August 1, 2006: Highland Park & New York City

Still more signs of the North:

• In New York, this sign: “DON’T HONK – $350 PENALTY”

• Smog

• Rough roads and potholes

• Bagels - good ones

• Cars moving 10 to 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, traffic permitting, instead of 5 to 10

• Northern hospitality (more about this below)

Our trip wouldn't be complete without a daytrip to the Big Apple, center of the known universe. Listening to Latin jazz to set the mood, we crossed the Hudson River for the third time. We emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel to find the Empire State Building dead ahead, looming over us.

When we last visited New York, we rode the elevator up, but this time we just drove by it on our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper West Side. Driving in the City is always a thrill for me: dodging taxis and jaywalkers is a real test of skill.



We found an empty parking space a few blocks from the Met, only to discover that the meter was inoperable. I stopped a hospitable New Yorker and asked her if we would be running a risk in leaving our car there. She advised against it but offered her free space only a block away from the building’s entrance. We gave her a lift to her car and avoided the museum’s $35 a day parking fee.

New Yorkers are unfairly portrayed as unfriendly and unhelpful, yet I’ve always found them only too willing to go out of their way to help strangers. At the museum, a barista gave Tommy a big glass of milk for free.

The Met is a monster of a museum, so no one ever sees all of it.

We focused on what the boys wanted to see, which were the Egyptian and Greco-Roman collections.

Tommy has really taken an interest in the gods of antiquity and their complex interrelationships.

He said of a massive sarcophagus, “This is proof that the Egyptians loved doughnuts.” I laughed and he said, “I was joking. I think it was really fried chicken.”

The Temple of Dendur, transported all the way from Saqarra, Egypt, is a legendary acquisition. We visited Saqarra in 1989 on our legendary round-the-world trip. We saw a step pyramid and several tombs there.

After our museum tour, we took a circuitous route through Central Park on our way to the Upper East Side.

We shopped for food and coffee and gifts at Zabar’s, the world’s best deli or, as it calls itself, a “gourmet epicurean emporium.”

Debbie had a dinner date with Melanie and I with David and the kids back in Highland Park, so we couldn’t stay longer in NYC. We drove south on Broadway and through Times Square and the Lincoln Tunnel to reach the New Jersey Turnpike.

If we had had longer, though, we could have taken the best free ride New York has to offer: the Staten Island Ferry, with its always-spectacular view of the downtown skyline and the Statue of Liberty. It’s a jaunt we took three years ago, when we visited the American Museum of Natural History as well. We might also have paid a call on my sister-in-law’s cousin, Marjorie, a textbook author who lives only a block from Washington Square Park.

And we would have ridden the subway to Ground Zero, a place that has caused the most serious psychic wound Americans have suffered in many years. It seems to have affected the US as a whole a lot more than it has New York City, perhaps, as David suggests, because its residents see 911 as something more concrete and personal than the rest of us: the murder of nearly 3,000 people, rather than an emblem for a great battle between good and evil. Many New Yorkers resent Bush for using this tragedy as a pretext for never-ending war.