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.

October 28, 2007 - Receipt #7 – Candy Before Performance of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”

October 28, 2007 - Receipt #7 – Candy Before Performance of “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”

Back in the room, IM surfs the Internet while I write in my Reporter’s Notebook and read the May 21st issue of the New Yorker. I’m absorbed with Peter Hessler’s “Letter From China: Walking the Wall” describing David Spindler’s fascination with China’s hundreds year old defense against the marauding Mongols. Spindler is an independent scholar of the Great Wall and pursues his scholarship with a Quixote zeal that borders on obsession. I’ve visited Shanghai several times in the past year and a half and never gotten beyond a two-mile radius of the Hotel Sofitel Jin Jiang Pudong, the distance I can comfortably walk in the small amount of time my business reasons for visiting China allows. The author and Spindler hiking the little known sections of the ancient wall in remote areas of China I will probably never visit makes for a compelling read.

Curiously, the Great Wall has kept foreign cultures out all these many hundreds of years in contrast to America that has embraced continuous waves of immigration since the first Europeans set foot on this land. And nowhere is this influx of cultures and ethnicities more evident than in Manhattan, where north, south, east, Middle East, and west come together—a trip round the world experienced in a walk through the city’s neighborhoods. After over half a century watching the rest of Asia prosper by engaging the West, the gates of China’s Great Wall have been thrown open and the world is flooding in. I get the impression that if you understand the Great Wall you might well understand China.

Rested and refreshed, we leave the Buckingham at a quarter after seven in the evening, and walk down 6th Avenue to 44th Street, where we turn right, join the throng of theater-goers all making their ways to their play or musical, and proceed across Broadway and 7th where the two cross one another. We make it through the mass of humanity and arrive at the Shubert in plenty of time before the performance begins. The musical was vintage Monty Python, bits and pieces of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a tune from “Meaning of Life”, all begun with a musical version of the fish face slapping skit from the original “Monty Python Flying Circus” BBC Series. It’s the joke that starts the play.

The audience at the Shubert for the play was unique in that most were fans of Monty Python comedy, much like the audience for “Jersey Boys” and “Mama Mia” are fans of the music in each play. Perhaps the uniqueness of the audience owes more to my observing its members more closely than when we attended musicals and plays in the past. Perhaps the audience for “A Class Act” the musical based on the life and work of Edward Kleban, which IM and I saw in 2001 were there to see life of the lyricist who created the songs to “Chorus Line” or the audience for “Aspects of Love” which I saw alone in 1991 were fans of Andrew Lloyd Webber, its creator. Neither garnered the Broadway acclaim of long running hits “Chorus Line” or “Cats”, perhaps because they lacked the fan base that causes one musical to succeed beyond expectations and others to sink into oblivion after a few performances.

I’m reminded of a musical playing during the time Irene and I were dating back in the 1960s. “The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd” book, music, and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The musical had posters plastered throughout Penn Station and at every train stop on Long Island and in Manhattan. It failed after a few months on Broadway, despite producing the hit song “Who Can I turn to,” that every singer of note in the 1960s recorded. IM and I chose to see “Funny Girl,” with Barbra Streisand. It too produced the popular hit “People” but enjoyed long running success as well. On reflection, perhaps neither the Broadway plays nor the audiences have change, perhaps I have.

We are seated in the Mezzanine in row H seats 112 and 113 one in from the aisle. After we get settled, I want something sweet and venture to the concession stand at the a few rows up and behind us. There I purchase a box of junior mints for IM—her favorites—and a roll of Mentos mints for me. The attendant was so busy that I didn’t want to ask her for a receipt which she didn’t offer when providing me change for the five dollar bill I tendered for the purchase, which I dropped into a tip jar.

The aisle seat on our row is occupied by a lone male in seat 114, ten to fifteen years my junior, putting him in his fifties or late forties with thinning graying dark hair. Spreading in the middle, he fits uneasily in the narrow theater seat with so little leg room in front that those seated must stand up to allow others to pass. Throughout the play he squirms restlessly trying to get comfortable but to no avail, bumping into me in the process—the one reason I took notice of him. He is dressed in a white shirt and dull gray slacks and carries a white plastic shopping bag packed roundly with stuff—hard to tell if its recent purchases or belonging he’s carrying around for lack of a backpack or briefcase. Once I noticed him, I couldn’t help trying to fathom how he came to be at the play alone. Perhaps the simple answer was he wanted somewhere to spend a couple of hours and be entertained

The play had some funny bits, though the gay humor did get old after a bit. The female, who kept reminding the audience in typical Monty Python style that she was the female lead, was funny. The play ended to considerable audience applause and IM and I made our way out of the theater and headed for 8th Avenue for our return walk to the Buckingham Hotel.

