In Transit

This past weekend I went "home," that is, back to NewYork City, for the first time since moving to Western New York State six or seven weeks ago. I stayed with my sister, which was fun, and I saw my nephew and my brother, and all of that was very comforting. And, my sister and I got to see Barbara Streisand perform in a concert that was heralded as "Back to Brooklyn"--kind of in tune with how I was feeing. It was a phenomenal concert--Streisand was feisty and strong and sounded glorious. And it was fitting that I was there with my sister, since my attachment to Streisand's music comes from hearing my sister listen to it when I was very young. 

It was a little hard to leave, but I had a couple of quintessential New York encounters to carry back with me. The best was perhaps as I was waiting on line to get through security at the airport (where I live now, this takes about 2 and a half minutes--at JFK, a long, drawn-out process, which followed the long, drawn-out ride to the airport in a taxi, with some extra suspense about whether I was going to make it to the airport on time, this time not because I left late but because of a Fire Department ceremony that was blocking traffic on the street my cab driver chose to take to get on the Belt Parkway. Which meant that we had to circle back through traffic in the direction we came to take the entrance that was the closest to my sister's place, which we should have taken in the first place--a half hour lost).

Anyway, I made it to the airport, waited on the long line to get through security, feeling frazzled and wondering somewhat grimly if I was really going to make the plane. Finally, I got up to the agent who was checking people's IDs and boarding passes. He had the usual bored and jaded look as he scribbled those unintelligible marks on my boarding pass, but then he slipped me the casual question, the way the customs agents sometimes do. "Where are you traveling to?" "Upstate City," I answered quickly. But then I wondered, had I answered quickly enough? So I embellished, just to drive home the point that I really did know what my ticket said on it and was actually going there. "My new home," I said. I must have said it with just a touch of resignation, or irony, or can-you-believe-it tone. At any rate, it got the unanswerable, Yiddish-inflected New York response from the agent: "Better you than me." 

That made me very happy somehow.