Nineteenth Century Freight

The game drive?  It was lovely.  But we all just sat in our seats, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the animals that were marching about the parks. Don’t leave the vehicle!  Eat your boxed lunch.  Stand up every now and again to look out the roof and snap a photo.  Addis Ababa was many things, but what with the high altitude and the absence of catalytic converters, I wasn’t inspired to do a lot of cardiovascular exercise. 

Being home now in New York is grand.  But I fret about the work I’m not doing and move from one seat to another, reading, chatting. The refrigerator is full of things I shouldn’t eat.  I need some exercise.  We all do.   My younger daughter isn’t sure, but eventually I convince her to head out on a bike ride. 

I hadn’t planned to be but I’m reminded of a similar bike ride with my older daughter from probably three years ago.  She would have been the same age as the younger one is now.  Though they are very different people.  We headed out to the bridge that time and I suspect we’ll do the same today but I’ll need to be judicious about how I introduce such an idea lest we have an early mutiny.  The trail heads out from behind a dying mall.  Behind the supermarket dumpsters and the dead end, bank parking lot is the trailhead. Riding out and up on to the trail, the spell of the mall, the concrete, the traffic, dissolves now beneath the green canopy. 

Either side now is steep drop off.  One imagines the workers, distant relatives of mine perhaps, helping to pile the embankment up, to reinforce it so the tracks could be laid and the trains could ride along carrying all that nineteenth century freight.  We pass the Catholic cemetery where my grandmother and her husband, my granddad namesake now both lay.   The green of these oak leaves, these unnamable dark summer green that touch upon the earliest memories of what it was to discern color and consider trees.    

Park benches are named for loved ones.  One of them is for “pop” which gives me pause.  People are skating and walking and coming up behind us saying “on your left.”  And I am marveling here, two hours from the immigrant forge of Manhattan, at the American cultural diversity, the American class diversity, the rich mix that isn’t really much a part of my life in China.  And I wonder what my little one makes of all this. 

She wants to stop out on the center of the bridge, with all humanity walking back and forth beneath the sky.  I have it in my mind to go all the way across the bridge.  She knows this and asks if we can’t just turn around here.  She begins to lecture me on how important it is to listen to people sometimes.  And another time I would have told her we were going to push on regardless, but she’s made her point well.  Sometimes I don’t listen.  I’ll listen.  Let’s enjoy the ripples of the Hudson for a bit and then we’ll head back home.

Sunday, 07/16/17