End-of-the-Line Trip #1: 7 Train to Main Street, Flushing

My Beloved and I were either mad dogs or Englishmen in a previous life, because we never do anything except in a blazing midday sun. A hike in the California desert? A tourist trek across Cochin, India? Hang on, we have to wait till the clock strikes twelve and the temperature goes into triple digits.

And so our debut End-of-the-Line trip (the first of our excursions to the farthest reaches of the New York subway system) took place on the hottest day of the year so far. Admittedly not 100 degrees—but 86 and the first humid day of the season. That immediately put us in a good mood.

Our mission: to ride to the end of the #7 train, said to be one of New York's busiest lines and one of the most ethnically diverse subway lines anywhere. The 7 originates at Times Square in Manhattan and ends at Main Street and Roosevelt Boulevard in Queens—smack in the middle of Flushing's Chinatown.

But the fun of the ride started earlier, as soon as the train emerged from under the East River and came up above ground in Queens. I love riding elevated trains, getting the roof-top view of the surrounding city and the occasional glimpse into people's windows. Three of the stations in Queens, including 46th Street, take advantage of the outdoor light on the elevated platforms with beautifully imaginative stained-glass windows.

















We came out of the subway at Flushing-Main Street and into a crush of people on the sidewalks, shops selling discounted Chinese music CDs, and a profusion of Chinese bakeries and noodle shops. As usual when we go anywhere, I had specific foodstuffs on my mind, and if it's Chinatown this must be bao—specifically cha siu bao, roast-pork buns.

After a meander through the indoor Flushing Mall (where the massive True Love Wedding Shop made us happy we'd eloped), we came back out to Main Street and spotted the Taipan Bakery. Although I prefer steamed bao (white and doughy on the outside, sweet barbecued pork on the inside), when you're starved and you're staring at a bakery case exploding with gorgeous sugary products, you don't stand on principle if only a golden-brown baked bao is available. I heroically resisted the cakes and custard buns, picked out my bao, and Stan went for a red bean-paste bun. Then we chewed and sweated our way south through the crowds on Main Street to the Chung Fat Supermarket.

Had we not been looking at a few more hours of touring in the hot sun, I might have been tempted by one of these grumpy fellows...

















...or by a bag of frozen dumplings, which filled two entire rows of freezer cases:






















Instead we got a box of "Crisp Bits" banana chips and left the shopping mania behind. Another half mile down Main Street and we were in another world: the Queens Botanical Garden. One look at the ferns in the Woodland Garden and I instantly felt 20 degrees cooler.






















The Botanical Garden is part of a string of parks that flow through Flushing (sorry) like a gentle green river—while the Long Island Expressway, the Grand Central Parkway and the dreaded Van Wyck (which leads to JFK, as any Seinfeld fan can tell you) roar by on overpasses.

We walked across the street to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, site of the 1964 World's Fair:






















It's changed some since then:






















But my favorite thing was the description of the time capsule contents from 1964, which were buried alongside the capsule from 1938–39.

















I especially love "one checkered bikini," "tranquilizers," and the misspelling of "cigarettes" for all eternity.

The busy Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is also the site of the U.S. Tennis Association's Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, to which I had to pay homage—though sadly, the players we spied through the chain link fence bore no resemblance to Roger Federer or Rafa Nadal.

















Having now achieved our end-of-the-line objective, it was time to head back the other direction. But first we had a few more stops to make.

While in theory it seems a romantic notion to blindly hop a train, go to the last stop, and see what you see, I knew that would likely to lead to some serious disgruntlement as we ended up hot and sweaty down a blind alley in an industrial no-man's-land. So we did some research before the trip, including consulting our friend Rick Meyerowitz, who's been to every corner of every borough and has eaten everything he found there. And lived to draw the tale. (If you didn't see it in The New Yorker, check out the astonishing culinary subway map Rick produced with his partner Maira Kalman, in which they reproduced the New York subway map and replaced every single station with place-appropriate funny food names. All aboard for Montezuma's Revenge!)

