Tag: taxis

Tall

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I am standing on Church Street, in TriBeCa, trying to hail a cab heading uptown.  People (and by that I mean New Yorkers) have cab-hailing styles. One, casual, with a relaxed open palm and fingers. Another, taught, high arm, hand waving. Then, the Lunger, who seems prepared to die under the wheels of a taxi. Me, I raise my arm and try to believe I’m tall enough to be seen.
Tonight, I am dressed up, unsteady in high heels, feeling conspicuous in makeup, too warm to wear my fancy party overcoat so I’ve tried to drape it artfully over my arm, and now I’m sweating into it, or pressing wrinkles into it, as I strangle my tiny handbag.  The flow of buses and cars, black SUVS and so many yellow cabs. I want to check the time but I haven’t a free hand, nor do I have the confidence to look away. There is a configuration of rooftop lights I’m supposed to follow to know which cabs to wave at. My ignorance after three years proves to me once again that I don’t intend to stay.
More cars, more buses, more cabs. Every taxi is the same, on the outside, every cab the object of your purest desire. Come to me, yellow cab. Pull up to the curb by me, yellow cab, roll down your window and ask me, “Where to?” Please. I need you.
I give the driver the address of our first stop, where we are to pick up my husband, and then our second stop, at tonight’s event. I slide behind the driver, my outfit twisting around my hips. I sit off balance, my ankles crossed, periodically bumping around trying to straighten my clothes.
“Your husband. Is he a tall man?” asks the driver.
The majority of cab drivers in New York leave you alone. You get in, there’s some discussion of the destination, and you drive. Maybe one in ten has an axe to grind, a nascent worldview to expound upon, a philosophy he can’t resist sharing.
“No…,” I say, hesitating. “More like medium-sized.”
“See?” he says. “I’ll tell you. My daughter, she has a husband. An American husband. A tall man, her husband.”
It’s a work-related function, where we are going. One of those functions I was led to believe we would be attending regularly when he took that god-damned job and we moved to New York.  An awards show? A premiere? Who fucking cares? Most of the time I’m not even invited.
“They come to my house and leave their car in my parking spot,” the cab-driver continues. I ask myself what the hell he is talking about.  “I only get one spot, but they leave their car. I cannot move it because I have no key. She chose this man for herself, this tall man.”
It’s the end of the day. Rush hour. Of course in New York City rush hour is several hours, peaking just after five, I guess. We are on the backside of it, maybe six-ish. I don’t know.
“Your husband, is he smart?”
“Yes,” I say. “He is very smart.”
“My daughter’s husband? He is not smart. He is tall.”
TriBeCa in autumn, 2012
I want to tell you funny stories about New York. I want them to be calm, reflective, backward-looking, and hilarious. I did things in New York and you want to hear about the celebrities I saw there. Like Ian McKellen exhorting me to try harder at Pilates, or Patrick Stewart going incognito in a U.S.S. Enterprise ball cap on the subway. And my memories of the fancy events sparkle with celebrity cameos: Jennifer Aniston, looking skinny and normal and pretty at a premiere, or that guy from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, skulking around like a party-crasher, scarfing hors d’oeuvres and drinks, alone in a t-shirt in a corner. I want to draw New York for you the way you like it drawn for you, with cool old buildings and a vintage jazz record soundtrack. Not real pigeons shitting in your hair but cinematic pigeons, rising in a flock. Expensive TriBeCa lofts where, of course, the AC works. Glamorous skyline shots, the wail of sirens edited out. Cabs roaring past, but never buses running the red. No baked-on dog diarrhea on the sidewalk. No smell of urine in the subway.
The bland niceties exchanged by executives and their wives at work-related functions don’t make for many good stories. The HR guy is usually there. He always manages to remember my name. He knows I have kids and horses. Sometimes his wife is with him, looking like the saddest woman in America. Maybe she looks at me and sees that I, too, am the saddest woman in America. The HR guy asks after my kids and horses. I lie, and say everyone is fine. Always. No one wants to hear they aren’t.
It’s a struggle. I am still digesting, and there are many things I’m not supposed to say. I got smacked down by a Twitter troll last December, after I tweeted that I think New York is run by a bunch of mobsters. No names, no details. My troll made a new account to reply to this tweet, to tell me to get the hell out of New York and not let the door hit me in the ass. I blocked her, and she moved on to tweet at my husband, and at random people tweeting about my husband. I try to keep my Twitter world friendly and nice; I don’t spend my time there arguing with disagreeable strangers, and I block hostile people early and often. After a day’s worth of head-scratching, I realized who she was; I unblocked her, and asked her if her kids know she’s a Twitter troll. After this, she deleted her account.
 
