Travels posts

Heading downtown to the Whitney in 95-degree heat.

The days begin to blend together during a vacation, don't they? Initially, everything is new and memorable, then they become routine and skip by. Most of the rest of my time in NYC was like that. Every day was about three things: 1) We're doing a museum or two, 2) how do we get there, 3) how do we beat the heat?

Over the three days, the answers were:

1. The Morgan Library, the Whitney, the Met, and the Museum of the City of New York
2. Walk from 102nd to 37th; subway; walk; walk
3. We don't; it beats us.

I guess I'm one of the few people who's excited to see the Morgan Library not for its exhibits (Shahzia Sikander art, Jayne Wrightsman Bookbindings Collection), and not because it houses, you know, an insane book collection, including three of the original Guttenberg Bibles, but because it's the site of the final showdown between Coalhouse Walker Jr.'s gang and the powers that be in “Ragtime”—both E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel and Milos Forman's 1981 movie. I'm curious if Forman filmed the scenes outdoors in New York or if they built the set elsewhere. Streets didn't seem wide enough.

I loved the Whitney: an exhibit of Dawoud Bey's photography and a greatly curated collection, including artwork of Jacob Lawrence and Edward Hopper. The Met is the Met: overwhelming. Wanted more from the Museum of the City of New York but not sure what. The main exhibit was the '80s New York music scene and included MTV intros and Madonna singing “Like a Virgin” on MTV. Other than Madonna as New York transplant, and I guess MTV stationed in the city, didn't see much of an NYC connection. 

What did I learn?

• Mendl's Bakery in Wes Anderson's “Grand Budapest Hotel” has to be based on Ladurée, a high-end, pastel-boxed bakery in Paris and at 70th and Madison. We stopped there for coffee and the most delicious macaron I've ever tasted.
• Bergdorf's has those ultra thin escalators from early in the 20th century; love those
• I saw no mention of Doctorow or Coalhouse Walker Jr. at the Morgan Library, but it does include some of Scott Joplin's sheet music under glass—right next to an original Guttenberg Bible. Our robber barons were so much more well-read back then.
• New York in August can exhaust you; hydrate. 

“And now 'Wall Street Rag,' composed by the great Scott Joplin.”

Sun comes up, it's Tuesday morning.

I first noticed it when I was applying sunscreen after that first dip in the ocean Sunday afternoon: little aqua blue flakes on my skin. Coming from the sunscreen? Like an extra ingredient? Like: “Now with aqua blue flakes!!!”? But they were the same color as the Rehoboth Beach beach towel I'd bought that morning, so I assumed that was the culprit. I guessed I should've washed it before I used it. I was hoping it was a temporary thing.

But it was the same after Monday morning and late afternoon swims, and that night I washed it with the rest of my clothes. The lint tray wound up packed with aqua blue fluff. And there were little bits of it all over the rest of my clothes.

So is it good to go now? Or did I get a defective and/or cheaply made beach towel for $19.95 at Rehoboth Lifestyle at 77 Rehoboth Avenue? Or maybe the whole line of these “First and Anchor”/“Made in China” beach towels is defective—preying on tourists in need? I know, in the scheme of things, but still a bummer. “Hey, how did your vacation go?” “Great. I picked aqua blue flakes out of everything.”

I bought it shortly after I figured out my Rehoboth exit strategy Sunday morning. Patricia and I are flying out of D.C. next weekend, and without a car there's no clear path to get there. There's no train. Rental cars are either all rented or at a premium. There is a bus to D.C. but it only leaves once a day, at 6:30 PM, from the parking lot behind the Volunteer Fire Station on Rehoboth Avenue, and doesn't arrive in D.C. until 9:30ish. That would screw up dinner plans. There's a train from Wilmington but that requires a busride to Wilmington via the DART bus service, whose website is kind of unhelpful. It's tough to see at a glance how often the buses go, where they go (how many stops), and if you can buy tickets beforehand (feels like: not). Both my sister's family and my brother-in-law's family have a car, but they're packed. In the end, the best exit strategy seemed the evening bus to D.C. I'm hoping that its company is as responsible as Amtrak is in terms of pandemic mask policies.

Because of all this—exit strategy, beach towel—I didn't get into the surf until Sunday afternoon, about 24 hours after I'd arrived. Monday morning, the last Monday of the summer season, the beach was quiet—mostly grandparents and grandkids, and a few single parents with children. Monday afternoon, I biked through the Gordon Pond Wildlife area over to Lewes, then went back to the beach like Frankie and Annette. Tuesday morning, during a 7 AM stroll along the boardwalk, amid all the geriatric joggers, I saw a school of dolphin swimming close to shore.