So with Rick's suggestions in mind, we walked up and over the walkway that bridges the park and the Stadium-that-should-be-Shea-but-is-now-Citi-Field, and caught the 7 going back toward Manhattan. We got off five stops later, at 82nd Street, and stepped into the life under the el—the way much of New York used to be, until they tore down the 6th Avenue El and the 3rd Avenue El, and the El that once ran right up our street in the Village.






















Having left Flushing's Chinatown behind, we were now surrounded by taquerias, clothing stores, divorce attorneys, bars, and music representing seemingly every country in Central and South America. I had visions of grabbing an empanada (an Argentinian bao?), but before we knew it, we'd arrived at 74th Street and the center of Jackson Heights.

Jackson Heights has been on my must-visit list almost as long as I've been coming to New York, and especially since our 2005 trip to India. It's the locus of Indian food and shopping, and I was ecstatic as we patrolled the aisles of Patel Brothers and Subzi Mandi, picking up:
* mustard seeds (99 cents!)
* heat-and-eat packages of palak paneer (spinach and Indian cheese) and navratan korma (vegetables, cheese and cashews in a creamy tomato sauce)
* a bag of "Kerala Mixture" snacks that looked like a packaged version of the bhel puri we saw being prepared on sidewalk stoves in Bombay;
* and a bag of "Mix Mukhwas," the ubiquitous after-dinner breath freshener snack (mostly fennel seeds) offered in bowls at the front of every restaurant we visited in India.

I lusted after a sparkly sari in a shop window:






















...and we finished the afternoon with a late lunch at the touristic but excellent Jackson Diner (bhel puri and navratan korma, plus dal, cool yogurt-and-cucumber raita, warm and puffy naan bread) and two bottles of Kingfisher beer. It may be India's version of Budweiser, but it took us back to a rootop restaurant in Bombay on an impossibly humid and buggy evening, and how delicious a cool bottle of piss-water beer could taste.

Then, back up the stairs to the elevated train, an impromptu adios serenade by a full Mariachi band...






















...and we were on our way back home, back to the beginning of the line.

Long Day's Journey, redux

In the Los Angeles house I grew up in, my two older brothers had glued onto their wall a map of the Tube, the London subway system, salvaged from the years we lived in England. I loved to climb up on my brother's bed and stare at those multicolored interlocking lines and read the names of the stops. Elephant & Castle. Tooting Bec. Swiss Cottage. Ealing Broadway. Uxbridge.

I was so little when we left England that I had no memory of riding the Northern Line or the Piccadilly Line or the Bakerloo Line, and I bore a pint-size grudge about that. There was so obviously stuff going on there in those fantastic destinations—Kentish Town! Shepherd's Bush!—and I'd missed it.

Today in the New York house I live in we have a shower curtain bearing a giant map of the New York subway system. The names on this map may not be as Dickensian as those in London, but they grab me: Pelham Bay Park, Far Rockaway, Brighton Beach. They're the crooked fingers luring me to adventure.

The other week, I wrote about my meeting with the charming, enthusiastic Stanford senior who was planning to take New York by storm en route to a successful acting career. The comparison to Katharine Hepburn's wild confidence was easy—as was the contrast with my own youthful caution.

Well, here I am in New York City, a few decades late, but with time to spare. "Maybe New York itself will be your way of taking New York," My Beloved suggested after I wrote that post. You see why I married him—the man is a genius. He was exactly right. I'm not interested in conquering the New York publishing scene, or starring on Broadway or running for office. But I do want to dive into the deep end of the New York experience and muck about. And the shower curtain is going to get me there.

So today we start the first of a series of periodic adventures: We'll pick one subway line and take it all the way to the end, stopping along the way to walk, eat, explore, hit some dead ends, take some pictures, see what we see. Eventually, we'll ride every line in New York City. Today's journey: the 7 train to Flushing Main Street.