The first time we get a glossy invite to a fancy event, I plan for weeks; I shop for a posh frock, with special occasion shoes and suitable foundation garments and two pairs of expensive hosiery in case I tear the first pair putting them on. I go on to buy my first and second tiny fancy party handbags, and one is so small I can’t fit a glasses case into it.
By the last one of these damned events I wear a cheap, red tulle dress I buy online. When a colleague of my husband’s turns to me and compliments my dress, I can’t decide if it’s out of politeness or sour dismay. Sometimes, she has to sit near me at these things. I think she thinks she has nothing to say to me. She is wearing a very expensive dress. Like the kind of thing you get at Barney’s, and it’s like $1100. Black. Asymmetrical. And those strappy, $1095 Jimmy Choos. I know what they are, I just couldn’t stand in them, much less walk in them. And besides, why would I when I can wear Fluevogs?  I am happy enough with how I look, in my funky shoes and my polyester party dress. I may never wear the dress again, but it was well under $100 so I really don’t care. You could spend that on lunch in New York with friends if you had friends. I say my thanks for the compliment, but I think she probably hates me.
I mean, what is that: “I like your dress…”? Somehow it communicates something else: “I see you’re wearing a dress.” Or, “I am noticing your dress, and your dress isn’t expensive like my dress.” Or,  “I think your dress is weird. I think your dress might have been cheap.” Or,  “What the hell are you wearing?” Or, even, “Who the fuck are you? Why do you even come to these things? No one here likes you or has anything to say to you. You should just stay home.”
Where do we get our ideas about others? That people care what I spend on clothes? That men are funny and women aren’t? That people judge your intelligence based on your height?
But anyway, going back to whatever night I was talking about, after I’ve done my 3 ½ minutes with the HR guy and his sad, sad wife who sees into my soul, the night where I’m still chipper about a fancy party or whatever.
I want to tell you about this one guy, someone my husband introduces me to, and how blunt and hilarious I think I am, telling him like it is. My husband is polite and professional, always, like he was raised to be polite and professional. I am somehow in this moment incapable of either. Maybe I am always incapable of these things. A question is exchanged between the men without being answered, and I toss out my answer, overly strong and quite inappropriate, like a I’ve taken big slug from a flask of grain alcohol smuggled into church and belched.  This guy, he doesn’t care if I have horses or children. I say something else, trying to be funny.
There’s a flash of recognition on his face. At the time I take it for approval. “I’m on Twitter,” I offer. Today, now, I scream back at myself, “Twitter is free, you stupid twat! Any asshole is on Twitter. Go drink more and talk less!”  Then, I tell him who I am on Twitter. I have done this so rarely. Today, now, it makes me hate myself. 
Within days I am followed by the woman who becomes my Twitter troll. She is friends with this guy. They are professional contacts who flirt with each other on Twitter.
But getting back to the moment before I open my damned mouth, before my husband replies with his polite and professional words, before I volunteer who I am on Twitter: my husband introduces me to this guy. They walk up to me together. There is my smart, medium-sized husband with someone. It is unmistakable. He is tall.

Uber Alles

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This one time, before I had Uber, I am in San Francisco and I want to go to a fabric store and I don’t have a way to get there.
So I decide to get off my high, high anti-Uber high-horse and download the app.
I arrange a ride to the fabric store from my hotel. I’m into it. The app is like a game, with a map and a tiny car you can see arriving, When I step to the curb in front of the hotel, I look up to see the driver, J– driving by, his head and elbow out the window, calling, “Hey, Maggie. I’ll pick you up right there. Lemme turn around.”
I ask to sit in the front, explaining that I get carsick.
J– playing serious hits of the late 70s and early 80s including Billy Joel and he smells of weed.
This other time, when I was in Seattle, I got the best haircut of the last few years and when I was done and trying to change out of the little kimono they give you to wear when they’re coloring your hair, but someone was in the bathroom and taking for-fricking-ever and when he came out he reeked of pot, I mean reeked, and I was like, oh, ok, that’s legal here now, but, like, seriously, wait a minute, because scissors are heavy machinery, right, and I have an expectation of sitting down in a salon and having a sober person do my fucking hair, right? 
So I started thinking that everyone in Seattle was going to have to deal with a period of adjustment and bad haircuts as they adapt to having legal weed, and I felt a little sorry for all those people walking around with bad haircuts. Maybe they’d all be stoned, too, so they’ll all chuckle and be, like, whatever.
So anyway I didn’t even need to go to the fabric store in San Francisco at all, really; it was just one of those things that I do when I’m in a place with an afternoon to kill, go to a cool fabric store. I went to the fabric store in Hawaii once and it was full of Japanese fabrics priced like the American-made ones and I was so new to the quilting thing that it didn’t mean anything to me, but, in retrospect, I should have bought a lot of it because Japanese fabric is twice as expensive in the rest of the U.S.
Little stores like small fabric stores are the kind of thing you really have to check to see if they’re open, especially in like New York where shopkeepers seem only vaguely aware that oh, people might want to know some shit about a store, like where it is and when it’s open, and the internet would be a place to put that information. But, like, you know, I was in San Francisco, where they practically invented having the Internet to do more things than email. So, I assumed.
So I get picked up by J** my Uber guy who smells just a wee bit like weed and I ask to sit in the front because I get carsick. Straight away, I ask him how he likes being a Uber driver. He tells me he loves it. “How long have you been doing it,” I ask.
“About four months.”
“And what did you do before?”
“Drove a limo for six years. This is much better.”
That settled, we headed to the Upper Richmond.
We talk about race relations in the U.S., and gay marriage, and progress. He refers to “his generation” saying that he was born in 1968, and I wonder which generation he believed me to be a part of, since I was born just a couple years before that. But I don’t ask. My mother comes up, and I talk about her like she’s alive. I like talking to strangers, and I especially like telling lies to strangers. Like if I tell them the whole truth they can steal my identity or cast a spell and give me whammies.
The best thing that J— says is this: “I always say, life is like 1% what happens to you, and 99% how you handle it.”
When we get to the fabric store, J__ says it looks closed. It is closed. I tell him that’s ok, but I’ll walk around the neighborhood anyway. I am disappointed. It was supposed to be so cool. I go next door and try on some jeans.
jeans