Overall, it's the usual beach routine in unusual times. Gus & Gus isn't allowing indoor dining (good for them), so Saturday we ate our gyros and cheese steaks on the boardwalk (they were out of chicken), then went to Funland, mostly staying outside, where my sister cleaned up at Whac-a-Mole and that squirtgun horserace game. Sunday, for dinner, we went to Obie's on the north part of the boardwalk, but we were the only ones who walked into the place masked. Monday we ate in. My brother-in-law's family lives in Canada, which requires a COVID-free test within 72 hours of reentry, and the family member who's heading back first had his on Monday: negative. Rite-Aid and Walgreen's do drive-through tests but he went to a nearby clinic, paid the extra $60 or so for the quick test, said it was much more efficient than the Canadian system. Then he went swimming.

Rehoboth's iconic Dolles Salt Water Taffy sign has greeted visitors since 1927, but now it's disappearing.

I know. I never did Days 3-5 but hope to backtrack and pick it up at some point.

Saturday I made the trek from New York City to Rehoboth Beach, Del., thinking about COVID. Every sniffle, every inadvertent cough, you probe yourself and wonder. You're careful all of the time but you still wonder. The Amtrak ride from Penn Station, New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Hall, to the Joseph R. Biden Jr. station in Wilmington, Del., was about as good as it could get under the circumstances. (Note to Republicans: Support infrastructure and maybe you'll have something named after you, too.) The train was clean, the conductor/ticket taker told people to mask up, no one complained. New York generally has been good. Half the people walked the streets masked, and indoors that was pretty much everyone, but of course they knew the tragedy of it. Delaware was a revelation.

My sister and her family picked me up in Wilmington and we made our way south but stopped near Dover for lunch: Grotto Pizza. Don't know how well-known that chain is outside of Delaware, but they're pretty big in Rehoboth and getting bigger. Too big? The most iconic sign in Rehoboth is the Dolles Salt Water Taffy sign that towers over the center of the boardwalk at Rehoboth Avenue, but apparently the owner of the property recently tripled the rent, Dolles is getting out, Grotto's is coming in, and it's removing the sign. When I read about it earlier this summer I said to myself, “That's it, no more Grotto's for me,” which, let's face it, wasn't a huge sacrifice, living in Seattle, and not being a huge fan during my infrequent stops in Rehoboth. And yet here I was, in my very first stop in Delaware, breaking that promise. My sister's family ordered a pizza and I ate a slice. I missed my slice of good New York pizza and ate a slice of lukewarm Grottos. The gods look down and laugh.

But the greater disturbance for me was inside Grotto's, where none of the customers were masked. Worse, none of the servers were masked. I haven't seen that in a while. You'd never guess we were in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.

Most of Rehoboth was the same. Buying groceries along route 1, or walking along the crowded boardwalk Saturday night, you'd see a few other masks but not many. At Penn Station, it was 95% masked and maybe 5% unmasked. I remember one lone, crazy Black dude walking back and forth along the length of the station, a weird smile on his face, plus a few Nosenheimers (people who haven't figured out how to wear a mask after 18 pandemic months), but everyone else was responsible. Rehoboth feels 95% unmasked, 5% masked. The unmasked look stupid and feel belligerent. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it. But that was a thought: “I never realized how stupid everyone here looks.”

At least the place we're staying at is beautiful and close to the beach.

For the moment, the iconic shop is occupied by a Henna store, which wasn't exactly doing gangbuster business on Saturday night. 

A heroic statue of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. on 125th Street. 

Lesson of the day: If you want to avoid crowds on the subway in the middle of rush hour, and in the middle of a pandemic, sit in a non-air-conditioned car. On the 6 local, uptown, it was just me, Patricia, and about five black women. At various stops we'd see people step in, feel the heat, or the lack of cool, and step out again, running down the line to find one with AC. Another plus: When you make it back to the surface, the mid-day temps actually feel cool. It's like Blanche DuBois and her hot baths in summer. 

We spent the morning walking around Harlem, which neither of us had ever done before. We're staying at basically 102nd and 5th Avenue, so we started out in Central Park—the Conservatory Garden and the Untermyer Fountain, where it was us, joggers, and women pushing strollers—and then around that lake in the northeast corner of the park and onto 110th Street. Thus the movie and the song.

Walking up Malcolm X Blvd., we noticed a couple of great taglines in businesses along the way: a funeral parlor, for example, “where beauty softens your grief.” Turns out the New York Times wrote about this guy back in 2003. Then there was the ATLAH Church, whose sign out front softened nothing:

D.A. ALVIN BRAGG SAID HE WAS STUCK UP 6 TIMES IN HARLEM, ADD 1 MORE THE WHITE LESBIAN & GAYS ROBBED HARLEM FROM ALL HAMITES

This church and its signs are apparently infamous—a Black, east coast version of the right-wing nutjob signs of Chehalis, Wash. At least it's had financial troubles.

