Kendrick and I have been wanting to spend a full day in the city at some point this summer – Chinatown, Little Italy, that kind of thing – and decided that this weekend presented the perfect opportunity: my parents were out of town, so we could both help them out by looking after their animals and spend two whole days in NYC, with no need to drive back and forth in between.
Kendrick had school stuff going on until late on Friday, but I thought hey, I’ll just drive in by myself with Indy and the dogs and all our bags. It’ll be fun!
Ehhhh.
First of all, it took me three tries to actually get on the road: first I forgot Virgil, who had apparently jumped out of the trunk and run back into the house while I loaded up the front seat (this minor error was discovered the moment that the car door closed due to the fact that my car was quiet, and Virgil + car = not quiet, ever). Next I forgot my phone. And finally – this one I only found out when I was about to make the turn onto the highway – I forgot the keys to my parents’ place, which would make it kind of difficult to gain entrance upon arrival. Back we went.
Anyway, we eventually made it to the city, and I even managed to drag one huge suitcase + two dogs + one baby + one stroller + myself three entire blocks and one entire avenue from the parking garage to my parents’ apartment. I feel very strongly that there should have been someone waiting on the doorstep to hand me a medal.
After a trip to the Salvation Army (where, strangely enough, I found an exact replica of the coffee table that Kendrick and I bought in that very spot six years ago, which either means that something weird and fate-like was going on or that there are really a lot of those exact tile-top coffee tables out there in the world) and a trip to the pharmacy for the other things I forgot to bring, we hit up the playground.
It’s the exact playground where I used to play growing up; I remember it as being fun, of course (the sprinkler! the swings!) but also sort of not the most idyllic place in the world, being located in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1980s. The city has since cleaned it up, installed some pretty awesome play structures and very cool graffiti art (it was the backdrop for this photo shoot)…but still: within five minutes of climbing around on the jungle gym I noticed that yep, those two people sitting over there on that bench were most definitely doing drugs, and off we went.
I think it’d be an easy thing to say that this was yet another “whew, glad we left the city for the suburbs”…but it’s more complicated than that. I am glad that there don’t appear to be drug dealers hanging out in our local playground. Definitely glad about that. I’m also glad that we now live in a place where people don’t slam into our son’s stroller, knocking it off course, and then continue on their way without noticing, much less apologizing (which happened seventy or eighty times during our Saturday trip to Chinatown). I’m glad that whether or not a given block in our town is “safe” after night falls isn’t even something I really think about; there are about two blocks total in the entire place, and neither of them is exactly a hub of criminal activity.
But still: there’s a part of me that’s glad that my son will know there’s other places besides our town out there. And not just “out there”…right there. Like, half an hour away, and somewhere he goes not just on special occasions, but all the time.
I suppose I just want the world he knows to be wide. I want him to know how to deal with the less-than-lovely stuff, too.
Speaking of less-than-lovely: later on we went to Toys R Us to check out that guy.
Recall the dinosaur obsession? Critical mass has been reached.
Later on, we made our way down to Chinatown to revisit our very favorite soup dumpling place…
…and then continued our meal at an outdoor restaurant in Little Italy.
Last stop of the evening: Times Square. It’s an unpopular opinion – most people think it’s loud and obnoxious and tacky – but it’s one of my favorite places in the world, and always has been. I lived three blocks away from the exact spot pictured above for decades, and it still takes my breath away every time.
On Sunday, we thought a trip to the Intrepid was in order. I know: that’s a kind of grumpy shot. But it was pretty hot up there on the flight deck; things got a lot better once we headed inside the museum.
See?
That was a lot of activity for 48 hours. At the end, we were done.
DONE.
