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Daily Prompt: Four Minutes and 24 Years

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The benches in front of 1 Penn Plaza, along West 34th Street, are lively at lunchtime and look like they remain so long after lunch, as deliverymen pick up and drop off all day long and limo drivers waiting for their VIPs kibitz with one another and with passersby who want to know how famous the person about to become their next brush with fame is and whether he or she is worth pausing for on their way to their next New York City attraction.

There was no reason for me to be in front of the famous skyscraper to make this observation last Thursday afternoon. Five minutes before passing the limo drivers and their VIPs and the lunchtime crowd, I was finishing up being lost in Penn Station, the renowned train- and bus- and everything else station (flying saucers will someday land there because it is shaped like one). Ten minutes before that, frustrated that I could not find a sign directing me to exactly where I was going, many many blocks away, I reasoned that any door with sunlight coming through it and people’s shadows walking past must lead to the outside and a street, any street, and the possibility that, once there, I would be able to figure out where I am. In New York City, on the streets, I am (usually) okay, since it is one of the easiest cities to negotiate on foot. It’s a grid. (Mostly.)

That hunch led me up one staircase to plate glass doors that entered into Madison Square Garden. I headed back down that staircase.

Out on the street, I made my way back around MSG to the front of Penn Station and then onward, north along 8th Ave. to have coffee with a college classmate and then meet up with other friends to attend a taping of “The Colbert Report.”

The college classmate and I had not seen each other in almost 24 years, when I had thrown a post-graduation party he attended; thoughts and memories of this party were on my mind while I strolled up 8th. Cars were blocking the crosswalk, so instead of waiting to cross, I turned right and started over to 7th, where I would continue my northward stroll.

This is how small a moment any moment can truly be. Had the crossing been available, I would have continued on 8th. But sitting on a bench on 34th Street at that moment was another college classmate, in fact the co-host of that post-graduation party, someone I have not seen or spoken with in three years and who did not know I was in New York City. He has an office in 1 Penn Plaza and was on his lunch break, people-watching.

Had I walked past ten minutes earlier, I would have missed him, but I had just spent those ten minutes escaping from Penn Station.

“Is that … Kevin? Really?” I thought to myself. Can’t be. I was not going to say anything; I was going to walk past the person who I assumed was a merely a stranger with a familiar face, since how could it be that I would bump into a long-ago friend in this giant city; a hunch had just now almost gotten me lost in Madison Square Garden. I had better leave the hunching business to others, I thought.

“Mark?” That settled it; it was my old friend. With one friend waiting for me in a restaurant in midtown and about 20 more blocks to walk, I had about four minutes to bring my graduate school housemate up to date. He had the same four minutes to bring me up to date. What was I doing in the city. What was he doing on that bench. Our relationship statusi, our work situations, my physical condition. How long it had been since. How utterly baffling the fact of what we were experiencing right then was. Why I was not taking the subway instead of walking 20-plus blocks. We finally, after all these years, exchanged phone numbers.

“How long has it been?” That was my other friend’s first question as I walked in the restaurant, a few minutes later. I reminded him: 24 years. And an extra 10 minutes because I had run into someone. He, too, was on his lunch break, so we had limited time in which to reacquaint each other with each other. Relationships, work, life.

How much time does it really take to tell someone what you’ve done and seen? Maybe it only takes about four minutes to (re)establish who you are and the rest is elaboration with anecdotes.

Who am I? Someone who takes 10 minutes to get out of a wide-open train station but is happy at the social accident that was thus made possible.

* * * *

colbert ticket2

My thumb.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 22 asks, “You’re about to enter a room full of strangers, where you will have exactly four minutes to tell a story that would convey who you really are. What’s your story?”

Daily Prompt: Last Leaf

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today, September 21, is the last full day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the autumnal equinox will walk into our lives tomorrow at 10:29 p.m. EDT, precisely. In the Southern Hemisphere, today is the last full day of winter. It’s a big day for everyone. Pat the globe on the back. Good going, world!

The photo above was taken at around 1:00 p.m. today in upstate New York, where the leaves are just beginning their annual color change. Starting with a deep green, they shift in color to a weak green, then yellow, then a red that I find beggars my attempts to describe it; it is a red I refer to as “fall foliage red,” because I do not run into it elsewhere.

This of course is a global phenomenon and most human beings do not need my poetical-ish endeavors at describing it, but we here in the Northeastern United States have fashioned something of a tourist trap out of this simple natural fact of life. “Come See Biology Happen!” I do not know if other countries with similar climates as ours, usually found at the 42nd parallel north (a line I am just south of), have the “leaf peeper” phenomenon, but around here and in hilly areas north of here (Vermont, especially) by October 1 we will start to see weekend visitors leave their cities and their sidewalk trees or their plowed-over suburban tracts of land with five carefully placed trees per yard that are still only four inches in diameter to come stare at ours and re-remember what hillsides look like. We sell them calendars crammed full of 12 beautiful and glossy photos of the green and red hillsides that they have been looking at and hillsides they have not yet been to, photos they will look at in their cubicles next summer, when they will make plans to visit us again in the fall, so they can buy another calendar.