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

October 25, 2007 - Receipt #6 - The Long Manhattan Meal

I’m recounting four days in Manhattan through the written receipts we’ve amassed during our stay. This is the sixth. After paying for our purchase we leave the store and find a bench across from the museum store entrance to sit for a second to gather all our purchases in a single large plastic bag. All around us is a steady stream of pedestrian entering and leaving Rockefeller Center Plaza, many stop on either side of where we are sitting and attempt to take photos of sculptor Paul Manship’s famous gilded statue of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind. Prometheus guards the Rockefeller Center Plaza subterranean patio as you enter from 5th Avenue. The statue was commissioned in January 1933 for this quintessential Art Deco center built in the depths of the Depression. It was the ultimate statement of capitalist optimism in the darkest period of modern history—“let them eat cake,” and why not?

Purchases all packed into a single bag, we head back to the hotel along 5th Avenue, passing at 55th Street, the St Regis Hotel, which was the preferred Manhattan staff lodging during the year and a half I spent in the late 1970s working for Regis McKenna Public Relations in Palo Alto—himself having a penchant for staying at the hotel that bore his name. It was a late night arrival on the occasion of my first visit to Manhattan in the agency’s employ that the St. Regis Bellman introduced me to the Brasserie Restaurant at 100 East 53rd Street. “It’s open 24 hours a day, has modest priced, great food, and it’s where everyone who work nights in Midtown go for dinner when they get off,” he enthused. I had a product marketing manager from Apple Computer Inc. in tow at the time and the two of us had great steaks and pommes frites, accompanied by a California red. Back then the Brasserie was the kind of egalitarian hang out with the 1960s décor that resembled its Paris namesake.

A block further north, we pass Trump Tower; the first three stories of the building’s face wrapped in a bright red advertisement for Gucci—the wrap art style of Christo and Jeanne-Claude commandeered for a completely commercial purpose. How could you ignore all that red adorned with glamorous women, made-up and coifed to look perfect in Gucci designed apparel? IM and I certainly couldn’t. A block further north and we turn left onto 57th Street intending to return to the Buckingham, but hunger sets in and the two of us realize we’ve not had anything to eat since getting up this morning except a glass of orange juice. On the south east corner of 6th Avenue and 57th Street, we spy the restaurant Rue 57 and determine there is where we’ll sate our appetite. The restaurant’s entrance is on the 57th Street side of the corner and we enter to a full room of diners—the midtown lunch crowd finishing up before heading back to their offices to finish off their workweek. Being in a big city on a weekday when everyone else is committing themselves 9 to 5, I always have the impression of being truant from school. All around you the conversation is shoptalk, except for the smattering of tables with other truant tourists like IM and me.

Just as we give our name to the hostess, a corner table comes available at the back of the restaurant opposite the entrance. We follow our hostess to our table snaking between diners’ chairs squeezed so compactly together that it was hard not to brush the back of each chair you passed. Once seated IM orders a Margarita, and I order a glass of champagne. The three tables to our right, toward the reception desk, were being bussed and made ready for new patrons when we were seated and by the time our drink order arrives, the two tables next to us are squeezed together for a party of four. The one lone third table accommodates of a couple that arrive just after the foursome is seated. Our neighbors are a young couple and an older couple—son and significant other being treated by Mom and Dad—or vice versa to lunch in midtown. The older couple speaks French to one another and English, with little accent, to the younger couple, with the conversation eventually becoming all English. I’m not terribly observant when it comes to other peoples’ conversations except when their body language conveys tension that compels me to listen. The foursome’s conversation resembled white noise to me, sounds beating against my consciousness but nothing registering. IM and I discussed the day, what our kids back in California were doing now, how bad the plane ride was and how great it used to be, and what New York used to be like when we were younger.

IM and I met at the Page Two, a nightclub in Oceanside on Long Island in February 1964, which had dancing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was looking to meet someone and IM was dumping her boyfriend. She was sitting alone at the bar drinking a rye and ginger and I asked her to dance, She accepted and we spent the rest of the evening dancing and talking. She had come with girlfriends and left with them later but not before I had asked her out the upcoming Saturday to tour the city doing tourist things. She accepted and I spent the rest of the week trying to plan out the day, without much success.

