“Start spreading the news.
I’m leaving today.
I want to be a part of it
New York, New York ….”
OK, so I’m not leaving today, more like 10 days from today. But if all goes as planned, I will soon be getting on that big jet plane, flying to my family in PA and then hopping on the train to Penn Station. I’ve got a room at the Washington Square Hotel where Hemingway once stayed.
I’ve been set for this trip for months, and yet I’ve been convinced that the very reason for it would ultimately be canceled. The invite to read at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village came in March, but even as the date grew close, there was no mention of my reading on the website schedule. I told myself either way, it would be OK. This is, after all, New York.
The trip comes with all kinds of emotions, excitement, a bit of nerves, wonder … but I’m also having a terrific time tripping down memory lane.
It was 1988. We were living in Connecticut in a third-floor apartment with hardwood floors and a clawfoot tub that I painted teal blue and equipped with a bubble mat (anyone remember those?). One day, as the holidays approached, I got the notion that we should spend New Year’s Eve in Times Square. I found a stately old hotel — the Doral Tuscany — in the classifieds of the New Yorker, booked a room, and off to New York we went. We skated in Rockefeller Center, ate at the New York Deli and when we passed the Simon and Schuster offices, I stopped to have my photo taken under the building’s sign. Though it was still a faint twinkle on the horizon, I dreamed of publishing a novel even then. I had no idea how one wrote a novel exactly, but I was going to do it. Some day. Thank heavens no one told me how long it would take and how much rejection would come along the way.
That night, we joined thousands in Times Square, where police corralled us with blockades once the block grew sardine-packed full. For some reason there was a pink plastic bathroom garbage can on the street and at one point I stood on it and led our block in song. I have no idea why, but we might blame the vino. Or it could just have been that I was happy. So, so happy. We were in New York. Anything seemed possible.
A year later when my friend Bonnie visited from Alaska, we drove her to “the city,” as my more sophisticated New England friends called it. And she was as wide-eyed as I had been on that first visit. It was Memorial Day weekend and the city was quiet. But I remember how friendly people were, how twice, as we stood looking like tourists, someone stopped to ask if they could help. We passed life-sized cardboard cutouts of Gorbachev and Bush, and surreptitiously posed just behind them so my hubs could snap the photo we were supposed to pay to have shot. We bought fake Rolexes and took the boat out around the Statue of Liberty.
It was the trip we talked about for all the years after, and the memory I treasured most when Bonnie died in 2012. I’d long since lost my Rolex, but she still had hers and her husband was kind enough to give it to me as a memento of my friend.
I have no doubt that on this trip I will also make some life-lasting memories. Three of my friends are flying in from Colorado, an old friend from my Connecticut days now lives there, as does an old Rocky Mountain News colleague and an editor I wrote for back in my home décor writing days. My niece and a handful of her friends are taking the train in as well.
Last week, I checked the Cornelia Street Café yet again, and again, no sign of my reading. What would I tell my friends who had bought airlines tickets to meet me? I couldn’t imagine.
Then, last Thursday, the same day I was asked to do a major interview, the same day my books arrived, a friend suggested I check out the Cornelia Street Café website. And there was my mug and the announcement that I would indeed be reading.
“If I can make it there
I’ll make it anywhere …
New York, New York
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