Maybe I didn't make it to Ealing Broadway, but I can take on Broadway-Lafayette (B-D-F-V trains)...and Broadway Junction (A-C-J-L-Z trains)...and East Broadway (F train)...and 74th Street-Broadway (7 train)...and Broadway-Nassau (A-C trains)... . And I consider that a more than fair trade.



1964 London tube map: (c) Transport for London, via clarksbury.com. Thank you.

Photo: Church Avenue station, Brooklyn. (c) Me

Adam's Rib

For years we had this conversation:

"Should we?"

"Nah."

"Okay."

And then one day it was:

"Let's do it."

"Okay, let's do it."

And so we got married.

At least that's the Reader's Digest version of the story. I've been trying to come up with one ever since the day two weeks ago when we stood barefoot on a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, just us and the justice of the peace and seagulls for witnesses, and said, "I will."

Reactions from family and friends had a theme: "You're kidding!" "You did WHAT?" "No way!" "You?" And various stories of falling off pieces of furniture when they heard the news.

My friend Lauren said, “I thought it was illegal for heterosexual couples to get married in Provincetown.”

And from my friend Gary: “I like that you call him 'My Beloved.' Now that you're married, will he be demoted to ‘Husband’?”

And everyone's inevitable question: “Had you planned this, or did you decide on the spur of the moment?”

We've been together for almost 10 years, so obviously the subject has come up. We didn't shudder at the idea, but we didn't feel incomplete without it. There were no when-will-you-make-an-honest-woman-of-my-daughter discussions, although seriously, that would have been darn cute.

Occasionally since leaving L.A. and moving to New York full time, my Beloved and I talked about logistics—like how much easier it is to own property together if you're married. But also about finances—like how there could be negative tax implications if we got married. We'd shrug and drop the topic.

Then there we were one Saturday watching The Bourne Ultimatum when I went over and gave my Beloved a hug. He looked at me and said, "Screw the finances. Let's do it," and I said, "Okay, let's do it."

And there you have it. Two lives changed in the span of a commercial break.

Four weeks later, we drove to the Provincetown Town Hall—rather, its temporary headquarters in a trailer up next to the cemetery—and applied for our marriage license. It was a pretty straightforward process; I think they asked for our first and last names. And we skirted the three-day waiting period by driving down to the Barnstable Family and Probate Court to apply for a waiver.

That process involved filling out a “Marriage Without Delay” form, forking over $65, and spending the 10-minute wait watching divorce proceedings in the courtroom. Clever ploy, Massachusetts! But ha ha—we were not deterred! The judge signed our waiver and the jovial Irish bailiff handed it over to us…after extracting a pledge that we weren't Yankees fans.

On the night before the big day, I sat on the bed in our rented Provincetown condo and called The Child at college to let her in on the secret—the only person to know ahead of time. She offered us her good wishes, said she was happy we were doing this, and gave us her blessing: "Finally, you're respectable!"

All that night, I listened to the rain and the wind rattle the windows. I wondered if I was brave enough to get married on the beach in a downpour. And we woke up to the sun blazing in an intensely blue sky. Thank you, universe.

At noon, we stood on the beach in that magic Cape light, looking across the bay at the lighthouse and Pilgrim Monument and MacMillan Wharf, I in my thrift shop dress and Stan in his Old Navy shirt. Before us stood the kind, warm, funny, compassionate justice of the peace, Susan Marcus, whom fate and Google had brought our way.

A wild wind swirled around us, so strong that we could barely hear our own words as Stan and I read aloud the poetry we'd chosen for the occasion—Stan from Walt Whitman:
...Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

...and me from Shakespeare:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds...

We read our vows to each other, comic yet sincere. We picked up fistfuls of sand and symbolically poured them together into one glass container—an olive oil cruet we bought at the Brewster General Store. We shared a glass of red wine, sweet and bitter. Tears streamed from my eyes, whether from emotion or wind.

