Queens
I went to New York City in 1980, staying overnight in Manhattan enroute to Massachusetts for a job as a summer camp counselor. I don't know why I stayed overnight, exactly, but it was a residence, and the camp paid for it.
I hadn't been back since then. Until last weekend, I went to Queens to meet C's other daughter/son-in-law/grandchildren.
Queens wasn't I expected. It was dense (which I did expect), but it felt much less like part of a huge city and more its own neighborhood, particularly the little area I was in. We walked it all on Monday, just before we left to go back to Grand (Gray) Rapids.
The sun was shining, and it was cold and and incredibly windy. The sting on your face when you turned a corner was real. We walked to the grocery story and a fruit market and it was all so genial. The fruit market also had cheaper fruit and vegetables than Grand Rapids, and the fruit was ripe, too.
There's a strange Midwestern thing where fruit is never ripe. The fruit in stores has been picked long before it's ripe because it will stay sellable longer, but that also means it tastes lousy.
Not in Queens, though. It was all beautiful.
I particularly enjoyed seeing how everyone was different. Down a single street, you might hear people speaking four different languages, and there were so many styles of dress and culture. Uniqueness (in any way) is not a strong suit of Grand Rapids, or the Midwest in particular.
The grandchildren are two (almost three) and four months old. This means every day starts at 5:30 a.m. My favorite moment was at 6 a.m. one morning when the infant was yelling his head off and the two-year-old was running back and forth down the hall shouting "Tai chi! Tai chi!"
That one moment made the whole trip worth it.
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