Our destination was the Apollo Theater on 125th, which was open, but where not much was going on. Two women were working there. The older one was kind and chatty, the younger one behind the souvenir counter was bored and not. Patricia admired the chandaliers. We bought postcards of bills promoting old Apollo shows.

Walking back to the apartment, I asked Patricia how comfortable she felt in Harlem. “Pretty comfortable. Not too uncomfortable.” Pause. “You kind of stick out.”

I've stuck out before, of course, living in Taiwan for several years in the 1980s. But there you stuck out in a mostly positive fashion. You were a symbol of your race, which felt positive: America, ESL, Hollywood. In Harlem, you felt like you were a symbol of your race that felt negative. But it's all “felt”; you don't know anything. And at the end of the day, you assume most people don't give a shit. Everyone's busy. But yes, I felt we stuck out, too. It's not a bad thing to feel. To feel some aspect of what it's like.

After a lunch of the previous day's Zabar's purchases, we took the subway down to the Strand, spent about an hour and no money there (they didn't have any of the movie books I was looking for), then walked the neighborhood in search of coffee and maybe air-conditioning. Tough enough being a tourist in New York City in August; the pandemic adds another layer of difficulty. It's better to sit outside in a pandemic, but it's not better to sit outside in New York City in August when it's sunny and 95. Either way, the few tables we saw were either occupied or in the sun, so we walked for a bit, then sat on a bench in the shade in Washington Square Park. A few shops in the neighborhood were closed. Most seem to have survived the pandemic. 

North toward Harlem.

Eventually you realize there are no babies crying. You're on a packed plane, a red-eye bound for New York, and it's pretty quiet. Where are the babies? Then you realize in the waiting area beforehand there were no babies. A few kids running around, but on your flight? It's adults. Because why bring an unvaccinated baby on a flight in the middle of another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic? You can be vaccinated, and you have to be masked, but babies can't be vaccinated or masked. Sure, I may be stupid enough to risk the journey but why would I put my baby at risk? So no babies, no cry.

There turns out to be a lot less conversation between seatmates, too. The person sitting next to you isn't someone who might make the hours go by more quickly, it's someone who might make your life go by more quickly. No one's doing it. The masks get in the way anyway. In the end, everyone is just steeling themselves for the flight. It's a planeful of people, flying on a red-rye in a crash-prone Boeing 737, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, heading toward a hurricane. 

We're not the smartest people in the world.

We'd made the plans months ago when there were maybe 70k cases of Covid per week in the U.S. and it was in steep decline. Since then, the Delta variant has been wreaking havoc among the unvaccinated, and worry among the vaccinated, and it's back up to two million cases a week, according to Johns Hopkins. But we went through with it: my wife full of confidence, me full of dread. 

The pilot tells us we'll have a smooth flight with a bumpy landing. It's the opposite. In the middle of the country we experience a lot of turbulence but flying into Newark is pretty smooth. The red-eye is a good way to go if you can sleep on flights, and in the past I could a bit, if I nibbled some Xanax and had one of those neck pillows. I didn't and hadn't, so my wife and I both arrive bleary-eyed, complaining of lower back pain (hers) and hamstring tightness (mine). Then we don't make much of the rest of the day. Too tired. We're staying with friends on the upper east side. We do walk west across Central Park and down Broadway to Zabar's and pick up stuff for lunch, which we're thinking of eating outside somewhere. But we keep getting flash downpours. We try to hail a cab on Broadway. No luck. We walk east to Amsterdam Ave, and no luck there, either, which is when Patricia sees SaraBeth's, a restaurant she knows and likes. And that's where we have lunch, under a constructed transulescent roof, our Zabar's bag at her feet, sitting next to former SNL alum Tim Meadows, our first celebrity siting, whose order was misplaced and he has to order again. A late afternoon attempt at a nap goes nowhere. I think of Kramer: “I missed my chance.” 

Another memory: Arriving in New York, getting a coffee at the airpot, then heading outside and being able to take off our N95 masks after, what, nine hours total, and breathe the fresh air. Yes, even Newark is fresh after nine hours masked. Then the cab ride into Manhattan, our cabbie dodging every which way through narrow spaces. I'm reminded again of what New York is: cramped and quick. The former makes the latter necessary. You've gotta make space for you. I would never survive here.

My wife found this one in Salem, Oregon:

To go with these. Vomit is still my favorite.

