Editor’s Note: This morning we in Virginia’s Piedmont are awash in a sea of white, our snow now covered by the ice of Storm “Izzy,” which replaced the heavier burden of Storm “Frida.” This version of winter’s wrath leaves us still with power, and thus some stimulus from the America out there that Marlow concludes in this retrospective on travel and gerontologic change. Reports this morning indicate one of the flashpoints may have been ignited. Let’s take a trip with Marlow to a world we knew, now in the rear view.
– Vic
Author’s Note: As incurable travelers, we have seen more than we remember but we remember more than we have seen. Hence, the following delayed reflections regarding the latest installment of our ongoing journey.
-Marlow
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Rear view mirror — NYC
During our December 2021 trip to NYC it was our good fortune to be occasionally wrong about the what’s, when’s and where’s — being mistaken and stumbling into something new/unexpected is the essence of the traveler’s joyful memories. The absence of feeling at home when we were there was mind expanding.
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Some of our group despite advanced age were new to the city — no, not like the Hollywood tropes of poorly dressed provincials with silly pretentious. Nor was it some odd effect of how many NYCers used to view those of us who resided in flyover country — well-fed, rather silly, and politically naïve visitors. In some ways they, way back when, did view us as residents in some loose group of offshore islands with immigrant problems, language and accent barriers and rigid non-progressive racial and class systems. Nowadays they’re just as friendly and kind as Southerners and Midwesterners.
No longer were we visitors viewed like Mongolian yaks — hairy cows who were seen as smelly, ill-kempt, long-haired animals on their way to despoil the big city’s entertainment, shopping, and dining houses.
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We took what were at times were aimless walks. We would be given some NYC official subway system sanction after about 5 or 6 station stops with maybe one train line switch. So, after a mile or two we’d exit the city’s deep underground storage tube(s) for our eventual unsupervised release to a park, hood, shopping, eating or entertainment district. No longer were we eyeballed with morbid curiosity by the dark clad city dwellers regarding what we rubes might do next.
What I found amazingly missing during our time aboard NYC’s mass transit was the absence of the old timey fire drills involved in getting on or off a subway trains, with people panting and pushing and the mad dash for the crowded, smelly stairwells.
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Oftentimes during midweek periods, we discovered that very few others were going to our destination. The train cars were close to empty. This was the rarest situation on a NYC subway train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy. Almost always what waited for us above ground was genuinely interesting and pretty, and at times quite stately and dignified places.
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What I found upon returning to the Empire and reengaging America’s woeful mainstream media headquartered in New York City and Washington DC was how wrong it is for them to see and report on our country in a perpetual bad mood: they have begun to blame the country for their mood and consequently draw the wrong conclusions. By the way, nothing is more indicative of our endless media-flogged culture war going badly than a noticeable rise in its valiant propaganda in support of whatever their favored cause du jour . . . anything officially denied or left unmentioned is probably a fact.
Back in the days of my early NYC borough explorations during the 1960s, nothing was stranger than being in a fairly bad section of one of them and being told that another place — our destination — was a great deal worse. No longer was that true. Not sure why but we saw no evidence of rampant lawlessness being trumpeted by our nation’s print and electronic media.
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On our train travel to and from the Big Apple, we had our own compartment – plenty of space, plenty of provisions – cookies, chocolates, and whiskey — that made being on this Trans-East-Coastal train like a luxurious form of convalescence.
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From our train compartment windows, we saw extraordinary landscapes — pale yellow ones under blue sky — extraordinary because they were not deserts, but rather the large endless pasture or crop lands; here and there were small towns, burghs, villages, and even rarer large shiny bustling cities, that were then followed by a herd of cows here, horses in paddocks there, and finally new and used car lots nearly empty of product. The US was inhabited but with a sparseness that was surprising as it was impressive.
A predominant characteristic of the land and man scapes we saw was a stark stoic nature much like that seen in an Edward Hopper painting.
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Upon departing this beloved Babylon, we were happier than we had been since starting our trip on the train. We had been mostly in charge as we took our time; and the weather was dramatic — warm, dry, and sunny. Little wind. I briefly mused that maybe we had died, and this was our surprisingly good fate.
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“Didn’t get too lost” didn’t cover what we could say
But we knew all the time
We really felt that way
But that was then and now we know it’s a better day
But we can’t get sad since we’re here to stay
Until someone comes to take our place
With a different name and a different face
New York felt alright.
Still feeling good about ourselves and a bit modest after seeing what a tiny place we occupy here in the Empire. Our long ago promise to engage local people and places has been renewed and our eyes refreshed,
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A few travel tips – plans (in pencil), not dreams — focusing on new roads, places, ways, people, and secret gates. Twice the cash, half the clothes. Hopefully with these, adventure, memories, laughs, lessons, perhaps a friend or two and some wisdom will result.
Saved rounds:
It was easy to see the beginnings of our visit, but quite hard to see its end.
When we first saw New York on our own, we were very young — me a barely-made teenager, W a still freshly minted 20-somthething. It was summertime, and we got off the planes of our times, me a Super Connie at Idlewild, her a 727 at JFK. We were both somewhat programmed by all the movies we had ever seen and all the songs we had ever heard about New York. In fact, it never was those things but something a whole lot more and in ways we never could anticipate.
For me I still have a vegetable/fruit cart smell and jukebox music sound sense of the city. For W, it’s more of a deli, shopping, and jazz clubs. These were not the mixed blessings of being young — it formed the basis of our utter connectedness to the place.
Of course, it was same but different for one other city for both of us — Paris. Also maybe Chicago for W and Florence for me.
Some nights there we’d look through the taxi or Uber car windows at the town and its skyline, spotting small things in shop window displays and big signs that said TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a shimmering flood of sunset’s golden rays (this last item still seems remarkable and exotic, for NYC rarely has blue-skied, sunny mid-December days.)
In retrospect it seems to me that those moments were at times happier than the ones that came later. Part of what I want to tell you is being in New York like Paris can make one feel young again like coming out refreshed on the other side of a film dissolve. These places can be like entering a revolving door at seventy-something and coming out a good deal younger and on a different street and time. These cities have been described as for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that they are for those of us who come there from somewhere else, places for the old and very old to be born again.
Places of renewed belief in possibilities that something extraordinary might happen any minute, any day, any month; no dark six-thirties in the evening with bitter winds off the rivers; nothing irrevocable; everything within reach.
Just living a real life there however briefly. We Southerners were in New York on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever we currently belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who knew when the trains left for our hometowns. These places were not Hollywood film abstractions but tangible and tasty ideas and romance.
That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promise. Now back home — New York like Paris comes back to me/us in hallucinatory flashes that are quite clinically detailed despite being a month in our rear-view mirror, because we feel like we still have all the afternoons left in the world to enjoy them.
Their golden rhythms will never fade or be broken despite our advancing ages.
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