And then it was done. We were married. He was my "husband." I was his "wife." Such odd words. We played with them like Play-Dough, rolling them around to see what we made of them. We wondered if we felt different. We don't, and we do.

"How's married life?" everyone asks now.

"It's superb," I say. "It's sweet."

And I believe my husband—still My Beloved—feels the same.

Keeper of the Flame

Shortly after she left Bryn Mawr college, Katharine Hepburn moved to New York City to pursue her acting career. She got a job as understudy for the lead in a play called, appropriately, The Big Pond.

"I learned the part and sat on the sidelines quite convinced that I would be far superior to the leading lady I was watching, Lucile Nikolas," she wrote in her autobiography, Me. "She was a very competent actress who did not have the advantage of being very young and absolutely outrageous and full of a sort of wild confidence based on nothing but energy and ego. Of course I thought I was scared to death, but all I can say now, looking back, is that I was not scared enough. Open a door, I'd go through. Even if the room I was entering was on fire."

This is who I should have been. At least, this is who I thought for years I should have been, back before I stopped second-guessing my 21-year-old self. Before I realized that all my choices—as safe and un-outrageous as they may have been—brought me here, to a place I'm happy to be.

But for many, many years, I berated myself for my Hepburn Deficit Disorder. Why couldn't I have had that energy and ego? Why didn't I assume that I was better, more talented and capable than the next woman—instead of what I did assume, which was that pretty much anyone else on the planet was more deserving than I. Why couldn't I charge through an open door, instead of peering tentatively around the doorframe?

Well, as Hillary Clinton once said, "Coulda, woulda, shoulda—didn't."

I'm over it now. Pretty much. But the other day I met the alternate-universe version of myself, and I have to admit, it gave me a pang.

He doesn't look much like me—he's about two feet taller, almost 30 years younger, African-American and gay. He's a senior at Stanford, my alma mater, and he found me through the alumni association. He wants to move to New York and hoped to get my advice about neighborhoods and jobs and...whatever. Mostly he talked and I listened—with admiration and a rueful shaking of my head.

"New York is the ultimate city!" he said as he perused the diner menu, before telling the waiter he'd please like the "freshly brewed coffee."

"It's so easy to be gay here, it's so easy to be African-American here. This is where it all happens. It's the greatest city in America!" No, he said, he definitely did not want to go home to Los Angeles. "Noooo, no, no. Maybe when I'm older and I'm ready to retire."

He had just auditioned for a summer theater program with Steppenwolf in Chicago, and was casting about for a job he could get in the fall in New York. "I'll do anything—I'll start in the mailroom, I'll get people's coffee. I'll walk dogs. Although I hear that's really competitive."

His plan was to work for a year while studying with his acting coach, go to drama school for three years, and then, ideally, move to London or Paris—where he'd spent his junior year abroad and attended every theatrical production he could grab hold of. "I saw 60 plays last year," he said. "I was broke, but I loved it."

When we met for freshly brewed coffee, he'd been in New York less than a week and had already seen four plays on student-rush tickets. His favorite was Red, the two-man play about artist Mark Rothko, starring Alfred Molina.

"It's about the nature of art, what is art—that whole difficult conversation and dialectic that people have," he said. "I saw it in London and I think it's even improved since then. The staging is so cinematic."

I walked him to his subway, and he thanked me profusely for my time and all the (non-existent) help I'd given him. As I turned and began to walk away, a middle-aged man leaned in to me and said, "Way too pleasant for New York."

I laughed. "Oh no," I said. "He'll do fine."

"You suddenly realize what a tremendous opportunity it is just to be alive. The potential."

And then—bam!—we lived in New York. And it only took me 40 years to get here.