This weekend, my wife and I took the Bremerton ferry over to Hood Canal—which is not a canal—to spend time with her family in Union, Wash. Saturday, the bunch of us went over to Potlatch State Park, where, after walking north along the beach until I hit a rivulet separating the public from the private, I came across a sign extolling the various types of salmon in the area: chinook, pink, steelhead, chum (they got rooked in the name game), sockeye, coho and cutthroat. And on the reverse of that sign? A warning against eating raw shellfish, with a pretty funny pictograph:

Later, we went up to Hoodsport to visit our two must-visit places in the area: Hoodsport Coffee Co., and their Olympic Mountain ice cream; and The Hardware Distillery, which makes great whiskey, vodka, gin, aqua vite, and assorted spirits. It was our first time back to either place since before the pandemic. We visited the coffee/ice cream place first (they were serving people outside rather than indoors, which I was glad to see as the pandemic ratchets up again), but we had to wait around for the distillery to open at noon. While waiting, we visited, among other places, the local library across Higway 101, where I came across yet another odd pictograph—this one a warning against slippery steps. I've seen slipping pictographs before, but never where the guy looked like he might be Gene Kelly or Ben Vereen clicking his heels.

No feet but look at those fingers. 

Oh, right. In my Potlatch beachwalk, over the barnacled rocks along the shore, I also came across this googly-eyed guy, which looks like something God made in arts and crafts class:

I think I'm just two or three Hood Canal pictographs shy of my own movie rating system: from Ben Vereen (4 stars!) to Vibrio Bacteria (looking at you, Zack Snyder).

Our Lady stands.

• Motorized scooters are big in Paris even though nothing seems less Parisian
• Segways are big with tourists everywhere even though nothing seems less human
• From the traditional vantage point looking east, Notre Dame looks the same. We know it's not, but at least the exterior holds up
• There is actually a bigger and—dare I say it?—more beautiful Notre Dame in France: the one in Strasbourg, which was built between the 12th and 15th centuries. I thought I was done with European cathedrals from the Middle Ages until I saw that one; then my mouth just fell open.
• Spider-Man #3, with the introduction of Doc Ock, which cost 12 cents in the U.S., cost 9p in Britain. A comic shop south of Montemarte was selling this Brit pub, along with Tin Tin and a collection of Silver Age Marvel comics. I think the proprietor thought my French was better than it was, because he tore off on a story that was probably fascinating but with which I couldn't keep up. The gist: he bought the Marvel comics in NYC in the 1970s and ‘80s, when bookshops were everywhere, and man weren’t those the days? He was asking either 300€ for the Spidey (what was writen on the back of the plastic covering) or 1,000€ (what my shitty French thought he said). I was tempted

• The French version of “The Catcher in the Rye” is called “L‘attrape-coeur” (literally: “The Heart Catcher”), and the phrase “...and all that David Copperfield kind of crap” is translated as “...et toutes ces conneries a la David Copperfield.” One of those newstands/shops along the Seine was selling it, as well as Salilnger’s “Nine Stories” (“Nouvelles”). These I bought, but they were cheaper: 7€ for the deuce
• I could spend a lot of €s at those newstands/shops along the Seine; they have my stuff. I still regret passing on those Tour de France posters
• The only time I ever want to smoke is when I'm sitting alone at a small table at a Paris cafe watching the world go by. A cigarette feels de rigueur
• They‘ll use anything to sell anything: In this case, a photo of communist leader Che Guevara with a stogie to promote Father’s Day specials at a cigar and spirits shop in Brussels. I'd say Che is rolling over in his grave but, given the T-shirts and everything else, he's probably rolled out by now

• The train station in Antwerp should be declared an international treasure
• Is it a new fashion trend in Belgium for young women to wear men's dress shirts as dresses? I saw it a few times. Let me speak for all men in the world: We approve
• “Ghent” in Ghent is spelled “Gent.” Muscles from Brussels, Gent from Ghent. What does Antwerp get? Twerp? Seems unfair. Someone work on that
• Someone should publish a book about all the memorials in all the small towns throughout Europe to their WWI dead; I would be your first customer. They are heartbreaking
• Belgian breakfast cereals include Choco Clams and Honey Bubbles and Miel Pops Loops and Choco Cookies and “Cereal Flakes Met Pure Chocolade Au Chocolat Noir.” Really anything with chocolate

• It's hard to find pannekoeken in Ghent, which is a crime
• It's hard to find mussles in Ghent, which ditto
• Apparently the most stolen painting in the world is “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” 1432, by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, and one of its panels, taken in 1934, is still missing. The painting was a key component of the George Clooney movie “The Monuments Men,” which almost makes me want to watch it again, even though I found it pretty disappointing upon its release in 2014
• Is adoring a mystic lamb far removed from idolizing a golden calf? Just tossing out
• Artists in the Middle Ages couldn't paint babies for shit
• Museums are best when they intermingle centuries-old art with modern art, as at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent
• If you bike outside the cities in Belgium you‘re going to see lots of cows and horses

