THE GETAWAY
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I was in New York City recently. Cheri was minding the shop. I feel guilty leaving work behind (stupid of me, I know), but Cheri had her own excursion south a few weeks further back, and even completed a deal from the Grand Canyon, her phone held high in the air like some lighter at a rock concert. It was my turn, I told myself. A chance to actually talk to the kids, to notice all the ways in which they’ve grown.
We’d rented a pretty apartment on Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn, across from the Rose Wolf coffee shop and the Orient Avenue community gardens. We were out towards the edge of what’s been gentrified, that’s how it felt. From the bedroom balcony I could see a big guy down lounging on his rather splendid patio furniture in a white T-shirt with his airpods on. Other side of the grey wall separating him from his neighbour was an old man in a much greyer white T-shirt dragging a rake through a pretty-much-done-for-the-year vegetable garden established in 1954 or similar.
We took the ferry across to Manhattan and then another ferry to Staten Island, this one with an armed coast guard escort. In the waiting room to come back, a crowd pushed against the glass and how many of them were concealing weapons was a question I didn’t want to ask in front of the kids. We shopped Soho and Washington Park, hunted down Superiority Burger in The East Village (you should do that too) and toured The Tenement Museum. We ate in Bushwick and shopped in Williamsburg. Bought up Chrome, and three of the four us took in a show on Broadway (no prize for guessing who stayed away). We dizzied ourselves at the Guggenheim.
We played our part, in other words.
On the day we left, we were through the alien concrete piles of Newark roadworks before it began to rain. But then it came down hard for hours, up until we crossed the border. Lanes narrowed wickedly and then flared again abruptly like gingko leaves. Striped barriers rose out of nowhere. Lightslicks completely fluid on the tarmac made it feel as if Bladerunner was being broadcast from the clouds.
I was on my own within that weather system, focused only on getting us home intact. A cockpit is what I rode in. But when the spaghetti of roads flattened finally into a single arrow homewards I reached for the on-off to the stereo and listened to the wonderful Brooklyn band Big Thief for long parts of the drive, while everyone else surfed or read or slept.
When we got home I tried them again, the band that is, through headphones and with a drastic overpour of scotch on the arm of the chair. I also picked away at a few emails, easing back into work like a diver in his decompression chamber. I thought casually for a while on the luxury involved in being able to complain about the rain coming down on a Swedish SUV, even an old one bruised and softened by a life lived hard, and I set those travails against a backdrop of good food and reckless spending. I felt mostly rested and a little chastened. Intensely aware of how things can fall apart and yet didn’t that week, not for me.
*Here’s a link to Big Thief playing live on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. My favourite song right now.
