Jim just returned from a subway ride to a Lego store in Manhattan to buy a cup of bricks. Soon we leave for the local Hispanic grocery store to purchase Drano for the bathroom sink we helped clog. We’re recovering from waking up last night at 3:30 AM when the smoke alarm started beeping. Jim changed the battery but no luck and Sophie-the-dog let us know this was her worst nightmare. Jim looked online and successfully cut power to the alarm—us still safe with a functional non-beeping smoke detector in the bedroom.
We came to Brooklyn for a 12-day stay as dog-sitters so Annie and Juan Carlos could go visit his family in Peru whom they’d not seen for a good while. Post-holiday confusion, snow and Omicron caused cancellations and delays all around but not directly upon us. PDX had the longest lines we’d ever witnessed for baggage check and security. Fortunately we got to drop our bags with the curbside valet and had pre-check or we’d have missed our flight. When we picked up our bags at JFK, I noticed huge piles of lost luggage from less fortunate travelers.
Annie and Juan Carlos flew to Florida for their connection but right before boarding, they got word of Covid within his Peruvian household. The airline pulled their suitcases from the plane and Annie and Juan Carlos decided to make the most of their situation and stayed in Fort Lauderdale for a week. My mom says flexibility is a marker of high intelligence; our kids soaked in Disney, alligators, winter sunshine, and friendly, non-jaded Floridians.
And Jim and I still got our make-believe experience as New Yorkers.
APARTMENT: Though compact, our temporary home is efficient and perfect for two. After the kids left, we immediately seized every inch and assumed the ways of big city living. For example, here you drop off your bag of dirty clothes at the laundromat around the corner where they weigh it and return it to you all clean and folded a day or two later at a cost not much more than plugging quarters into a machine yourself.
Annie and Juan Carlos reside in the same neighborhood as that depicted in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” the classic book I discovered back in 9th grade English class.
You’ll find the same street names here as in the book but the area has recast population groups from Dutch to Italian to Puerto Rican to gentrified. You’ll still find cultural remnants such as the nearby Avenue of Puerto Rico.
I packed more thoroughly for the New York winter than Jim did so he appropriated the lavender scarf our daughter-in-law Anna knitted for me one Christmas. On our third day here, five inches of snow fell, flakes which usually get efficiently shoveled by most building owners. But down our street, the sidewalk re-froze and I suffered an inelegant, slow-mo, splayed-limb fall. Fortunately I didn’t injure myself which mercifully meant no visit to a Covid-filled hospital.
SUBWAY: (Annie: “They call them trains here, Mom.”) We had a learning curve compared to European subways since they list their lines differently. Instead of marking them by their final stops, they indicate general directions like Uptown or Brooklyn, and even that can steer you terribly wrong. You also find divergent runs on weekends and evenings, separate express trains, and frequent last-minute schedule changes
At one quieter train entrance, we swiped our fully loaded cards but neither worked so we crawled under turnstiles like Sophie burrowing through a doggie door. Fortunately nobody but security cameras witnessed our shame.
New Yorkers in general do their best to avert other people’s gazes, sticking to their own business in such places, probably because they’d otherwise risk making eye contact with some of the scarier folks that might share their space. On about half of our subway journeys, we encountered at least one hostile man, many of these guys probably driven from the cold into the relative warmth of the subway.
Once when we boarded a train, a dude lay sprawled out on a row of seats so we edged towards the opposite end. Every person following us did the same until our side filled and lounging-guy had the other entirely to himself. Sure enough, dude eventually stirred, sat up, and swore—aggressively and repeatedly. His eyes darted around in a challenge to meet any of ours and become the focus of his chemically-altered state.
Jim and I regularly find ourselves the oldest on trains, especially since our main transfer station in Manhattan sits near New York University. New York City clearly is a city for the young in many ways, especially underground.
Even pre-pandemic, I avoided touching public hand or stair rails (which absolutely nobody ridicules me for anymore) so me grasping a subway grab bar during Covid in New York City just won’t happen. Jim suffers few such trepidations so he hangs onto bars as necessary, which enables me to safely grip his arm in turn.
Sadly this works less effectively during sudden subway stops and one time I started stumbling around. Two young gals noticed my struggle and sprung from their seats, signaling for me to sit. I’m still processing this incident because it was an utterly old lady moment for me, yet speaks to the inherent goodness of most New Yorkers.
