October 29, 2007 - Receipt #8 – Coffee & Danish from Associated Supermarket, 225 W. 57th Street

October 30, 2007 - Receipt #8 – Coffee & Danish from Associated Supermarket, 225 W. 57th Street

It’s Saturday morning May 19th and we’re two days into our four-day stay in Manhattan that I’m reliving through my accumulated paper receipts. We awake just before 9:00 AM to the sound of a city enjoying the first day of a weekend. Outside, the sound of construction can still be heard as well as felt from the vibration of heavy equipment wrestling steam beams into place. The chaotic sound of horns punctuate the earning morning as traffic along 57th Street and 6th Avenue struggle to make its way faster than conditions will allow. New Yorkers talk a great deal more than Californians and perhaps the horn is a surrogate for vocal chords when you’re wrapped in a cocoon of steel, glass, and rubber. We’re right next to the elevator in the Buckingham Hotel, which reminds me of the residential hotels my family and I lived in when I was a boy in Ponce, Puerto Rico and Portland, Oregon; though the Buckingham was a couple of stars above those of my childhood.

You turn left out of the elevator and walk a few steps to reach the door or our room, number 11A. When you enter, to your left is a small closet size kitchenette with stove, refrigerator, sink and cupboards with dishes and silverware. In front and to your right is the living room with couch, on the wall opposite the entrance and television on the wall across from the couch. From the doorway, to the right of the couch is a window that provides a peek-a-boo view of 6th Avenue and the wall of an adjacent building. The Peak-a-boo view not only provides a view of traffic on 6th Avenue but the back of a nightclub featuring a year-around Halloween theme. From our vantage point you can see the props that keep the façade standing, thus spoiling the illusion of the building when we view it from the front.

On the wall across across the twelve-foot space from our room, an elderly woman occupies the rightmost of the two rooms facing our wall. Her bed is near her window and we’ve seen her sitting in her dressing gown on the bed watching television: an Edward Hopper painting, with just as much poignancy. We keep out blinds closed to provide her privacy except at night when we turn off the lights and open the window to air out our room. Our queen size bed is off to the left of the couch viewed from the doorway. Another window behind the headboard of the bed gives us a view of the wall of another tall building. To the left of the bed is a closet. At the foot of the bed adjacent to the closet is a small bathroom, about the size of the kitchenette. A desk sits on the wall next to the bathroom entrance across a small walkway from the foot of the bed. Despite being a bit cramped, the room does have a high ceiling, thus making it feel less claustrophobic.

The Buckingham has no restaurant and thus no bed and breakfast accommodations. After my morning toilet, I leave IM checking her e-mail on the iBook G4 portable we’ve brought with us at the desk at the foot of the bed and go out of the hotel in search of a morning breakfast. I head west on 57th toward 7th Avenue. We had passed a supermarket on our way back from the theatre last night and I’m en route there now to purchase breakfast for the two of us. I reach Associated Supermarket at 225 W. 57th Street just before Broadway and I enter. It’s sparsely filled with early morning shoppers. There is a deli section and a few patrons are enjoying coffee and pastry while reading the paper at small tables set up inside. I purchase two Danish and a cup of coffee. IM prefers tea and we have Lipton tea bags and hot water in the hotel room. I pay cash at one of the two checkout counters going this early on a Saturday. I’m the only one in line but a lady comes up after I’m rung up. The bill comes to just over $5.00 and I add sugar to my tall coffee, put a lid on it, and take my purchases out into a slightly overcast Saturday morning—the rising sun peaking beneath a persistent cloud cover that threatens to enshroud the day in a pall.

On my way back to the Buckingham, I walk beneath scaffolding of a building under repair. We’ve seen quite a bit of construction everywhere we’ve walked in the city since we’ve arrived. Manhattan resembles a living organism that is constantly repairing its damaged body, replacing aging parts of its anatomy with new construction or renovating structures that have elements worth preserving—this appeared to be the case with building I’m walking beside. When I return to the room, IM has heated water for her tea and she and I sit down to have our Danish before heading out into to the increasingly overcast Saturday.