A Heart in New York

New York -- to that tall skyline I come
Flyin' in from London to your door
New York -- lookin' down on Central Park
Where they say you should not wander after dark
New York -- like a scene from all those movies
But you're real enough to me, for there's a heart
A heart that lives in New York

- Simon and Garfunkel

I had been up fairly late the night before making some additional travel arrangements, so I booked the Morris Plains shuttle to midtown at the fashionably late hour of 10:00AM. An early morning accident on route 80 threatened to turn the road into a parking lot once again but by the time we started our journey East, everything seemed to clear up and traffic was a breeze. I booted up my laptop so I could enjoy some MP3s and watched the somewhat monotonous suburban landscape fly by. As we drew closer, I could occasionally see the New York skyline peek intermittently between the suburban vistas but turned away each time.

The wait by the GWB (that's George Washington Bridge, not George W Bush) toll booths was only 10 minutes by the time we got there, not at all bad under the circumstances. Shortly after we passed the Fort Lee Hilton, I noticed a large caravan of immense trucks and cranes, all painted in red, parked silently on a nearby access road. My driver explained that the equipment had been sent over from Ohio, and was heading to lower Manhattan to help with the recovery effort. Some of the vehicles were so large that they needed to wait for traffic to dissipate a bit before they could undertake the bridge crossing.

Bookends

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you

- Simon and Garfunkel

As we sped across the bridge in the left lane, the sky over the city grew dark and ominous. Soon all visible colors were inundated by myriad shades of gray, as if to reflect the moods of the city's inhabitants. As I stared at the somber skyline, my eyes were instantly drawn to the WTC locale, the towers standing out clearly in my imagination, their outlines emphasized even more so by their absence. As I sat and stared transfixed, a truck in an adjoining lane suddenly veered sharply in our direction and began to force us towards the railing that demarcated the center divider. And just as suddenly, it swerved back to where it belonged. But the wounded vista was already gone, replaced instead by the gritty and crater-like pits of the Cross Bronx Expressway, situated on the Eastern terminus of the bridge.

As we bumped slowly southward on the crowded FDR, I had an opportunity to take in the character and characters that define my old home. On one side, two men stood about 100 feet apart quietly fishing in the East River. On the other side, several Humvees sat motionless on the side of the road, their drivers gazing casually at the traffic crawling very slowly by. Later on, we came upon a man standing by the threshold of traffic, dangling a banana peel from one hand and from the other, the empty rind of a watermelon impaled on a stick. This was clearly the makings of a deep and profound statement, but try as I might, I could not discern the meaning for myself.

We turned off the highway at 49th street and waited by a gridlock-ensconced traffic light as eight folks clad in business attire stood by engaged in heated conversion. At the next light, I watched a SuperShuttle driver unload a woman’s luggage, comprised of two large carryons and three huge stacks of newspapers, each individually bound in rope.

“That’s not mine," she exclaimed.

“But it was sitting alongside your luggage when I picked you up at Newark,” the driver replied.

Something told me that there was going to be a huge shortage of USA Todays at a EWR newsstand that day.

We reached our destination at about 11:15 and the moment I stepped out of the van, the heavens let lose and I found myself engulfed in a pounding downpour. I was running a few minutes late for my first meeting and figured my clients would now have an even better reason to think I was all wet.