London's Whining

This is how I always expect NYC to play out on any given day for me, a London/Texas hybrid. I will get jostled in an un-southern like manner. I will get sweaty and miserable. I will get confused and worry about early-onset Alzheimer's. Unable to remember what train stop to get off at, I will instead remember, in the habit of old people everywhere, days from decades ago, when I negotiated London's transit with ease.

Having spent all that lovely free time back in Austin (see picture of the recently self-named Jesse Hussein Coldsmith screaming on the plane), I was bracing myself to say goodbye to my vacation. From now on, it would be all NYC all the time, with several different teens. For some reason, touring around the gardens of the North Shore just doesn't appeal to the younger set.

My direst predictions about Teens in New York were, I'm delighted to say, not met. Though I did find myself remembering London fondly (reasons why to come later). Our first foray, just a few days ago, began with the usual panic. I'd left plenty of time to get to the local Long Island Railroad station. I knew exactly when the train would stop for us (10.04 am). I was in control. Until, suddenly, I was all at sea. The parking lot sign at the train station said "Lot Full". The cars sitting right in the mouth of the garage had quite noticeable green permits in their windows. Ah, yes, I'd forgotten about permits.

(My niece Blythe, looking relaxed in Central Park)

So I drove briefly around the choked local streets, getting a little irate and panicky. Then I remembered how, only the day before, a Whole Foods employee in Glen Cove had told me, not two aisles from the beer case, that the chain had stopped selling beer. Now, I don't think that Long Island has any more clock-watching donut-eaters than Texas has, but it had seemed that the indifferent employees who'd made my life difficult over the last few months, could, on this occasion, help me out. Perhaps the "Lot Full" sign was something no one hurried to update whenever a car left the lot. So I took a chance and re-entered the lot.

Sure enough, I found an empty spot. I felt fairly certain that whoever had failed to change the sign was also not going to waste needless foot-steps walking the tower to check permits. Confidently, I parked and herded Jesse and my niece onward.

Once again, the L.I.R.R. was perfectly on time. I tortured more wool while the landscape went past for an hour. The girls, true teens, seemed indifferent. Why do teens make you do things they then subsequently pretend not to care about?

Once we arrived at Penn Station, I found I could decipher the needlessly complex Metro diagram just enough to get us to Grand Central Station, where we were to meet up with Jesse's pal since day care, Alexa. Grand Central itself is a truly beautiful building, cathedral-like. It feels far quieter than it should. The vast distance above your head seems to dampen the ambient noise. The white stone and marble everywhere, the fabulous moldings of the arches a hundred feet above your head, made me feel reverent, for the usual two minutes. Then it was off to the food court.

Grand Central's food court, in my view, is the dream food-court you would wish to find in the local shopping mall. There was a stall for Indian food, the thing I always look for first. The dishes reflected the usual American preferences. Chicken Tikka Masala has truly become the Indian version of General Joe's chicken. The Rogan Josh, a dish that's too exquisite to risk having just anywhere, looked overly-creamy, but the chana massala was great. Blythe picked out a terrific steak hoagie from a sandwich vendor. Jesse and Alexa got stodgy-looking bagels and swore they were content. That's the scary thing about kids: they really did look happy with their choices. Bari, Alexa's mum, watched, having eaten earlier.

Having dined, we pressed on to the Chrysler building (famous elevator door at left) and then to the New York Public Library. Blythe was delighted. She couldn't get enough time in the library so we left her to enjoy it on her own for awhile, as the rest of us found a deli with iced coffees and Asian salads and American sandwiches. I mean, we were impressed by the library, too, but our stomachs were calling again.

After collecting Blythe, we decided to walk uptown on 5th Avenue, just to see some fancy shops. Instead of noticing the shops, we found ourselves just enjoying the stroll. We admired molding and brick-work and pretzel smells (Bari, being an architect by training, is just the person to be with on such expeditions), in the wrong direction. Bari pointed out that the best brick-lay patterns force you to look at every brick. After talking to her, I wanted to go home, demolish the tedious brick outside my house and re-lay it all. Meanwhile, where were the fancy shops? There were stores aplenty. The girls pulled us into a couple of shops where you could, well, let's face it, dress up like a tart for less than $20. It was the sighting of the Flatiron building that let us know we'd gone in the wrong direction. We spotted a train station and, after some errors, managed to head back to Times Square and the various candy-dedicated stores that Jesse and Alexa were so keen on.

Did you know that you can fill three stories with M&Ms consumerabilia? With M&Ms pillows. And M&Ms back-packs. Socks. Key chains. Thank heaven there were no thongs.

We made our way then to Greenwich Village, to meet Bari's friend Elaine who bought us a lovely meal and sadly had to press on to the show that she and Bari had booked. We hailed a cab back to Penn Station, cheap at $12.

We made it back to the car in the Huntington Station garage's parking lot. I'm not sure if the lack of a parking ticket on the windshield means that we escaped unscathed or not. Maybe they just take down your license plate number and get a ticket to you with the same speed they got my subscription to Newsday to me (which was never, despite repeated phone calls). Or maybe I'll get hauled off in hand-cuffs in a few days. It won't matter because the sights and energy of New York City was worth every irritation.

As a final note, let me join the legion of London Whiners traveling in NYC. The London underground map, posted in every crevice of every tube station in London, is purely schematic. The designer, a minor deity in my view by the name of Harry Beck, figured out in the 1930s that the kind of knowledge you need to get from Charing Cross station to Richmond is completely different from the knowledge you need to find the Thames once you've arrived at Richmond. New York's subway map tries to relate the trains to the geography and general city layout, forgetting that once you've arrived at a station, it's precisely the general city layout you no longer care about. Getting around New York using that wretched map and stepping on trains free of signage challenged all our powers of de-cryption. There's now software available to help you, while you're still at home, to figure out the train changes you'll need while in New York. No such software exists for the London underground, so far as I'm aware. The map tells you all you can usefully know, prompting me to think that software is what you need when graphic design fails.