THE TRIP TO NEW YORK

The kids had the week off, and I have this week off (spring break) so we spent the weekend in NYC. On the way down, a noise began in the engine. It sounds like a rocket taking off at first, and then like a motorcycle revving up, and then like rocks in a blender. I stopped at a gas station in Paramus New Jersey. A squat Hispanic male attendant told me, "My friend, you have trouble."

I needed to know what kind. I stopped at another gas station, and a Pakistani man said, "It's your alternator. I tell you, my friend, there is trouble with your bearings."

"Do I have to get it fixed right away?" I asked.

"No, this thing is loud, but you can drive for a few days," he said.

We went into the city, and found a parking spot on the street at 78th and Broadway. My one real skill as a driver is reverse parking. I slipped into the slot, just big enough for the van, no worries. Parking lots charge a minimum of thirty dollars for ten hours, so I always park on the street in New York City. I paid the Muni-meter 4 dollars with the credit card. An Asian doorman watched me pay for the meter, and take the slip to put on the dashboard.

He then said, "You are stupit. You don't have to pay if you're on that side of the sign. You are fucking stupit."

He said this without apparent rancor, or an attempt to get on my nerves. New York has its own feeling, and it's hard to put your finger on.

I looked at a blue sign amidst five other signs, and I thought that perhaps he was right. The arrow on the sign pointed the other way.

So I lost four dollars, and we walked over to the Natural History Museum. It was only two blocks, but the blocks are long. So it was a twenty minute walk. The kids hate museums, but I love them, so in we went. I couldn't interest the children in the pygmy owl, or the lemurs, or the dinosaur bones, or the twilight displays of wolves in the Canadian north, or the cascade of butterflies that showed evolution in color and morphology between butterfly species. A life-size blue whale did catch their eye but only momentarily. Riikka snapped many pictures.

"Let's eat!" The children cried, like wolves, or like some kind of animals, wanting to be stuffed.

The A train going south wasn't working so we had to go up to 125th and then go back down, since the track was being repaired. A Peruvian man complained to us about his fat Dominican girlfriend, and he kept saying, "Your wife is thin! My girlfriend is fat! I have smashed holes in her kitchen telling her to stop eating so much, but then she eats even more! She's a f... b..." I considered reminding him that there were children present, but thought he might have an anger management issue.

The New York subway underground is so beautiful, so glamorous. You could see rats down on the platform, nosing around for scraps. You feel as if you are in Hel, amongst the Plutonic engineers. But as dirty as it is, with old gum spots on the floor, you sense a basically good humor.

Times Square has so many lights. Apparently it's possible thanks to Niagara Falls. All the electricity there turns into electrons that they glide through the grid and it lights up entire buildings with Burma Shave ads and red triangles that advertise non-essentials over forty stories. My 5-year old said, "This is my favorite town! Why isn't the whole world lit up like this?"

Toys R Us is noisy and has a Ferris Wheel in the lobby, which you can watch from the second floor. It's right on Times Square. There's a life-size T-Rex replica which moves and growls, out of Jurassic Park. I said to my two-year old: "Is it alive?"

"Nope. It's a toy monster," she said.

We went back up on the metro, but had to wait a long time, eating candy from the Toys R Us on the platform. Four E trains went past before the A train finally came, and then it was so packed we couldn't get on. Finally another A train came. We had to get my friend Paul who was flying into LaGuardia. We got back up to 81st, and then walked to the car and I shot across the Queensborough Bridge and was in Queens, expecting to see signs to LaGuardia. I stopped and a Hispanic man at a gas station told me to ask his wife in the van how to get there. "She works there," he said.

I went around to her side, it was 9 pm. She looked away.

"Your wife is afraid," I told the man.

"Answer him," the man said into the cab.

I was supposed to go to the end of 21st, she said, and then duck down on Hoyt Ave., for six blocks, and then I'd be on the highway -- the Van Wyck -- and would whip into LaGuardia. Excellent directions, and twenty minutes later I pulled into the Delta-Northwest terminal arrivals and Paul hopped in the car, from whence we went north, the engine still grumbling, screaming at times, and then settling down, up to New Rochelle's Marriott, where we settled into two adjoining rooms overlooking the town, which in turn overlooks the Atlantic Ocean.