GROCERY STORES: Our Tree Grows in Brooklyn neighborhood offers a spendy natural food store a block over and an affordable Hispanic supermarket a ten-minute walk away. (Just remember to bring your personal grocery pull-cart to haul your bags back.) The supermarket features specialty foods from Ecuador to Columbia to Brazil and beyond, with over 20 check-out stands functioning at once.
Shoppers regularly pack the massive supermarket, all Hispanic folks except us and maybe two others (not an understatement) and the clerks speak Spanish to everyone, including us. A store manager directs traffic and distributes carts up front. Our first visit, he tried to catch my attention by yelling out Mamá—another old lady moment for me. I should be grateful he didn’t cry out for Abuela.
On our second visit, I lost Jim entirely for a spell, which wouldn’t have been so terrible except I failed to bring along either my phone or apartment key. Jim remembered me mumbling something earlier about vinegar, so in my absence, he ambled towards the condiment aisle.
Like a good Girl Scout I remained at our last-seen location but by then I think Jim had entered the land of plantains and tomatillos at the far time-zone of the store. I must have looked quite the sight in my panicked state, a blonde abuela in her big red coat and KN95 mask, clutching a bag of M & M’s, adrift that winter evening inside the Food Bazaar, visions of the store closing and getting kicked out into the darkness without knowing a single person other than my meandering Jim. I never left my phone behind after that.
FOOD: We had much better success with international foods using Grub hub to order Greek, Mexican and Thai which showed up at our door 20 minutes later. Why have we never tried this in Salem before? We also grabbed margherita pizza a few times from the joint around the corner, the Naples owner also supplying us with cheesecake he’d made at home.
ACTIVITIES:
Since this wasn’t our first time in New York City and we had time to kill, we got to see some more atypical sites.
Tenement Museum. We selected the “Hard Times: 1880s” tour, featuring middle-class German immigrants, the first ethnic settlement group with a separate language in NYC. It made me think of my German great-grandparents who arrived in the US that same decade.
The word “tenement” brings to mind something terrible, but at least for these Germans, it actually served as a cozy community where people looked out for each other. The size of their apartments rival what you commonly see in NYC today. Plus they had a family-friendly saloon in the basement with great German food, like a McMenamins pub with bratwurst. The only clear drawbacks? Using outhouses and hauling heating coal from the back yard, but that would have been the case most places at the time.
Neue Museum. We continued with a German/Austrian theme unintentionally by visiting the Neue art gallery, which in truth reads way more Austrian.
Like most visitors, we came for the famous Portrait of Adele Block-Bauer, also known as the Woman in Gold, also featured in the 2015 movie with Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.
In the early 20th century, artist Gustav Klimt visited Ravenna, Italy to see its early Byzantine mosaics. The gold leaf portraits of Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora inspired Klimt to paint Adele Bloch-Bauer in a related sparkly fashion. In 2018, a visit to Ravenna similarly inspired artist James Southworth. He translated the golden image of Theodora onto a discarded door from our McCall, Idaho cabin, the door and cabin both constructed by my Uncle Ralph and Grandpa Rudd in1947.
BROADWAY: We emerged from the subway at Times Square where I immediately came face-to-boy-parts with a man emptying his bladder a wee three feet away. We scampered across the street towards whichever crosswalk signal read “WALK”. The urinator trailed us for a frightening bit but eventually stopped, thankfully distracted by a hot dog stand. Somewhere there’s a horrible joke here, but it’s too icky for me to contemplate. With the urinator’s attention channeled elsewhere, we threaded through the mass of humanity up Broadway to The Music Man.
The audience jumped to its feet when Hugh Jackman and later Sutton Foster took the stage, roaring long enough that the orchestra had to wait it out. A woman beside me said she’d originally purchased her ticket back in 2019; Covid just took this long for her to use it. The show was supposed to open in September 2020 but that didn’t happen until December 20, 2021. By Christmas Eve, Omicron struck the cast itself and they had to close for ten days. Amidst all this chaos, we scored good, affordable seats for a Friday night with one day’s notice.
TIME TO LEAVE OZ and our kids’ petite fairy tale retreat in Brooklyn, complete with in-house pet Sophie, and the best of entertainment and museums at arm’s reach. (Thanks to Omicron, we also purchased some great fire-sale tickets for Wicked, which drives me to yet more Dorothy references.)
New York churns out a fantasy full of contrasts. A wicked witch and her flying monkeys lurk around every corner while glittering yellow brick roads and red ruby slippers lay right at your feet. Somehow more international than Europe itself, the flavors of the world await just a cautious subway ride or Grubhub order away. You just have to be courageous enough—and keep your eye on your Sophie or your Toto enough—and brave the mindful road to make it there.