The next Saturday I picked her up at her place, without a clue as to what we were going to do for the day. We walked to the train station near her place, and took the train into the city, getting off at Penn Station, where all the commuter trains disgorged their loads. Our first stop was the United Nations, which I had wanted to tour. IM had already been but was eager to do it again. The UN was a major topic of discussion during my current affairs class at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington—taught by a retired military officer, who had been stationed all over the world and had turned the whole class on to getting out and seeing what had excited him so. He was one of the reasons I joined the Navy rather than going on to college. You could say he contributed to my being where I was at that instant.

Secretary-General U Thant headed the institution back then, but I was more familiar with Dag Hammarskjöld, the man who preceded him. I was struck by his untimely death in a plane crash on a peace mission in the Congo. Men like him were larger than life characters and to have one of them die accidentally made you realize that death didn’t make exceptions for standing in the community. I recall during the tour how small the rooms appeared. On television during the evening news broadcasts, the rooms all seemed larger and more spacious. It was especially large when black and white video showed Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on his desk in the General Assembly during the fall of 1960. Did the camera lie or did my mind make these places and events larger to fit their purpose in the world? I suspect the latter. The other impression I left the UN with was the diversity of people working there. It was my first encounter with black Africans, Europeans, and Asians in such numbers, more than I had ever come across in all the travels the Army provided my family and me. IM and I toured the UN again during our visit in 2001. The revelation then was the increased diversity of people over our first visit, not only working at the UN but among the visitors touring it as well.

Our lunch arrives, IM has a chicken salad and I have veal scallopini and another glass of champagne. On our first date in New York IM and I left the UN in the afternoon and took in a movie—Goldfinger—Sean Connery playing James Bond, a young Dame Shirley Bassey singing the title song during the opening credits. After the movie we walk around midtown riding up the Empire State Building elevator and looking out over the city, wandered about Rockefeller Center and eventually ended up in a little Italian restaurant on one of the streets in the Theatre District. All I remember of the place was our table had a checkerboard tablecloth in the center of which was a bulbous-bottom Chianti bottles wrapped in basket with a candle burning and candle wax encasing its neck and bottom. IM and I talked about our families, her mom and dad, her married older sister and two bachelor brothers in Scotland. I described my Filipina mother, Southern Baptist father, and three younger school-aged sisters. Here we were two people from the opposite ends of the earth having dinner in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan—what were the chances? Our lunch at Rue 57 was memorable because we were both very hungry; our dinner at the little Italian restaurant 47 years ago because it was the first, because the day had been perfect, and, except for a few other tables of early-bird diners we had the place to ourselves.

The waiter returns after we had finished our meal and asked if we wanted dessert, which we both decline. I offer him my credit card and he returns a few minutes later with the credit card slip, which I sign. The bill came to just under $112 with tip. It was just coming on 3:00 PM and sated, we snake our way back to the front of the restaurant and out onto 57th Street. We walk back to the Buckingham and take a rest before the performance of Spamalot at 8:00 PM that evening.

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

October 24, 2007 - Receipt #5 – Souvenir Shopping in Rockefeller Center

I’ve come to the fifth receipt that I’ve collected since my wife IM and I started our four-day trip to Manhattan. After collecting our tickets at the Shubert Theatre box office, we exit the theater and walk along Shubert Alley between 44th and 45th streets toward 45th to the theater gift shopped named after the alley. We had given this shop plenty of business over the years—t-shirts from Cats, Chess, My One and Only, A Chorus Line and cast recordings of Nine, Starlight Express, Aspects of Love, Les Miserables, among other items. IM was looking for T-shirts for the grand kids, but realized that they would not recognize any of the shows pictured on the shirts on display. We leave the shop in search of a store with t-shirts showing action heroes—Buzz Lightyear, Spiderman, to be specific—two favorites of our young grand sons.