My friend looked in my car's engine, and he said, "It's the Idler Pulley that's making all the noise. They're a real pain to change. I'd need a big wrench to change it."

"Will it still drive?" I asked.

"Sure, for a couple of days," he said.

Breakfast had a big choice: no bagels, but there were sausages, oatmeal, juices, muffins, waffles, and we ate too much (I had oatmeal with a strawberry topping, and nine glasses of grapefruit juice), and then went down to Columbia University in Morningside Heights to meet my friend's daughter, who let us go up into her dorm room. It was about fifteen feet by eight feet overlooking the quad. She had posters and other designs on her walls, but I can't remember them. Obscure musical groups, I think. Dave Matthews was the only band I recognized.

We then ate at Tom's Restaurant at 112th and Broadway, which is where Seinfield's group hangs out in the show. Hamburgers were 4.50 without fries. At the table next to us, a white man was saying to his friends,

"Anyone who doesn't agree with Obama should be killed. The right should just shut up. Anyone who takes money from the bailout but doesn't believe in it should be put to death."

One of the other students (they were young) said, "The left has been picking on Bush for eight years, and now you're going to kill anybody from the right who says a peep?"

"That's right," the young man said. "I'm just so sick of the right. They should all be killed."

The guy was eating a vegetarian hamburger, and dipping it in ketchup, wetting the corner of it, like it was right-wing blood.

Across the street on 112th is the old Labyrinth Books which is now Book Culture, because the original Labyrinth Books moved to Princeton, taking its name with it. I bought the following books:

Introducing Kant, by Christoper Kul-Want and Andrzej Klimowksi, which claims on page 1 that Kant is post-religious, and that he "embraces change and human fallibility."

Fermat's Last Theorem, by Amir Aczel, which is an account of Andrew Wiles' breakthrough in terms of solving the obscure theory x to the nth power + y to the nth power = z to the nth has no whole number solution when n is greater than 2. I've read now about 20 pages of it, and it's engrossing, taking us back to mathematical developments in Babylon that help to explain the action in Princeton on June 23, 1993, when Wiles wrote out the answers for several hours explaining how he had finally solved the theorem which no one had been able to solve for three hundred years.

On Liberal Revolution, by Piero Gobetti, which are the writings of an Italian revolutionary theorist who died at age 25. This book argues that the Soviet Marxists had a liberal side,

"Trotsky counters the abstractions of the Slavic intelligentsia, from Radischev to Tolstoy, by proclaiming a liberal vision of history for the first time in Russia" (page 1). This I've gotta read, even if it's with a grain of salt. Trotsky's suppression of the Cromstadt revolt shows where his liberal theory (if any) led: a revoltingly autocratic, and genocidal tyranny toward dissent.

Dialectical Urbanism, by Andy Merrifield: Social Struggles in the Capitalist City. Merrifield is a Marxist geography professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. I hope the book will help me place surrealist and other modernist poetic struggles within a liberal urbanism. It's not clear to me that that will happen, but that's the hope.

My daughter, who's nine years old, wanted to buy a book called "A Girl's Guide to the Nightlife of New York," but I explained that "girl" was a fairly loose term, and in this case it meant "young adult" so she put it back.

"In a few years," the man behind the counter said tenderly.

Lola has decided she wants to attend Columbia University.

"You have to get straight As," her mother reminded her. "School is important."

We then walked into the enormous St. John the Divine cathedral on Paul's suggestion at the corner of Morningside and 112th. It seems to me to be as big and as beautiful as Notre Dame de Paris. Lovely high stained glass windows, choir practice, vaulted ceilings.

Riikka said, "I can believe in God again."

My child Julian said, "It's creepy. Let's get outta here!"

He and his even smaller sister held hands and looked up the eighty feet or so at the blackened ceiling.

We drove home the Palisades Parkway route up through Harriman, the bypass of the toll booths at the juncture with Route 17, the Idler Pulley still grumbling, and got over the Downsville Mountain just as a snowstorm began which left three inches on the driveway this morning.