• If you’re biking to an artists colony outside Ghent, chances are you‘ll find exactly zero artists and lots of rich people. It’s really a rich people's colony
• Not many groups of humans are known as “colonies.” I can think of three: leper, nudist, artist. The first two, in a way, contain elements of the third
• Cheese, chocolate and bread from a convenience store and eaten on a park bench is a way better lunch for the bike-ride-weary than anything you might get in, say, an expensive restaurant in a rich people's colony
• Remember to take video as well as photos. Coming across that classic car parade in Eke, for example, would‘ve been a good moment for video, Erik
• Get off the beaten path in Bruges; go to the danker places with the locals
• If you’re biking east of Bruges, the restaurant to go to is Siphon, which is a few miles east of Damme (pronounced DAH-me). It's a fourth-generation family-run restaurant that is closed on weekends but was packed on a Monday afternoon around 1:30 with older folks dressed to the nines. Oh, and get the steak. I didn‘t, but I saw it arrive for someone else and goddamn
• Getting zero laughs when you pronounce your team “Damme (pronounced DAH-me) bums” doesn’t necessarily mean they didn't hear you  
• Go left at Siphon, rather than right, if you want to make Sluis, Holland. We went right. Which was wrong. We never made Holland
• Asking directions when you‘re lost is better than relying on maps or GPS
• I have a good sense of direction on a grid but add diagonals and curved streets and I’m hopeless
• European sports fans watch the Super Bowl! I had no idea. When we mentioned we were from Seattle to some Germans in Ghent for the weekend, the first thing they said was: “Seahawks!” Then they talked up the Super Bowl, which they said they watch every year. Because sports
• But they don't watch baseball. Because boring. To them
• Europeans are still wearing Yankees caps. Someone needs to tell them that they‘re wearing the cap of the favorite team of Donald Trump. OK, I will
• Trump has replaced Pinnochio as the international symbol for lying. A Dutch magazine we saw in a Ghent laundromat used this cover line: “Iedereen liegt: De Trump in elk van ons,” which translates to “Everyone lies: The Trump in all of us” 
• A clothes store window in Ghent displays not only dresses and outfits but tiny versions of same on dolls. Fun!
• My name can pass as Flemish
• Expect to be admonished by wait staff if you don’t finish your charcuterie in Strasbourg
• Expect to get a “Bien sur” shrug by wait staff when asked if the charcuterie and cheese plates come with bread: “Oui, c‘est France”
• No Michelin guides for France were made between 1940 and 1944, for obvious reasons
• In museums, sometimes the story is the crowds around the artwork rather than the artwork

• Henri Matisse visited Harlem in 1930 and became a fan of jazz
• A lot of people in the 21st century trust their lives to that grinding gears of 19th century technology that is the Eiffel Tower. I am among them
• In France, the Waldo of “Where’s Waldo” is called Charlie: “Ou Est Charlie?” He looks the same

• There are those who maintain and those who let things get run down. The Hotel Chopin in Paris is among the former, and is recommended; the Midnight Hotel in Paris is among the latter, and isn't
• No number of yellow-vest protesters is so worrisome as to prevent a line of 3-4 cops from turning to check out a stunning blonde walking by
• Vive le France et Belgique

I first visited Europe in 2002 when I was 39, and Paris was one of the first cities I visited, and Notre-Dame was the first landmark my friend Joan I went to. It was my intro to the city. I wrote about it back then, thinking I would write more about the trip but never did.

Here's what I remember: Even though it was April, the line to go up the tower was long, so Joan and I spelled each other by checking out the inside of the cathedral. At one point, I chatted up a woman in line, who was pretty, from Sweden, and had a boyfriend. Two out of three. Joan, a platonic friend, had a Flat Stanley she was carting around Europe for a daughter's friend. This was the rest:

The early April sun was hot enough that we were grateful when the line reached the shade of the Cathedral, and, after several more pauses, we finally began to climb the stairwell, which, to my delight, was circular and cramped, with stone steps worn smooth, and with a slight indent in the middle from all the feet pounding up it over the centuries. Even better was emerging onto a walkway outside, 46 meters above the ground, called the chimeras gallery because of the famous stone gargoyles there watching over (or dismissing) the city. While construction on the cathedral had begun in 1163 and wasn't completed until 1245, the gargoyles weren't added until the 19th century, when, in the wake of Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the cathedral had been renovated by architects Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc. The latter designed the chimeras. A wire fence separated us from them, but we managed to take a few pictures of ourselves, and Flat Stanley, with these guys, surely what Viollet-le-Duc had in mind all along. The stryga, a winged demon with hands on face, is perhaps the most famous, but I was drawn to one creature gnawing the head off a smaller one. What truly astonished, though, was the view to the east, over the remainder of the cathedral. The immensity and detail were both astounding, and couldn't be captured by my sad point-and-shoot camera. The zoom couldn't zoom in far enough to capture the detail, and I couldn't stand back far enough to include the tower's immensity.

A huge fire, its plumes of smoke reminiscent of the twin towers on 9/11, tore through Notre-Dame yesterday, destroying the wood ceiling and spire; the remainder is “structurally sound,” according to reports. I'm half a world away, with no rights in this matter, as Roethke wrote, but felt nothing but sadness all day. Today, too. And tomorrow. On social media, people are posting happy pictures in front of the cathedral, and on top of it, and reminiscing, as I'm doing here. There's not much else to do. 