We walk back toward Times Square, picking our way through the crowds spilling off the sideways into the street and turn left on 7th Avenue sure we’ll find a souvenir shop overflowing with the types of T-Shirts IM wants. How the mass of humanity and stream of car, truck, motorcycle, and bicycle traffic manage to move and not collide with one another in the confined space of the square is nothing short of amazing. IM leads the way as we walk up 7th, heading directly into the oncoming flow of pedestrian, which give way just enough to allow her passage. I follow along in her wake occasionally averting the throng approaching me by walking in the street mindful of the IM’s blue-jacketed back off to my left. We reunite at 46th street and stand fast as other pedestrians dash between east-bound traffic along the street. When the light changes and traffic stops, we resume our trek seeing off to our left the souvenir store with the shirts we’re after on display in its window. Weaving our way through the flow of people coming towards us, we enter the store and IM finds the shirts she’s after.

After looking for something for the grand daughters, however, she becomes frustrated and decides to look elsewhere for everything. We return the shirts to their rack and exit the store merging into the flow of northbound pedestrians heading north on the west side of Broadway. On the east side of the street, Virgin Mobile has an drive-in theater size screen mounted one and a half stories above street level playing a rock video. Just south of Virgin Mobile, Planet Hollywood beckons pedestrians to escape the hustle and bustle of the sidewalk and join the hustle and bustle within. We continue on until we reach 49th where we turn right heading east to escape the crush of humanity we’ve been struggling against for the past five block. Moving along 49th toward 6th Avenue, the amount of pedestrian traffic has diminished to a far more reasonable amount: plenty of room on the narrow sidewalks along either side of the street. As we walk, we pass restaurants filled with diners—it’s the lunch hour—and make our way around patrons loitering in conversation on the sidewalk after finishing their meal or couples eyeing the menu posted outside before committing themselves to enter. It’s still dull and overcast and occasionally we feel drops of rain that abruptly come and go.

When we reach Rockefeller Center we walk around the subterranean patio restaurants below, tables and umbrellas deserted in the face of an overcast and chilly day. Diners in the enclosed Sea Grill Restaurant and Roc Center Café on either side of the open-air patio below deprived of a view to accompany their meal. We enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art store on the south east side of Rockefeller center and spend time looking at the paraphernalia the store had for sale. IM finds a doll for our eldest grand daughter and a T-shirt with a ballerina on it for our youngest grand daughter. I buy IM a Kaleidoscope and a DVD tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The store receipt shows the purchase took place at 1:49 pm on Friday May 18th. Another moment in time documented in print.

October 22, 2007 - Receipt #4 - New York City Rhythm

October 22, 2007 - Receipt #4 - New York City Rhythm

In the Chronicle of our four days in New York last May documented in receipts, we picked up our fourth of the day—it’s Saturday May 14th—at the Shubert Theatre (sic—New Yorkers spell the word in the British form) at 225 West 44th Street: two tickets to Monty Python’s Spamalot for the May 18, 2007 8:00 PM performance. The tickets showed that the Internet transaction was completed at 12:48 PM on May 18th, charged to an American Express card belonging to me—the sales clerk printed the tickets after we arrived and I showed my card.

To reach the Shubert Theatre we had made our way through the throng of humanity swarming about Times Square. I use the terms “throng” and “swarm” to describe the tens of thousands of people who populated the collection of blocks between 48th Street to the north and 42nd Street to the south and 9th Avenue on the west and 7th Avenue—including Broadway the transverse boulevard that disturbs the orderly Manhattan Midtown street grid of north-south avenues and east-west streets—on the east. There is an kinetic energy that permeates the crowds that collect at intersections waiting for the light to change and grant them right of way. And when the red light changes to green there is a surge as that pent up force is released and given freedom to move.

Contributing to that intensity of purpose that pedestrians in large cities, in general, and Manhattan, in particular, possess is the constant sounds of a teaming metropolitan center. The noise of accelerating cars and buses, the strain of brakes pulling these vehicles up short, the blare of horns exhorting the slow, the timid, the lost, to move. And there is the constant rhythm of human voices straining to be heard over the turned up volume of the city: some exhorting others to climb aboard a bus, enter a shop, purchase goods of indeterminate origin; others calling to one another encouraging them to come this way, look at that, hurry up…; others yelling into cell phones while straining to hear the response… And there are the recorded sounds of rock music blaring from stores, recorded voices of talking heads looking out earnestly from television screens.

