Frail Deeds Dancing: New York City Briefly

The Wife in Front of Manhattan Bridge

Brooklyn Bridge At Night

I wrote yesterday about the fabulous wedding we traveled to New York City to attend. Today I’d like to offer some observations on the short trip to one of the most exciting places on earth. I always dread the travel to New York City and I don’t know why. My daughter lives there and has blazed a fairly easy way of getting there. We drive to New Haven, Connecticut and catch a Metro North train into Grand Central Station and catch a subway from there to virtually anywhere we need to go. I re-learned again on Sunday just how easy it is. We arrived at Grand Central and decided we needed to eat so we went to a café right in the station. It was typical New York City with everybody crammed into very small tables. We were literally eating with the people on either side of us and ending up talking to them as well. The forced intimacy was a good thing – I think they were tourists though – like us. I don’t think native New Yorkers would patronize something as mundane as a Grand Central terminal café. Sitting there and watching the city walk by was extremely fascinating. New York is always in a rush – people heading somewhere and what a combination, hipsters to bankers to street people to immigrants from every corner of the earth. All this mass of people hurrying towards some disparate goal – great spectator sport. That is one thing you give up in New York – personal space and for the short time we were there – it was fine. We caught the subway to my daughter’s apartment and spent the afternoon there trying to bond with a very standoffish cat and watching yet another Red Sox debacle. She lives in a loft apartment in Brooklyn that she has done absolute wonders with it in the five years she’s lived there. The rest of the day was spent at the wedding, already chronicled earlier. Yesterday morning we got up and took our daughter to brunch at one of her nearby Brooklyn hangouts – the Life Café. It’s a very hipster place that still made us feel extremely welcome and the food was plentiful and awesome. Some really bizarre zombie art was hanging on the walls. According to my daughter the café offers wall space to local artists and this week – it was a zombie centric type. Another rushed subway trip accompanied by our daughter saw us just in time to catch the train back to New Haven and a couple hour drive to retrieve the Wonder Pooch. Too short a bite of the Big Apple but time well spent.