NYC
Friday, April 29, 2011 at 5:30 PM On Thursday, I took the train from Harrisburg to Penn Station in New York to attend the annual conference of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. The day was dreary and rainy as could be, but my love for traveling by train weighed out.
My imagination still insists that trains are romantic and old-fashioned, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary most of the time. Take the inevitable Very Important Guy making a Very Important Call on his Very Important Phone who generously shares his conversation with the entire car. Or the escaped patient from the TB ward hacking on the back of your seat.
I have learned to lower my expectations of train travel. Modern-day Amtrak rides are not like in "North by Northwest"--there are no Gibsons and brook-trout meals in the dining car or innuendo-laden conversations with an attractive, non-creepy stranger.
But it's not every day that this mama goes to New York for a writing conference, and there's this modern marvel called the quiet car, so I sat back and watched through the rain-soaked window the improbably green Pennsylvania farmland and the graffiti and grit of Philadelphia and New Jersey.
After two days at the conference, my head is spinning with ideas and possibilities. My dear friend Jon came from Vermont to keep me company in New York, and we have eaten well, laughed a lot, and stayed up past our bedtimes every night.
We spent Thursday night at Rouge Tomate on East 60th, drinking Pimm's cups and Dark and Stormies and eating beautiful fluke ceviche, beet-avocado panna cotta, herb-fennel risotto and spaghetti with sea urchin.
After dinner, we saw a herd of paparazzi, cameras flashing, outside the Metropolitan Club across the street. An old man in a yellow bow tie pulled up in his Toyota and asked who we were watching. We said we didn't know.
The old man shook his head. "Then why are you standing here waiting?" he asked us.
Of course, we had no answer. The old man shook his head again and dismissed the absurdity of it with a swat of his hand. "It's just like this nonsense with the royal wedding and all that craziness. They say there's gonna be 2 billion people watching that on the television tomorrow. Well, I'll tell you one thing: It's not gonna be 2 billion and one."
I felt a little foolish for getting sucked into the celebrity tractor beam---but then we saw Kyle MacLachlan, and I had a little "Twin Peaks" geek-out and decided it was totally worth being shamed by an elderly gentleman in a bow tie.
Last night we played Cranium and ate pizza at an old college friend's apartment in Chelsea with his boyfriend and four other friends, during which time I learned again the meaning of the word "truculent," which I can never seem to remember, and that "taxidermist" is by far the most challenging word I've seen acted out in Charades.
And, naturally, we watched highlight footage of the royal wedding on the BBC. I thought of the old man in the yellow bow tie and longed for the day when I am old enough to say whatever I want whenever I want to whomever I want and not care one hot bit what anyone thinks of me.
I've also learned that although I am so grateful for time alone in New York, I have had a pit in my stomach since Thursday morning, when I said goodbye to my son. Tomorrow afternoon seems a million years away, but tonight I'm heading to Brooklyn to spend my last night with some friends from grad school. Real life will have to wait just one more day.
