Monday December 6, 2004 – A Fine Romance

Monday December 6, 2004 – A Fine Romance

When my wife “I” and I met on Long Island at a bar called the Page 2 in Far Rockaway in March of 1965. “I” had come over from Scotland to live and work outside Manhattan and had gotten a job in an electronics company she’s forgotten the name of now. I was attending a factory school at Sperry Aerospace in New Hyde Park. I had gone to the club to meet someone else and she was there with another guy, who had begun dancing with someone else. I asked her to dance and we spent the rest of the evening dancing and talking and making plans to go into Manhattan on the weekend. She was a mere slip of a girl, pretty as a picture, and she spoke with the loveliest Scottish accent I’d ever heard. Smitten, head over heels, crazy about her was pretty much what described my state after that evening.

The next Saturday, I picked her up at around 10:00 and we took the train from the Valley Stream Long Island Railroad Station with round trip tickets and headed for Manhattan. Disembarking at Penn Station at 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue in Midtown, we started walking. It was still chilly in the city, but the sun was out and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Though there was snow still on the ground in places, there was every indication that winter was giving way to spring. We walked from Penn Station along 34th Street to 1st Avenue and then turned north until we reached the United Nations, where 45th Street dead ends into 1st. We took the tour—“I” had been before, but she enjoyed her second time as much as the first. For me, this was my high school current affairs class coming to life. The Secretary General of the UN at that time was U Thant. He took over the position after Dag Hammarskjold met his untimely death in an air crash in September 1961.

After a tour of the UN, we decided to take in a movie and found Sean Connery playing James Bond in the newly released Goldfinger. After the movie, we wandered through Central Park and ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at 5th Avenue and 82nd Street. We meandered through the museum enjoying the time spent together. By the time, we had our fill of paintings and sculptures we decided it was time to find a restaurant for dinner. The place we ended up was this Italian restaurant with red and white checkered table clothes with a candle in an empty Chianti wine bottle—the sort with the rounded kind wrapped in a woven basket. The waiter lit the candle and we had a bottle of Chianti along with our meal of pasta and salad. I should point out that the drinking age in New York at that time was 18 hence my ability to order and imbibe this Italian red legally.

We ended the evening at the Drake Hotel bar listening to their pianist sing raunchy songs and tell off-color jokes to the great amusement of the audience. A taxi ride back from the Drake to Penn Station and a train ride back to the Valley Stream Train Station on Long Island where I walked “I” home the short distance from the train station. After a lingering good night at her doorstep, I took my leave and found a bus to take me back to my place in New Hyde Park. It was the beginning of a fine romance.