As most all major metropolitan areas, New York has become a tourist theme park. This was clearly punctuated by the tour buses lining Broadway—their conductors urging the stream of pedestrians to board their conveyances for tours of every piece of the city’s real estate that has some view-worthy site. Tours cater to the reluctance each of us has to decide what to do, especially when you’re on vacation and want a respite from decision making. Tours satisfy the pressing need to be doing something on your time off so you don’t feel guilty about wasting time. And there is no better proof of this than the London-model double-decker tour buses packed with humanity—young, old, and every age in between: those on the uncovered upper deck clothed in foul weather gear as insurance against the menacing grey sky that spat periodically to maintain its threat.

All about the intersections at and around Time Square, every available piece of building surface space is covered with huge electronic displays filled with animated commercial messages to influence the teaming multitude below, all of it looping continuous. Buildings not covered with displays are painted over with huge print ads, the entire two faces of one building painted in bright red with an ad for Target. Panning a full 360 degrees in Times Square at 45th and Broadway, the whole area appears beset by gangs of pin stripped hoods who have tagged every bit of visible space with their gangs’ graffiti. No one walking though this part of the city would have any doubt about who owns what.

October 21, 2007 - Receipt #3 - Buying a New Cell Phone

October 21, 2007 - Receipt #3 - Buying a New Cell Phone

Chronicling our four-day vacation in Manhattan through the receipts we’ve accumulated during our stay, I’ve come to the third, the purchase of a cell phone. I had left my own at home in San Jose as had IM—she usually doesn’t bring her phone relying on me to have mine. I had been toying with dumping Sprint for some time, largely because their network was not GSM and when I travel abroad GSM is the network I usually encounter. I was determined to end my several-years relationship with Sprint and now was the opportune time since I needed a new phone and the cost of getting one was to sign on with a new provider.

After we left the Buckingham, still full from the late night hamburger feast, the third purchase we made in Manhattan was two new Nokia GSM phones from the AT&T Store at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, between 53rd and 54th streets. The store is on the ground floor of the tall office building at 1330 near the corner of 53rd. The store was filled with an assortment of wireless handset, packaged in clear plastic containers containing details about each phone, features such as digital camera, MP3 player, etc. The other patrons of the store—a man and a woman, not together—were decidedly younger than IM and me, and their queries ran more to the features than the function IM and I were after. The young woman wanted help downloading ringtones. The young man wanted a new phone and was engaging the sales clerk in earnest conversation about the features of the various phones he could purchase.

I have to ask the question why do we need a portable phone besides the obvious reasons of being able to ring anyone in the world at will as long as you have their number. The question is better stated as why do we spend time calling one another to discuss the minutiae of everyday life. Is it because we have all become alienated by a world filled with so many people that we’ve become lost in the sea of humanity that surrounds us on roadways and especially the sidewalks and street corners of Manhattan. Lost and lonely amid teaming crowds of people, you can call someone you know and hear a familiar voice comfort you and ease the anxiety impressed upon you by the modern world.

The sales clerks were dressed in corporate wear, dark Docker slacks and solid blue and brown pressed shirts bearing the AT&T logo. The dark haired sales clerk helping IM and me was a native to the greater New York area, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, New Jersey—one of those. My ear is not discriminating enough to place him based on his speech. The second light haired sales clerk behind the counter was East European, which became obvious when a third customer—the other two having been helped and sent on their way while IM and I waited for our phones to be activated—an attractive light haired young woman entered the store and began conversing in a language that sounded East European, the origin of which I haven’t a clue, and the second sales clerk responded in kind, obviously the young woman was a friend or co-worker on a busman’s holiday. When our sales clerk rang us up, the register receipt said 12:25 PM. We had entered the store a few minutes before noon, a half hour transaction, which cost us nothing up front but committed us to two years of AT&T wireless phone service. Why do we need cell phones?

As IM and I left the store and resumed our walk down 6th Avenue, I could see every third or fourth pedestrian approaching us talking earnestly into their wireless handset and the conversation were the banality of everyday life. “I’m running a few minutes late…”; “Can we make it a hour earlier…”; “Did you get the kids to school on time?”; “Remember to pick up the laundry…”; “We have to stop seeing each other…” In a multitasking world why waste time walking when you can walk and talk at the same time. Our two phones were stuck away in pockets though both were on in case any of our friends and family wanted to get in touch. No one called. We weren’t on anyone’s must call list. And being together we didn’t feel alienated in the imposing world surrounding us.