I was walking around lower Manhattan last week, focusing on Chinatown, then decided to visit Trinity Church again. We'd been there in 2015 before “Hamilton” broke big—with me or the country—and I was curious if it felt any different. It didn‘t. Not much. There were a few more people hanging around, and a lot more reverence, and more coins left on the tombs of Alexander and Eliza. But that was about it on a hot, muggy Monday afternoon in early August. 

This time I was particularly struck by the inscription on Hamilton’s marble tomb. It touts his career as a PATRIOT, SOLDIER and STATESMAN...

Whose TALENTS and VIRTUES will be admired
Long after this MARBLE shall have mouldered into DUST

Except between these two lines there's an ornamental flourish and the lines “Grateful Posterity,” so you don't initially connect the second line with the first. It reads like Hamilton is a patriot, soldier and statesman “whose talents and virtures will be admired.” I.e., one day. I.e., in the future. I.e., maybe after Lin-Manuel Miranda picks up Ron Chernow's biography for vacation reading, sees his father in the story, and music begins to form in his head. 

Row AA, Seat 7

After Rehoboth, Patricia and I went up to New York for a few days and a few adventures. This was one of them. 

We arrived Saturday afternoon, had dinner plans every evening, so the only chance for a Broadway show was a Sunday matinee. For a moment I considered a baseball game instead, but the Yankees were in Boston (getting their asses kicked), and the Mets were the Mets. I went Great White Way. 

My nephew recommended the tkts app but P and I are old and had trouble making it work for us. More specifically: For the shows we wanted to see, the Times Square tkts booth wasn't available on the app. Other ones were: Brooklyn, etc. But we were staying near Union Square; we wanted Times Square. 

The TS booth opened at 11 AM and last time we did this, January a few years ago, we wound up way back in line and got slim pickings. This time we arrived early: 9 AM. How early were we? There was no line yet, and no indication of where the line even began. There was just a lugubrious security guard in the glass booth, who looked at us, kind of shook his head, got up slowly, came to the door, and, somewhere between saddened and amused, let us know: “You guys are way too early. You can go get a good breakfast, take a walk around, and you‘d still be too early.” But he indicated the bench where the line began, and Patricia, who had blisters on her feet from a hike in Rehoboth, manned the position while I walked up to Central Park.

It was early but already getting hot and muggy. I wandered past a run, 5K or 10K, in the park. I walked past Trump Tower on 5th Avenue, shuddered, then walked past St. Patrick’s, Rockefeller Center. You can walk anywhere in New York and find something interesting or iconic. It's the best way to see the city. Then I picked up an iced coffee for Patricia and joined her on the bench. It was now 10 AM and the line was about 20 deep. We were at the front. We kept hearing the gossip from more seasoned theatergoers. We were leaning toward “The Band's Visit” but many were down on it. Others recommended “Come from Away” but when the booth finally opened, and we asked about it, only single seats were available. We asked about “Hello, Dolly!” but Bette Midler was off for the afternoon. So we went with “Waitress.” Mostly for this reason. I never even saw the film and I barely looked at the tickets. For some reason, I assumed we were in one of the balconies. 

We weren‘t. We were in the front row. Way over to the left as you faced the stage, but front row. Right next to the stage. This close. 

Those seats used to be mine. 

The show was fine but “She Used to Be Mine” is the showstopper and it’s not close. Second-best song is way down there. Plus the story is kinda meh. It's good things happen to good people. It's the magic of baking. It's “Why is she putting up with this?” and then “Ah, at the 11th hour, she grows a spleen. OK.” Katharine McPhee played the lead, and she's got pipes, but is a little emotionally unavailable. Adam Shapiro as Ogie, and Erich Bergen as Dr. Pomatter, were audience faves. Mine was understudy Anastacia McCleskey as Becky. She fit into the scheme of things but also seemed like a real person. Some of the others weren‘t. Earl had no redeeming value whatsoever. He was a man’s dream: Every man looks good in comparison.  

I still loved it. I love those snug Broadway theaters. And now I'll have an answer when someone asks me how close I got to the Broadway stage. Just a foot away. 

I took this shot a week ago on our last full day in Rehoboth Beach, Del., a few hours before they closed the beaches for thunderstorms. I know: You don't exactly see storm clouds brewing. Nor was it particularly dark when they closed the beaches. But it was raining hard in Lewes, lightning had struck (or flashed?) nearby, and so, though we were merely feeling a nice schpritz under otherwise sunny skies, everyone was herded off the sand and the beach umbrellas were folded. For a few hours anyway. We had one last go at the waves. 