Then I walk around the neighborhood for a while and drink a Mexican chocolate mocha with a tiny bit of cinnamon on top. There is a guy in there loudly FaceTiming, his babby and nanny nearby. As he leaves I see he has a chain on his wallet. I didn’t know guys still did that.
When I get the email from Uber confirming the payment, I accidentally give the guy, J~~ 4 stars instead of 5. I feel a little bit funny about that now. Are you just always supposed to give 5 stars? Is it like one of those things with the car dealer, where if you can’t give five stars they will call you and ask what they can do to improve their service? Is he going to know and rate me poorly as a customer, and am I going to have trouble getting Uber cars in the future because the very first guy I ever had thought I was a bitch for giving him only 4 stars? I might have to give up Uber and try Lyft.
Oh, wait, but I forgot the best part. After I tried on some jeans at a store near the fabric store that wasn’t open, I went next door and bought some charming and snarky hipster greeting cards with the f-word on them. They had stacks of ironic t-shirts, and real metal Slinkies. There, a quiet, reserved guy sat behind the counter and mildly murmured an encouragement about my jokes, but I’m pretty sure he had a wilder side, because he was playing the Dead Kennedys, “CaliforniaÜber Alles.”

A Turtle in the Road

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 A few weeks ago, I tested the brakes of my car when I saw a small turtle in the road; my car has excellent brakes. My middle son, Art School, was with me, and I instructedhim to lift the turtle out of the road, keep it facing the same way, and put it down in the grass. He was surprised that the turtle scratched his hands with its desperately waving paddles, but he was more surprised than harmed. We drove to dinner with the excitement of having done a good deed, and though we were late picking up the Bacon Provider at the train station, and Art School had to wash the wild turtle germs off his hands, we were glad we did it.
Gregor, Soup Turtle
Back at the farmhouse we have rented in Dutchess County for the season, we are playing host to a pet turtle named Gregor for the second summer in a row. Gregor is a third year student at Bard College, having been enrolled after being purchased by other Bard students from a Chinatown street purveyor of “soup turtles.” Now he is an overfed beast, a red-eared slider, the kind of cheap pet that finds itself living in the green ponds at Central Parkonce it exceeds the normal dimensions of an apartment-sized aquarium. Somewhere in Gregor’s future there is no doubt a real pond and an old age spent basking in real sunshine instead of a propping him/herself on a small pile of rocks under a light bulb, and eating real insects and pond weeds instead of Rep-to-Sticks and wilted lettuce. But for now, he is our houseguest at the farmhouse.
Last summer Gregor’s aquarium sat on a shelf out of view or reach from our permanent pets, but this year he was placed by his exhausted owner on a little trunk in the mud-room, just inside the door. And there the aquarium has remained.
Just the other day I was feeding Gregor, and Cherry (who is a dog interested in all things small and squeaky, and has recently caught herself two baby rabbits) suddenly noticed the soup turtle for the first time, and now she actively wants to smell, watch and taste the aquarium of said small animal. I don’t want to find out if turtles squeak like baby rabbits.
Yesterday morning, because there was a train to catch, the dogs were roused when we got up. Even though the dogs should be exhausted from oh-so-much running around, wasp-catching, bunny-chasing and sun-bathing, they will leap to attention from a sound sleep if we make a gesture towards the door. So out they were sent, and they galloped about, did their morning business on the grass, and Cherry, being the senior and more obedient dog despite her predilection for hunting, presented herself promptly while Captain went off for an early morning adventure.
There was no time for an early morning adventure yesterday.
Once again I had made an incorrect calculation; I was wrong about what time we needed to leave the house to have the Bacon Provider to the train on time, and so we had lots of yelling anxiety in the car on the way there. The problem had started when I wasn’t ready to go at 7 am, got a bit worse when I was found at 7:08 stripping the sheets off the bed, and got worse still when Captain didn’t come back in. Captain finally took an out-of-the-way route via the open garage, and was shooed into the house. As I fired up the engine of my car at 7:12, the Bacon Provider leapt out again, because in my haste I had put Captain in the closed mud-room with Gregor, the turtle.
