Escape to New York

 My memories of reading at Shade on April 23 are still vivid and nothing but pleasant. To give you an idea of what a great experience it was, let’s look at what we had to do to get there.

 

(Fair notice: Our train was scheduled to arrive at 3:52 for an event that began at 6:00. The cab ride to the hotel was 2.8 miles straight down 7^th Avenue; the walk to Shade was five blocks. I figured two hours would be plenty of time, but I’ll accept responsibility for cutting things close.)

 

The Beloved Spouse™ and I decided to grab an early lunch, not knowing when we’d have a chance to eat again. Since we had to stop at Walgreen’s to pick up prescriptions, and there’s a Subway fifty yards away, we chose to get sandwiches. The sandwiches were good.

 

We both made pit stops before leaving for the train station. I needed to spend some time with myself (our euphemism for “dropping a deuce”), and did so without incident until I discovered there was no toilet paper. I had to dig paper towels that didn’t look too grotty from the trash can. Said paper towels were the brown kind that still have little chunks of wood in them. Big fun.

 

Standing on the platform, our train approaching, TBS remembered she left her prescriptions in the car. One of those prescriptions was for her restless leg medication. No one is sleeping tonight.

 

The train ride itself was not how I remembered them. (Granted, my most recent train trip was in May of 2019.) The ride was too bumpy to read, the seats were not quite uncomfortable, and the car was stuffy. The train was a few minutes late getting into the Baltimore Airport Station, then paused for close to half an hour outside of Newark to accommodate double tracking.

 

Penn Station’s platforms bore an unseemly resemblance to the crowd trying to catch the last helicopter out of Saigon in 1975. The signage may be sufficient for those who pass through there regularly. We had to ask a knowledgeable-looking gentleman (looks can be deceiving) and a cop before we found 7^th Avenue. (The cop was truly one of New York’s finest and got us oriented straightaway.)

 

Hitting 7^th Avenue, I immediately learned two things.

1. Madison Square Garden is directly across the street from Penn Station.

2. A Knicks playoff game had just ended. The crowd outside the station made what we found inside seem like midnight at an assisted living facility.

What I thought would be an easy matter of grabbing a cab from an awaiting rank turned into me going into the street between cars to grab a cabbie’s attention.

 

Our driver knew about four words of English. “Where to?” came up first. TBS got in front and showed him. She had to point out our hotel on his phone GPS to make sure he didn’t take us there via Hoboken. (I already knew the route, so any turns would have been noticed, possibly causing an international incident, as my patience was already frayed.)

 

He took us to the hotel, which was unrecognizable, thanks to construction that obscured all identifying information. This was when we got the rest of our cabbie’s English: “Sixteen eighty.”

 

The time was 5:10.

 

The hotel staff could not have been nicer, nor more helpful when I wanted to verify my walking directions and where to get a cab the next morning. The walk to Shade was as expected, and seeing the sign over the door was as welcome a sight as when my covid tests started coming back negative last summer.

 

As noted before, the event was, for me, close to perfection. Outstanding venue, great readers, and a chance to see some dear friends. It went so well we decided to walk back to the hotel.

 

No, we did not get mugged. That part of Greenwich Village is probably as safe as any, there were still a goodly number of people about, and muggers will generally look elsewhere before tangling with a six-foot-plus, 220-pound man.

 

What we did see were copious numbers of plastic trash bags on the sidewalks; Monday must be trash day on Sullivan Street. Encountering the stray rat wasn’t a complete surprise, though it was a bit unnerving that he ran so close toward us. What was truly unexpected were the dozen or more that stampeded in our direction right behind him. I hadn’t seen that many rats move that quickly as a group since the movie Willard.

 

None of this detracted from the rush we got from the Shade reading, though I must admit, it’s going to take something else of that magnitude to get this small-town boy back to Manhattan.