This was my first trip back to Rehoboth—my childhood vacation spot—since 2010, and I wrote about it enough back then. I don't have much to add. It's mostly the same. Funland's still fun. There's still only one mini-golf course, where, either in homage or warning, the animal remnants of the old circus-themed mini-golf course litter its fairways. Most of the customer service people are still from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. Even one Asian girl I talked to turned out to be from Kazakhstan. The anti-immigrant “Tea-shirts” (see here and here) are oddly toned down in the Trump era—although one on offer depicted a silhouette of a soldier crouching and taking aim in front of an American flag, emblazoned with the words: THIS IS HOW AMERICANS TAKE A KNEE. Grotto Pizza and Kohr Bros. prospers. Gus & Gus still does its thing. The Whitson and Bob's Bikes are still there, as is Lingo's grocery store, where my comic collecting began in the summer of ‘73. The week still goes by too fast.

We stayed in a big house three long blocks from the ocean, on Sussex Avenue, and set up camp on the north part of the beach, past where the boardwalk ends. Early on it looked like we would get thunderstorms every day but Monday was our only non-beach day. Normally we’d show up about high noon—stupidly for folks wary of getting too much sun—and stayed until the lifeguards left at 5 PM. Then drinks and dinner. We often ate out. We went to Funland twice. You get prizes now at Skee-Ball. Was that always the way? 

There were injuries. The second day, after the lifeguards left, Patricia and I went in one last time. I ran in, like the kids do, but the sand was uneven and I hit a dropoff and went down hard. For a day it hurt to walk, and I worried I'd sprained my ankle, but it wasn't that bad: just a bad bruise on the top of my foot. Patricia got it worse. She kept hiking in the mornings in the Gordon Pond Wildlife Area and wound up with blisters. The ocean helped there. The ocean taketh away and giveth.

I think that's what I'll mostly remember: the waves and the density of the water, looking like mercury in the late afternoon sun. 

A week ago Saturday I landed at JFK Airport after our flight circled for 45 minutes. Visibility issues. We didn’t come out of the clouds until we were maybe 40 feet from the ground.

Last time I landed at JFK—a year ago—I had to wait around for more than an hour before my luggage showed up, so on this flight I didn’t check baggage. Did the overhead compartment thing that everybody does.

(Sidenote: I don’t really get the economics of airlines. Why should passengers have to pay to check bags, which seems to inconvenience no one but yourself, but get to carry on big honking things, which inconveniences everyone? It makes boarding take longer, exiting take longer, requires more work from flight attendants. Shouldn’t airlines be doing the opposite of what they do?)

Anyway I was practically whistling a tune as I was wheeling my luggage through JFK. Before I knew it I was outside, spotted the taxi cabs, and was heading in that direction when a voice interrupted my thoughts. “You want a cab?” I looked over. “Yeah,” I said. “Follow me,” he said. I assumed we would head toward the yellow cabs, but we went past them toward the parking lot. Were there cabs there, too? I wondered. But we didn’t stop at a yellow cab. We stopped at an SUV-type vehicle.

“This isn’t a cab,” I said.

“It is a cab,” he insisted.

“How much?”

“Seventy-nine dollars plus tunnel fee.”

I was thinking, “I thought Patricia said there was like a flat fee of $50 for cabfare from JFK.” But for some reason I let the momentum carry me along.

That could be the mantra (or lesson) of my life, by the way: For some reason I let the momentum carry me along.

To be honest, I didn’t fully realize what I’d done until we were in traffic. That’s when I looked around, noticed no meter, no official anything, and realized, “I just got into the car of a complete stranger at JFK Airport.”

The dude got me where I needed to go but for almost double what it should have cost me. I don’t know if he was a different branch of cabdriver or if I just got took like a schnook. I assume the latter. It was so disheartening it took me three days to share the story with Patricia. 

We were only in Vienna two full days, and our last full day began poorly but ended well. After breakfast we started walking toward the Kunsthistorisches Museum but realized—again, standing by the Hofburg Palace—that it didn’t open for another hour. So what to do in the meantime? At this point it got a little “Marty”: “What do you wanna do?” “I don’t know, what do you wanna do?” P had done the research, knew what she wanted to see, I hadn’t and didn’t, and she was a little tired of leading the way. In the end, we decided to see something I wanted to see: Schreyvogelgasse 8. The doorway where Harry Lime first appears in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man.”

It took us to a part of town we hadn’t walked before—westish—where it felt less touristy. It felt like people were rushing to work rather than to museums. Along the way, P spotted a café with insane looking pastries, Café Central, but we’d just had breakfast so we simply made a mental note to return. We missed one block, then another, but eventually, clumsily, we found ourselves at the doorway. Was it the doorway? There was no plaque. It was just ... there.

