memories for inspection and comparison. Not adult memories, not adolescent memories, but color-faded, childhood memories of Manhattan. The street lamps were wrought iron and ornate. The cars were big and rounded. They were not brightly colored, or even lightly colored. They were dark, except for the checker cabs. (You could fit a piano in the back of a checker cab. There were two folding seats in front of the bench, so you could fit a full dozen people back there. At least that’s how big it is in memory.)There were mail boxes, phone booths and big dogs. All the women wore skirts below the knees. All the men wore hats.

The memories look like a black and white movie. Humphrey Bogart cups a match with his hands and lights a cigarette on the corner. He flicks the match confidently into the gutter.

Everybody smoked cigarettes. Littering hadn’t been invented yet.

Back in the present I looked for what was changeless. At 10:00 a.m. on a warm Wednesday morning, the street was moderately filled with people walking at the pace New Yorkers walk. They don’t stroll. People on vacation stroll. All these people had schedules and destinations. Walking amongst them is a graceful slalom, unlike Midtown where walking is more like driving in traffic or, sometimes, swimming in the opposite direction of a school of fish. This has always been the case. Walking in Midtown as a small child had always been a little frightening. A sudden current could rip you from your mother’s hand. This was a real and present danger and your mother was just as aware of it as you were. When the current was strong she grabbed your wrist and cut off the circulation. You didn’t mind because you couldn’t swim.

The people I pass are mostly fit. America, we are told, has a weight problem. I don’t know about other cities, but Manhattan does not, although certain sections of the “outer boroughs” may. Why this may be is an interesting question. Every fourth or fifth person I pass is an attractive young woman. I can’t help noticing that. I also can’t help noticing I am older than most of the pedestrians. This makes me sad for a moment, then it goes away.

I passed (I like the previous paragraph in the present tense, in case anyone with a red pen notices.) a small dry cleaners and wondered for a moment how a dry cleaners could afford the rent on the Upper East Side. The answer, of course, is that I can’t afford that dry cleaners.

Across the street from the dry cleaners is a center for seniors. All the elderly people are concentrated in this place. One man with a cane is bent and angular in a manner I have never seen before. I wondered what his story is. I assumed I am many times blessed by comparison.

I walked up 70^th to 3^rd Ave., turned the corner and walked back down 69^th to the parking garage near 1^st Ave. There are certain experiences the City will provide you with every visit. I was given three of them in double measure.

One cannot walk in Manhattan without walking under scaffolding at least once. This morning, the Upper East Side seemed to be under scaffolding with its attendant sounds: portable generators, wood banging on wood, metal banging on metal, the occasional obscenity. On 70^th, not one but two fire engines turned the corner from 2^nd Ave., lights glaring, sirens wailing, air horns blasting to wake the dead even though they were going to have to wait for the light to change on 1^st along with everyone else.

On 69^th there was the requisite jackhammer. In memory, jackhammers are worked by men with jiggling beer bellies. This one was handled by a young man of nineteen or twenty as fit as the pedestrians completely ignoring his racket (just as they had ignored the double dose of fire trucks). He was working at removing a parking meter and he was not having fun about it. The parking meter is probably the best constructed artifact of all time. The quarters are safer than in a bank, and they do not come out of a sidewalk without a determined man with a jackhammer.

A young woman wearing a low cut sundress (Again, I can’t help it.) on a bicycle confidently signals her way in front of a taxi to avoid a double parked car. That jackhammer would have caused someone from Queens to hit the double parked car.

There was more scaffolding and another jackhammer before I reached the garage. This one, however, was working away out of sight, four or five stories up. That was new.

Back in my car, I accessed my Manhattan driving gear. You need patience with an edge to drive in the City. The patience has you wait for the right moment. The edge has you slip into another car’s air cushion in a manner that gains respect from the other driver. It’s a skill. New Yorkers are very good at it. Unlike Boston, there are rules for driving in Manhattan. I am reassured I still know them.

The traffic cop on 62^nd and York signaled me with one finger, down low, onto the ramp to the FDR Drive. I raised my index finger from the steering wheel in response.