I keep waiting for the giant wallop of realization, the smack on the rear end as the door to California hits me on my way out. But it's not like that. I've discovered that instead it's an incremental dawning, a gradual accumulation of signs and moments.

I got my New York driver's license, surrendering my California license in the process. I have no car, but I have a driver's license, on which I've given my permission to donate my organs and tissue and eyeballs in the event of my untimely death. (Realizing that my eyeballs would likely go to a New Yorker, the better to see the Empire State Building, was one tiny wallop of realization.)

I got my first piece of direct mail containing return-address labels in my name paired with my New York address—and considered donating money to the cause just because they were the first. Yes, I'm that kind of idiot.

I give directions to inquiring strangers on a regular basis, and have only once sent someone 90 degrees in the wrong direction.

I launch into conversation with total strangers, as I did today on the subway when I found a car full of people dressed in plastic bags. It was the day of the New York City Half-Marathon, explained the woman on my right, who was proud to have completed it in under 10 minutes per mile.

I group my errands not by which side of the street the stores are on or by how many left turns I can avoid, but by the walking route I'll take to get to them. The other day I had a nice straight-line trajectory from the neighborhood office store to the FedEx office to the Jefferson Market library, back to Three Lives bookstore and home. It was a sunny day and I smiled the whole way.

I'm convinced I love snow and slush as much as sun and blue skies. I do not make myself popular when I express this opinion—admittedly formed after only half a winter on the east coast. But where else can you enjoy scenes like this:

















And pat yourself on the back for having survived this:






















And then you see things like this in a sidewalk planter, which give you a whole new appreciation for spring and new life and starting afresh and hope and change and you feel like the first person who's ever witnessed the birth of a season:






















This morning The Child, home on spring break, said in the midst of a lovely 56-degree day, "I wish I could transport my L.A. friends here and say, 'So, what do you think of the weather?' And when they say, 'Brr, it's cold,' I can say, 'Yeah, no, not really.' "

I promise I'll never become a smug East Coaster who glows with moral superiority because her winters are tougher. I'll probably never call myself a New Yorker, because I haven't earned the title. I'm still an L.A. girl at heart—one who goes to the water for relief and renewal, and who feels calmed by the sun setting over the place where a body of water meets the land, whether it's over the Pacific Ocean...

















...or over the Hudson River.

















But I'm mighty happy to be here.

* Title courtesy Katharine Hepburn, speaking of her film The Corn Is Green, in her autobiography, Me.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

"Orphaned again!" my dad cried, as My Beloved and I prepared to leave my parents' home for our flight back to New York. My parents have watched a lot of kids (6) and grandkids (13) and great-grandkids (5) come and go from this house, while they stand on the front porch and wave goodbye. They prefer the hellos to the goodbyes.

We'd been staying with my parents for nearly two weeks, ever since escrow closed on my L.A. condo and we'd moved out—watching the moving truck drive away...






















...and vacuuming and scrubbing the now-empty space.

















I leaned on the third-floor railing and cried for a minute. Stan patted my back. Then we laid out our keys on the kitchen counter, gathered our backpacks and our bottles of 409 and Windex, and closed the door behind us. Goodbye, house.

The two weeks at my parents' house were a gift. Yes, it was a little weird staying in the bedroom I'd grown up in, surrounded by too many pictures of myself in my hideous adolescent state. But the come-full-circle effect was soothing in a way I hadn't expected. I started my L.A. life in this house, and I left my L.A. life in this house. In fact, I literally left my L.A. life in this house, since my mom encouraged us to fill up a drawer with our socks and t-shirts so we'd have them there for our next visit which would be VERY SOON, she suggested.

Stan and I got up early each day and sat in the backyard reading the paper, while the cat put on his Fearless Hunter costume and stalked grasshoppers.






















I had the chance to appreciate the stillness and the rustle of leaves and the changing light.

















We drove around town in the car we'd sold to my niece and borrowed back from her, now with her bright-yellow graduation tassel swinging from the rear-view mirror. I jammed my camera phone with an L.A. mosaic—from the ridiculous...






















