New York, New York

A brief moment of space in Times Square.

Under the “thingie” in Penn Station I searched for a familiar face. Others did the same.  A boarding call cued people to stretch a line from one side of the terminal to the other. Others pushed around me. I heard my name. There she was. All the way from Germany. A Twitter and Facebook friend I had never met.

I had gone to New York to meet her, a writer, an author with an amazing story. But talent needs no story. Talent gets discovered sooner or later. I reflected on the fact.  I was in a yellow cab headed for lunch with a woman who had three published books. Her break came when a publisher read her manuscript’s page 99. that had been posted on a website.  That was it. Page 99.

She asked why I wasn’t writing? Did I have writer’s block?  No ideas? Why had I stopped?  There were more excuses than Obama had for the economy. Work, running around the countryside, painting and going back and forth between Hawaii and New York.  Time consuming excuses. All true. The rationalization easy. But every one was weak. If I wanted to write – that is, really write – all I had to do was do it.  I’d find a quiet place, a sacred time and hold up for three months to take a huge chunk of ideas out of my brain.  Not even fear could hold me back.  For crying out loud, I already wrote and self-published a book. It couldn’t get any more difficult or humiliating than that.

Oh, the humanity!

By 3 pm, we were toast. The city had sweltered to an almost unbearable oven. It was hard to touch the city. Beneath us subways pushed heat and fumes through the street grates where people stood like hotdogs on a grill. No Marilyn Monroe poses here. Odors from unpleasant origins hovered and caused unsuspecting heads to turn in self-defense.  And motion... The motion jabbed from every direction. Traffic down the street, up the street. People crossed right, left, came head on and dodge around you from behind. A million souls among the steel, concrete and the plasma screens all screaming for someone’s attention. The din etched in my ears, numbing them to nothing but the harshest of auditory chaos. A horn. A hawker selling bus tours.  I began to float, weaving between the others aware of almost nothing in the middle of everything.

I stood outside Madison Square Garden behind the thick metal cylinders that protect the entrance from a truck filled with explosives being rammed down the throat of  Penn Station.  The traffic light changed and a hurried crush of people come toward me from across the street.  Like a wave on a beach, they washed around me and dispersed along the sidewalk and down the stairs. I was inside my own head and yet for personal safety I dared not completely let go from my surroundings. I had lost five dollars in the Subway when I was in eighth grade. My art class came to see the museums.  I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

Inevitably, in this ocean of humanity were encounters – the taxi drivers who navigated the streets while we chatted in the back seat, the wait staff at Serendipity, cashiers at a café, a restaurant owner, the person sitting at the next table who consumed a BLT smoothed in a heap of bacon, a shop sales clerk who tried to sell her a $400 green handbag, the attendant at Penn Station who let us sit in the waiting area even though she wasn’t a ticketed passenger, and the postal clerk who volunteered to let me into a closed museum - all friendly, all helpful and all hospitable.  

The train whistle cried out with more frequency. Albany approached. It had been a long day. Even as the sun dropped behind the purple silhouettes of the Catskills, the air hung heavy over the Hudson River. It was the kind of thick air you gulped instead of breathed. You’d swear that you would drown. I stepped onto the platform and into the glass enclosed escalators, a thermal trap. It felt like an oven set to warm a loaf of bread. I ignored the last bit of crowd, those who swept from the train to make their way home or to some hotel to cue up for the next day’s business deal, legislative conference or important presentation. A bubble created by my own thoughts about the day shielded me from the last slight bump, or polite but rote “excuse me” from those who pushed past.

On the drive to Saratoga lightening flickered in the gathering thunderheads.  Muffled rolls of thunder greeted me as I pulled into the driveway. The hum of crickets and katydids filled the dark woods. This was a silence I could handle. The sky broke and the rains came in a heavy downpour.

Auf Wiedersehen, mein Freund

One day I’m going to either tell the story of the day I met the famous author Mariam Korbas in New York City for lunch at Serendipity, or I’ll tell my own story of how I became a famous author.  I haven’t decided which yet.