The circle of life is seen vividly in the changing colors of the leaves and in the annual calendar purchases of the leaf peepers.

People living in every region of the world must take advantage of something natural to attract visitors—the ocean and beaches, a mountain, or a major, powerful river—in the northeast we attract outsiders with something ephemeral, short-lived, yet constant: A season’s change, which takes mere weeks to complete, but it will be here again same time next year. You can plan your trip here with help from The Weather Channel: New York Fall Foliage. (That takes care of today’s public service aspect to the website.)

The red leaves then turn to orange and brown but by then most of them are on the ground, after rain and wind has knocked them off the trees. The leaf peepers do not stay behind and help us rake them up and dispose of them, thus denying themselves the complete autumnal equinox experience. Sad, really. But they must return to their homes and find spots for their 2015 Fall in Vermont calendars.

But we upstate New Yorkers, who live in a region that lacks a colorful nickname despite our colorful autumn—are we Hudson Valley-ites? Hudson Valleyers? Upstaters? Upstites? Catskillers? Upper Delawarians? Mohawk Valleyans? Mohawk Valets?—we remain. Someone is needed to take the photos and craft the calendars and grow the fake pumpkins for the real pumpkin spice lattes. (I held out till last year, when I finally had my first PSL, then I had my second, and on.) Every year, we are the last leaf on the tree.

I’m the last leaf on the tree
The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me
I’m the last leaf on the tree

I fight off the snow
I fight off the hail
Nothing makes me go
I’m like some vestigial tail
I’ll be here through eternity
If you want to know how long
If they cut down this tree
I’ll show up in a song.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 21 asks, “Changing colors, dropping temperatures, pumpkin spice lattes: do these mainstays of Fall fill your heart with warmth—or with dread?”

Daily Prompt: Reading People

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The woman next to me on the plane was in acute distress. She did not tell me this herself, but she appeared to me to be bearing a weight of grief and/or worry. I did not know what the source of upset was. She checked and re-checked her watch, and kept shifting her weight in her seat but kept herself leaning forward like an intense talk show host. She picked up the Airfone (this was in 2000) and considered doing something with it but returned it to its cradle. She picked it up again. She put the mandatory flight nuts in her handbag and did not accept a soda or water.

I am a dunderhead when it comes to feelings. With some experience in public speaking, I find that I can read a room more accurately than I can read an individual. Furthermore, I can tell when someone is ticked off at me far more capably than I can tell if a person is happy about something I have done or said or even if they are happy I am in their life. I need a lot of positive reinforcement.

On the plane, I knew that my ego wanted me to be this woman’s white knight and to be an attractive shoulder for her to lean against, but because I knew that this was what my ego wanted (or believed it wanted—what if she had leaned against me and actually wanted to talk and cry?), I knew I should simply keep reading my magazine. I did.

Anyone in a relationship knows their partner well enough that they can tell from a “Hello” text message with no other words or punctuation whether their partner is happy, upset, or confused by something. Or all of the above at the same time. Usually, not always, but usually, my girlfriend and I avoid the confusion that texting or other quick modes of communication can bring, and, when one of us detects something is off, we turn it into a phone call. We keep matters open and clear. I am grateful that we have not had many fights, but our worst fights have come when one of us did not phone and the communications got snarled and then so did we.

Was the woman beside me trying to get my attention with all her huffing and not-quiet sobbing? Anyone’s attention? Was she with the people across the aisle? They appeared to be a couple. Was she with them? No. Definitely no. There are ways to have a private moment in public spaces and then there are ways to have private moments in ways that may earn, well, the legitimate sympathy—and even empathy—of strangers. I do not profess to know that I can identify the difference between these two types of moment, in the moment. This fellow passenger on a flight from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Newburgh, New York, was proving to be a test of my ability to read a human being.

If I do not know my own emotions very well, which is something I started to write about recently (“For Crying Out Loud!“), I am not going to be able to correctly interpret another complicated human being’s complicated emotional displays. And I did not know my emotional inner life very well back in 2000; I did not know how complex the palette of emotions on display can be.

It may be that the woman beside me on the plane had brief moments of wanting to pour her heart out to me separated by moments of unapproachable grief or whatever she was suffering, but my default facial expression resides somewhere between poker-faced and perturbed by a distant sound that only I hear. (Look at my portrait accompanying this web site.) I probably looked as unwelcoming as possible, and then confused things when I would attempt to look welcoming, “just in case” she wanted to talk. I asked, “Are you okay?” and her shoulders replied with a surprised shudder and nothing else, no look in my direction, no words.

The landing was suspenseful, which is to say that technically it was uneventful but each sound from outside the plane, each bump of turbulence as our plane dropped into the thicker air, was audibly registered by the passenger beside me. Perhaps she was merely a nervous flyer? No. On the ground she took or placed (I do not remember which) a call on her cell phone to get a hospital address. She rushed to the front of the plane with no words to me or anyone, without waiting for the go-ahead from the air stewards.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 17 asks, “Are you a good judge of other people’s happiness? Tell us about a time you were spot on despite external hints to the contrary (or, alternatively, about a time you were dead wrong).”

There will be no column from The Gad About Town tomorrow, September 18, as I will be attending a television show taping in NYC. Yay, me.