P was also tired having her picture taken and never getting to take mine. So here she reversed it. Get in that doorway, she said. I obliged. I tried to do the Harry Lime look, the amused, amoral “Aren’t I clever?” look he gives Holly Martins after being discovered in the shadows. We tried once, twice, maybe 10 times. My eyes watered from the effort. That shit’s tough. Then we switched places and P didn’t try for the Lime look. She just owned the doorway. “One-take Patricia.”

Is there karmic serendipity in giving up what you want for what someone else wants? Early in their relationship, my sister left her job in D.C. to follow her then-boyfriend down to Atlanta, but got a better job as a result. A few years later, after they were married, she got an even better job offer in Detroit so he followed her there ... where he got a better job as a result. Something similar happened to us that morning. P went to the “Third Man” doorway for me, but found, half a block away, at Ludwig Reiter, the purse she’d been searching for all over Europe. The shop wasn’t open yet—when do the Viennese rise, anyway?—but she made a mental note to return. We left the area full of mental notes and digital photos.

We didn’t approach the doorway for the Kunsthistorisches Museum—across the plaza from yesterday’s Naturhistorisches Museum—until it was nearly 10:00, by which time a small line for tickets had formed. We got in it. And waited. And waited. And didn’t move. I got out of line to see what the hold-up was, and wound up conferring with another dude, a math professor from Brazil, both of us marveling at the remarkable inefficiency of the Austrians. Here we all were at the biggest art gallery in one of Europe’s biggest cities at the beginning of summer, and they had ... one ticket seller behind one glass booth? Really? In some ways it was comforting: a stereotype buster. Here was another: my guy from Brazil wasn’t particularly interested in the 2014 World Cup, which was still in its middle rounds at that point. Probably good for him in the long run, considering.

We spent several hours at the Kunsthistorische—P is all about the Dutch Masters—then had lunch, then split up again for the afternoon. She wanted to stay, I wanted to check out a museum to “The Third Man.”

My trip got muddled quickly. Most of the maps we had ended a few blocks south of the Ringstrasse, but the Third Man Museum was a few blocks south of that. Plus I got lost. Or misdirected. I convinced myself I was going in the wrong direction but wasn’t. I kept trodding over the same territory and felt the panic of missing out. P was seeing tons of art while I was wasting my time here! That panic of missing out, of not taking advantage of my surroundings, followed me, in varying degrees, throughout the vacation. To be honest, all vacations. It’s why it’s almost a relief when the vacation ends. You can get back to work and relax a bit.

To get to the Third Man Museum, I eventually realized, I had to cross over the Naschmarkt, with all of its goodies (“Patricia should really see this,” I thought), and the two busy streets on either side. Serendipitously, I wound up on Pressgasse, the street I needed to be on, and kept walking. A block later, after what seemed like hours walking around blind (it was probably a half hour at most), I finally spotted the museum on the corner of Pressgasse and Mühlgasse. It looked small and nondescript. It also didn’t look very busy. As I approached I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that was confirmed when I got close: “Closed.” The fuck? “Saturdays: 2-6 PM.” One day? It was only open one day? For four hours? Shouldn’t the guidebook have mentioned something like that? I rechecked it and found out it did—although it also mentioned Tuesdays. So instead of indulging in the bits and pieces of Carol Reed’s classic, I took a few pictures from the outside. In my head, I kept hearing Calloway’s dismissive advice to the idiot American abroad: Go home, Martins.

It took a while to find my way back to the Ringstrasse and the Kartnerstrasse, and once I did, and felt less tense (it was partly the hectic traffic outside the Ringstrasse), I wandered a bit, bought P macaroons at a small, snooty shop near our pension, then returned to our room and rested there for a moment. But there was no rest. The panic returned. In a day I wouldn’t be in Vienna! I was wasting my time! So I bounded out again—quickly, quickly—and visited Mozart’s residence on the other side of the Stephansdom. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great. Near the end, P phoned. She said she was on the other side of the Hofburg Palace and they weren’t letting anyone through because there were cops everywhere because Vladimir Putin was in town. Putin? I was missing out! I rushed over ... and found P on this side of the Hofburg Palace, on Kohlmarkt, not at all blocked off by the many cops there. She was just confused. She had a new purse with her, too, from Ludweig Reiter, which she loved, but less so the designer. He also made shoes and when she inquired if he had any in her size, size 11, his reaction was a dimissive laugh. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “we never have them in that size.”

For dinner, we went north, up the Rotenturmstrasse until we hit the Wien river, then along the river and up some steps to St. Rupert’s Church. This was a quiet area, and there seemed to be a few students around. Did I think that because of the name of the pub we stopped at for a drink? The Philosoph? It was the old Jewish section of town. It felt relaxing. For some reason, it’s a highlight in my memory. Sitting at the Philosoph, on Judengasse, enjoying a cold beer, an Ottakringer, in the magic-hour light before dinner. For a moment, I didn’t feel like I had to be anywhere else. 

SLIDESHOW: WHERE IS THE THIRD MAN MUSEUM?