October 20, 2007 - Receipt #2 - Working Late at McDonald's

October 20, 2007 - Receipt #2 - Working Late at McDonald's

I’m recounting a four-day vacation in Manhattan through the receipts I’ve accumulated during the stay. Yesterday I covered my first receipt and today, I describe my second, one from the McDonald’s on 57th Street near the corner of 6th Avenue. As I walked out of the Buckingham lobby and onto 57th Street I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. The last time IM and I came to Manhattan, we stayed at the Parker Meridian across 57th and a half block west of the Buckingham. We had come in the spring of 2001 when New York still possessed a sense of innocence and invincibility, before the terror of September 11th put an end to both and the city joined Pearl Harbor as the second place in the United States to be attacked by a foreign enemy. The street didn’t feel any different as a result of that horrific event—time having a way of dulling the emotions that had once been a sharp unrelenting pain. Time has a way of burying misery and suffering. It has a way of burying everything.

As I waited for the signal to change, at the intersection of 57th and 6th Avenue, I looked left and saw the entrance to Central Park and on the right corner of Central Park South and 6th what once was the St. Moritz Hotel. During the 1980s IM and our two daughters stayed there nearly every time we visited the city. Back then, the place was own by Leona Helmsley, the “Queen of Mean”. We liked it because of it being near the Park and away from the crowds surrounding the hotels within and around Times Square. It’s now the Ritz Carlton. Gone or at least less obvious are the ladies of the night that once graced the sidewalk across 6th from the Café de la Paix, the bistro on the ground floor of the St. Moritz with its outdoor patio tables. From our room on the 6th Avenue side of the St Moritz, IM and I spent the evenings after dinner or the theater watching the ladies ply their trade on the pedestrians and motorists along the block between 58th and Central Park South: reality TV without the electronic medium.

I recalled one evening after taking the girls to the theater during a trip in the summer of 1984, we were all a bit hungry and I decided to pop down to the convenience story on the St Moritz side of 6th a half block south of the hotel and pick up sodas and chips. As I was returning from my errand, one of the ladies decided to follow me back into the hotel and to pretend she was with me as I entered the elevator. The house detective watching the entire scene unfold blocked the lady’s way and politely asked if she were a guest of the hotel. As she made eye contact with me to appeal for help, the elevator doors closed and I was spirited away—Deus ex machina.

The desk clerk at the Buckingham had said I’d find the McDonalds just across 6th Avenue east on 57th and he was right on the money. Neither IM nor I have eaten a McDonald’s hamburger in so long I can’t remember when nor how the food tasted, but the smell of deep fried potatoes and hamburger patties sizzling on the kitchen griddle brought it all back to me as if it were yesterday. When IM and I first got married, we moved to Landover, Maryland where I had a day job at Bendix Field Engineering located at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. All we had to our names was a brand new Buick Regal—GMAC owned most of it; which we had brought before leaving El Paso, where we had just gotten married; our clothes; and a radio. IM was pregnant and we didn’t have medical insurance. I took a second job to pay the doctor and hospital bills. The first of my evening jobs was at a McDonald’s competitor called Hot Shoppes, owned by the Marriott Corporation. The place was right across the street from the Landover Garden Apartments, at 7254 Landover Road, apartment D, where we lived. I would come home from my day job ten miles north and west of Landover, go across Landover Road to the hamburger restaurant and put in six hours before coming home with a bag of leftover hamburgers and French fries. That lasted a month before I got a much better paying job fixing television sets. The money I made during that month though paid the doctor’s initial fees and the leftover hamburgers and fries saved us money on food. Standing at the counter of the McDonald’s waiting to order, I knew what it was like to be working in a hamburger restaurant at 47 W 57th St. an hour and fifteen minutes before midnight serving the last die-hard customer before shutting the place down for the night at 11:00 o’clock.

Having flown coach and gone without anything to eat all day, IM and I were starving. I ordered a cheeseburger for me and a hamburger for IM each with an order of fries and a large orange juice. Paying the bill and picking up my order I returned to the hotel suppressing the urge to eat the fries as I walked. Back in our room I opened the bag and to our surprise we find two hamburgers and two cheeseburgers, which turned out great since each individual burger was so small. We gulped down the burgers and fries washing them down with orange juice. Surprisingly our hunger was sated and neither of us felt so stuffed we couldn’t sleep. However, being the first day of a vacation and only 7:00 PM by our biological clock, we opted to stay up and watch the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to give the burgers time to settle. The monologue turned out to be quite funny, though none of the jokes were noteworthy enough to remember.

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.

