October 19, 2007 - Receipt #1: The 47-Year Drive from JFK to Midtown

October 19, 2007 - Receipt #1: The 47-Year Drive from JFK to Midtown

As I said yesterday, I’m recounting a four-day vacation to Manhattan through the receipts I’ve accumulated during the stay. Receipts are what time discards as it moves on. You could say that about photographs or movies, are written words jotted down to capture a feeling, a locations, a thought. Unlike all these things, however, a receipt is something someone or some thing gives to you acknowledging a transaction. The first receipt for our Manhattan trip, which I didn’t take though it was offered, was for the taxi ride from JFK to the Buckingham Hotel at 101 West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park at the corner of West 57th and Avenue of the Americas.

Though I didn’t take the taxi receipt I did take instead the official Port Authority of NY and NJ Taxi Information form. It recorded that a taxi with Medallion number 9K32 picked IM and I up at Terminal 8 of JFK at 21:27 hours (9:27 PM). On the reverse side it says that the fare from JFK to Manhattan is $45 plus tolls. Our cabbie was from Asia, my guess, Korea. He spoke so few words it was tough to fathom his country of origin, but he understood my request and took the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan, traveling the Long Island Expressway, Interstate 495, West off the Grand Central Parkway. Most cabbies would stay on the Grand Central past La Guardia Airport and over the Triboro Bridge into Manhattan entering the city at 125th Street and then take the FDR into Midtown. It’s slightly longer and more fare. It was the route I drove my rental car heading to Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, when I commuted monthly between the coasts for a weeklong stay in the home office of the publication I edited. Instead of heading into the City from the Triboro, I would drive north on the Major Deegan Expressway, pick up Interstate 95, and head for the George Washington Bridge and New Jersey beyond.

When I was right out of high school and through less than a year of my tour of duty in the U.S. Navy, I was stationed on Long Island for a four month stretch starting the first week of 1964. Two other sailors and I arrived by bus from Dam Neck, Virginia where we had spent the good part of the last half of 1963 learning computer science. Back then, the Navy taught recruits as much as you might receive in college courses on the function of just about anything electronic. We were assigned to a factory school in New Hyde Park run by Sperry Rand. I only bring this up because it put me on Long Island from January 1964 to early June that year. And it was a most memorable time in my life. I would meet my wife of this many years since. I had just turned 18, the legal age to drink in New York back then—in Dam Neck all you could get at 18 was kiddie beer. The Navy was supplementing my meager pay—hardly enough to subsist upon outside of a Navy base—with a daily room and board per diem, which made for a pretty big payday each month considering I was renting a room in a private home.

Our Cabbie smoothly made the transition from the Grand Central onto the Long Island Expressway and headed into Midtown. Off to our right as we made the turn we could see the two observatory towers of the 1964/65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. IM and I had gone to the fair during the time we first started dating in the spring of 1964. I don’t know how many times I’ve driven or have been driven past this sight and not reflected back on those early days of our youth and marveled at how quickly the four months we spent together in the Spring of 1964 past and how fast those four months telescoped backward in time as our lives plummeted pell-mell forward. All of us spend our lives passing places that hold special memories of our past. IM and I were about to spend three days revisiting a few of them.

IM had a Japanese camera backed—since stolen in a burglary of our home some 11 years later—and she took photos of our time together back then. When you look back on old pictures the first thing you notice is the hair styles and fashions that clearly place the people captured in the frame at a era in the past. IM is shown in one with a lime green button-front knit sweater worn over a white lace blouse atop a pleated heather green wool skirt. Her lovely blond hair is coiffed in a slight beehive style with a light green ribbon, holding down the front of her beehive and accenting her bangs, tied at the back of her neck. She facing the camera straight on smiling, her blue eyes beaming, her left shoulder forward to the camera and her right shoulder receding slightly toward the background. It’s a sunny spring day. She’s standing on a perfectly manicured deep green lawn in front of the single-story, suburban 1950s home where she’s renting a room. A three-step concrete stair leads to the front door off to her left and just out of the frame. Immediately behind her is a lamp pole with a large egg-shaped glass enclosure hiding the high-wattage incandescent bulb inside. In that picture she is just over half the age of our oldest daughter. She’s carefree, unmindful of the future awaiting her, concerned only with the here and now. When we were that young there was only tomorrow.

Once in Manhattan, the cabbie took 3rd Avenue north until 57th and then headed west, crossing Park, Madison, 5th and finally arriving at the hotel, which none of us could see from the street. A truck was parked at the curb and was partially obscuring the view. The cabbie eased the cab forward to the middle of the block asking again for the address, which I relayed. I asked him to swing around again and stop at the corner of 6th and 57th, which he did and sure enough behind the truck was the Buckingham. I tipped him $10 bucks and wished him a good evening. We checked into our room and tried to decide what to eat at 10:45 at night. We hadn’t eaten anything all day. I asked the desk clerk what was nearby and he rattled off a couple of restaurants. I asked him what fast food was close by and he said a McDonalds on West 57th across 6th Avenue from the hotel.