I am writing this on the 57th Street crosstown bus - and am seated opposite a woman (late thirties, willowy bohemian turned affluent Manhattanite) and her son. He’s around ten. Dutch Boy haircut. A designer duffel coat. School books. A New York private school kid, like myself in the mid-1960s. Watching him I am immediately thrown back to my own time at a very elite school where most of my classmates were sons of Park and Fifth Avenue plutocrats, and there were a few of us upper-middle-class kids from the West Side, and how the bus was the first form of public transport I took from the age of nine onwards, as back then the subway was an iffy endeavor (back when New York had over two thousand murders a year). And how jumping the bus was my first proper sense of running away from familial unhappiness, and the beginning of a lifetime’s addiction ti travel. And how memory is such an intriguing construct, and you find yourself transported back well over four and a half decades in a mere nanosecond, courtesy of an observed mother and son opposite you on a bus traversing Manhattan at rush hour.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:45:59 +0000
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