The yelling anxiety got more intense at the long stoplight in Rhinebeck, where all directions of traffic go red for a pedestrian, and then it always begins with green for the direction you don’t need. We should have left at 7 a.m. and it was my fault that we didn’t.  Good thing I’m a multi-tasker; I can simultaneously offer an apology, articulate a bland re-assurance that the clock in my car is fast, and drive like a bat out of hell slightly exceed the posted speed limit without crashing into anything. We made the train, just in time.
On the way back from the train station delivery, I met a large snapping turtle in the road, about 1½ miles from the farm. It was bigger than the last one we encountered.
Last year, we were still in North Dreadful, where we had a swimming pool and some scenery but were still surrounded by people who didn’t want to know us, I witnessed a woman in a large white SUV purposely driving over a large snapping turtle. It made a loud popping noise, turtle guts were strewn all over the narrow pavement, and I let out a shriek of horror. What kind of person goes out of her way to run over a snapping turtle? Oh, yeah. North Dreadful.
Angry snapping turtle, still ready to bite me
Yesterday’s snapping turtle was actually on the other side of the road, and almost all the way across already. I stopped my car and put on my hazards. I opened my window and tried to make a frightening noise. The turtle didn’t move. I opened the door and clapped my hands at it. The turtle didn’t move. I touched the back of the turtle’s shell with the toe of my shoe. The turtle spun around, snapped at me with its enormous mouth and scared me. I jumped left, hoping to get around it again. It hunkered in. I tapped it again, thinking that now I had its attention I could herd it off the road. The turtle spun and snapped again. Now it was pointed 180° from its original destination. I tapped the turtle once more, hoping to get a course correction. Now it was pointed towards the road’s shoulder, and looked ready to move.
I got back in my car and sat with my hazards on, waiting to watch the turtle make it to safety. A car came up from the other direction, and the turtle was directly in its path. I waved them down. I told them about the turtle. They thanked me. I told them about the turtle rescued by Art School. They told me they saw a man throw a jacket over “one of the big, aggressive ones” to be able to move it safely. I told them this was one of the big, aggressive ones.

The approach of their car inspired the turtle to rise to its greatest height, stretch out its neck and start booking it, turtle-style, up the road. I said it looked like it had an appointment in Rhinebeck. The other drivers laughed and said they could give it a lift since that was where they were headed. Another car arrived, and I pulled forward to tell the second driver about the delay. He was as good-natured about letting the turtle make its way safely across the road as the people ahead of him were.

Today I am back in New York City. I saw a green leaf on the sidewalk this morning and mistook it for a frog. 

No York

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We have been let down by Delta Airlines in the past, so we treat them with deep suspicion. I can report that if you are on Twitter and make complaints about them there, @DeltaAssist will respond politely and promptly, and almost always more quickly than the grinchy incompetents they employ to answer their phones.  In fact, the only reason we flew Delta on this trip was because arrangements had been made on our behalf.  On our return to Seattle, we checked in at JFK Airport and the agent told us we had no reservation (she checked the wrong flight) and then told us we had only two tickets (all three of us were ticketed separately). I can say that over this long weekend, this tart check-in agent was a fitting spokeswoman for the attitude I have named “No York.”
To be fair, everyone we dealt with was friendly and upbeat and kind. We saw dropped toys retrieved by passers-by, we witnessed a group of friends applying a band-aid to the toe of their friend on the sidewalk, and we saw multiple people rushing to help a fallen cyclist on the streets of Manhattan.  Wading through a crushingly huge crowd of festive Puerto Ricans celebrating Puerto Rico day, we even got to ask a New York City police officer for directions. 
I discovered I was inexplicably able to hail a cab successfully on the first three tries, but can barely walk a straight line down a New York sidewalk. Also, I have blisters on every surface of my feet (probably because I can’t walk straight). At home I often walk three miles a day. I guess Manhattan’s sidewalks are harder.
We are working with a relocation company, and a set of professionals have been charged with the task of finding us a place to live temporarily, moving our stuff, storing our stuff, finding a place to live permanently, and helping us enroll our 13-year-old in a new school. So far, we have a temporary place to live. It’s a start.