October 18, 2007 - Grasping at Fleeting Moments at JFK

October 18, 2007 - Grasping at Fleeting Moments at JFK

Sitting in the new American Airlines departure lounge at John F. Kennedy Airport on Monday morning May 21st 2007 at about 10:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, the only reminder my wife IM and I have that this is New York is a food kiosk called the Brooklyn Deli across the way from us. We could be in any airport in any large city anywhere in the world. I have been in several over the past few months—Ben-Gurion International outside Tel Aviv, Chiang Kai-Shek outside Taipei, Pudong International Airport outside Shanghai, and Narita outside of Tokyo—where all my outbound and inbound Asian flights connected. These giant gateways have a sameness to them that seeks to sooth the travelers’ anxiety over being displaced and in limbo between home and their final destination. Airports are also time portals where the traveler leaves the routine of Eastern Standard Time, in our case, and returns to the far more familiar realm of Pacific Standard Time. We’re all time travelers, us humans. Our lives move from one second to another, one minute to another, and so on from conception to extinction, each of us marking time in our geographic region. The airplane is the magic conveyance that allows us to jump from one region to another to experience life as someone far removed from our time zone.

As each second, minute, hour, and day passes we leave who we were in that past time behind. You can see your bygone selves and the state of the world around them in the still and moving pictures we make of those departed seconds. Four days in the Big Apple have zoomed by and all that remains are pictures and the credit card receipts documenting what we did while we were here. They are the only proof to ourselves and anyone else that we actually spent time in this big city. Furthermore, how much of what we believe happened actually happened and how much has our memory been embellished by what we want to believe the experience to have been.

About 25 years ago, I struggled to stay awake on a summer evening in 1982 during Zoe Caldwell’s performance of Medea on Broadway with Mitch Ryan playing Jason at the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street. I knew that the play featured Dame Judith Anderson as Nurse; but learned afterwards that the director Robert Whitehead had directed a younger Dame Anderson as Medea in a landmark 1947 production; and that both this and the earlier production were based on the play by American poet Robinson Jeffers, who adapted Euripides’s work for the modern stage. All those associated with the production now well along in age or deceased—Dame Anderson passed away in 1992 at the ripe old age of 94; Robert Whitehead lived another ten years dying in 2002 at the age of 86. I had inadvertently been privy to a once-in-a-lifetime event and learned about it after the fact. The realization made the experience of far greater import now than it had been at the time of the performance. In my older age, I realize that too many experiences of my life were far more enjoyable on reflection than when they occurred.

Our outbound flight from San Francisco International on Thursday May 17, 2007 at 11:30 AM, lasted around five and a half hours. All of that time I spent curled up in a coach class window seat in row 34 on the port side of the Boeing 767 aircraft wishing the time would past faster. I disembarked that many hours older, having flown 2586 miles from one side of the country to another, viewing below me, when I glanced out my window and cloud cover permitting, the landscape of the United States. For a matter of seconds I saw the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the sprawl of Chicago, the ribbon of the Mississippi, some of it I recognized, some of it I guessed at. I could no longer hold onto the moments we passed over Chicago than I could grab the seconds of time that it is taking for me to write these words. Pictures and written records documenting our movements through time are our only proof of what we’ve done.

I’ve always collected receipts, not methodically, but folded and crammed into my wallet: receipts for cash purchases because I can’t bring myself to throw them away and they explain why I have paper where greenbacks used to be; credit card receipts to refresh my memory about something I’ve bought but don’t remember what when I see the statement at the end of the month; and more recently ATM receipts—I’m given the option to take cash without one but I always demand to have it—because I typically don’t record the withdrawal in my checkbook until much later. We live in a world driven by the acquisition and disposal of money. The system of finance that regulates our lives in all the advanced nations is analogous to water in nature.

Where water is in abundance, lush natural growth occurs. In all monetary societies, where an excess of wealth accumulates, you see the extravagant development in places like New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Moscow, and the list goes on. Shinning, glass, steel, and concrete skyscrapers shoot up like stands of giant sequoias: every bit of the development documented in the form of financial transactions, once recorded on paper but in the 21st century in the form of binary data stored on hard drives, magnetic tape, and optical media in a multitude of storage farms scattered throughout the world. There is a record of everything everyone does in our advanced society. I want to recount the past four days through the receipts I’ve stashed away in my wallet. Tomorrow, we’ll start with receipt #1.