...to the sublime.

















We scheduled as many goodbye lunches and dinners with friends and family as we could, and I always said the same thing: "We'll be back often. We'll just be traveling from east to west to east, instead of from west to east to west." But I discovered we couldn't stop people from treating this like a mournful farewell.

Between outings, we spent mornings at the breakfast table and evenings at the dinner table with my mom and dad, tucking ourselves in among the routines they've formed over 61 and a half years of marriage. I appreciated all over again my mom's unassuming strength, my dad's quick wit, the old Bob and Ray jokes retold with fresh appreciation, the Sinatra CDs playing in the background, the comfortable potato face of Jim Lehrer each night on the big TV, the sound of my mom's voice reading crossword puzzle clues to my dad, now legally blind with macular degeneration. Like a Waltons family of four, we'd bid each other good night and take up our stations in bedrooms down the creaky hallway.

And then, last Monday morning, it was time to go—time to gather our bags and the giant sheep-cat, and head east toward home.

(To be continued...)

"Has your mind taken hold again, dear Professor?"

I hope you'll excuse my long absence. I've been having a Jason Bourne moment.

For those of you who haven't enjoyed multiple viewings of The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum like The Child and I have: At the beginning of The Bourne Identity, Matt Damon is found floating in the ocean with gunshots in his back; he has no idea who he is or how he got there, or why people seem to be coming after him with nefarious intent. Turns out he's a highly trained CIA assassin, but he doesn't know that. He just knows that no matter what country he's in or what life-threatening situation presents itself, he can miraculously speak the language and instinctively break a guy's neck in less time than it takes to say, "Who am I? Where am I?"

My Bourne Identity Crisis is less deadly, more domestic. Still, a little unsettling.

I'm back in Los Angeles again, this time to close escrow on my condo, sell everything I own (except my baking dishes and my books; too many books), pack everything in boxes and finish—really, I mean it this time—the move to New York.

At least, my body's back in L.A.; my mind is apparently flying in on the redeye. I get in the car and my body knows how and where to drive, but my brain is going, "Wait, what?"

We arrived at LAX on a weekday morning, and took the #6 Culver City bus up Sepulveda toward home. I watched the city go by out the window. The Citibank (Didn't that used to be called something else? What the heck was it?), the Trader Joe's, Dinah's Family Restaurant. It all felt familiar—my body knew enough to relax, sensing we'd be on this bus for a while—and it was completely strange, too. (The strangeness amplified when the bus stopped outside a mental clinic and a woman about my age got on, her hand clamped over her own mouth. She sat in the front of the bus and rocked a little, emitting stifled screams from behind her hand.)

We walked in to an oddly familiar foreign apartment, everything in a realtor-approved state of fake perfection. What is this place, and why do I know where they keep the extra rolls of toilet paper?

Since then, we've been going through the appropriate motions: selling, packing, boxing. A lone desk chair bobs sadly on an ocean of blank carpet. The desk is gone, though; carted off by another in a new series of Craigslisters. The sound of screeching packing tape travels around the apartment—now it's coming from the walk-in closet! now from the kitchen! A molehill of taped, labeled cardboard boxes grows into a mountain in The Child's former bedroom.

It's weird. What can I say? Qu'est-ce que je peux dire? Wait, what?

And it's exciting, too, of course. I'm developing a new identity. Someone who can fly in from New York, be dropped down in the middle of Los Angeles and instinctively find her way around. And, of course, miraculously speak the language. Sorry I'm late, I was trying to avoid the 405, so I took the 134 to the 101 and got off at Coldwater and came over the canyon, which was fine till I got to Santa Monica, so I thought Olympic would be better, but...

Try that, Jason.

* * * * *

Title courtesy Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn, of course) in The Philadelphia Story, screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, based on the play by Philip Barry.