Day One: Escape from Arizona to Manhattan

We head to Sky Harbor

We need to leave at 5AM for Sky Harbor and it’s 3AM and I can’t sleep. I had packed and checked and rechecked my checklist and I had hit the pillow at midnight and I am still wide awake. How can I wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep at night if I can’t sleep the night before we leave because show tunes keep cycling through my head?

New York, New York. It's a wonderful town.
The Bronx is up and the Battery's down.
The people ride in a hole in the ground.

At 4AM I wonder why Tucson doesn’t have a theme song. What rhymes with hot as hell?

At 5 AM the neighbor’s roosters are crowing and our house cat is stretching so I surrender to the day and turn on the coffee. We load our backpacks, our rollers and our three grumbling selves into our Beast. I turn the ignition key and begin narrating the obvious. “New York here we come. Start spreading the news.” My passengers groan. The sun is up, Ellen’s navigating, Matt’s slumbering, and 40-miles in I’m still narrating the obvious. “In 10-hours we’ll be in Manhattan!”

We stop at the rest stop on I-10 just north of Casa Grande. On behalf of the state of Arizona a sign says “Rest and relax” and “Thank you for being considerate of others.” Inside the restroom above one of the urinals a sticker reads “Russia jails LGBTQ perverts”. A reminder that some of us here are not as considerate of others as we should be. Visitors to our state shouldn’t be surprised. We do warn visitors there are venomous reptiles in the state.

It’s so early Mourning doves are cooing “who cooks for you”. As my passengers snooze I muse about what epithets the pushy pigeons in Central Park will be cooing.

We find the Terminal 3 airport parking garage, park our beast and I’m still narrating the obvious. “Well here we are.”

Ellen says she’ll relax once we’re past security. We know the drill. Bags in the crates… Shoes off…Stand on the feet…Raise your arms…You’re good…Now boarding Group 3…Please have your boarding pass ready.

At JFK airport our greeter, a new American from Guyana, greets us and directs us to our Haitian-American driver who drives us into Manhattan, the sauna that doesn’t sleep at night, and there’s still sunlight shining on sweltering Gotham so we walk from our hotel, the Essex, down 7th Avenue to shimmering Times Square where the cacophony of commerce and congestion reminds me this is the capitol of the free world, the singular city where the American dream teems with exuberant life.

Exhausted and full of dollar-a-slice pizza we walk on to Bryant Park where we see the Empire State building in the distance reigning over the midtown skyline. We circle the New York City Library and turn uptown on 5th Avenue and stroll past Rockefeller Plaza, Tiffany’s and St. Patrick’s Cathedral back up to the southern edge of Central Park and turn west to our hotel and everywhere we walked I saw the ghosts of the immigrants who bore me.

Here on this island of 1.7 million stories their stories are my stories.

When we visit Ellis Island on Monday I’ll see the name of my great grandfather, Simon, the 1861 arrival turned thief who was sentenced to Sing Sing in 1870 and who opened a successful carpentry shop upon his release. When we walk the city I’ll imagine my grandfather William above us in the sky riveting the skyline into place steel beam by steel beam. Inside St. Pat’s I’ll find the ghost of Lawrence, my father, the Altar boy who survived the streets as a boy when his father, William, fell to his death and his mother, Mary, perished in a tenement fire and the family of 12 scattered to write their own American stories.

I am proud of them and grateful to be a citizen of the nation that offered them refuge. I see their faces in the face of every New Yorker and I am proud of this great American city that remains a beacon of hope to the world and tonight as I slumber in room 521 I have no musical showstoppers ringing through my head, simply these words unspoken by the multitude of Americans who call this island home: Out of many, one.