May Have Been Midwood

My older daughter is flying into town, from college.  It’s going to be wonderful to see her.  I’d opted to spend fifty bucks more to fly her direct with no lay overs.  I imagined her snowed in, in Detroit, having missed a connection and told her to get the direct flight.  I considered but didn’t spring for the additional $150.00 that would have flown her into Newark on United.  Next time I will consider this more carefully. 

Midday on the last Friday before Christmas, we picked up my younger one from school around 1:00PM and headed on in.  We didn’t pull into the Terminal 4 arrivals area until about 4:15PM.  The traffic was merciful enough until we got to the approach to the Whitestone Bridge which was backed up for miles.  Crossing it was an accident in the oncoming lane, and not any toll booth as I’d suspected that all the rubbernecks were slowing for.  But then the Van Wyck Expressway (did you know Robert Anderson Van Wyck he was the ninety-first mayor of NYC?) was bumper to bumper.  If you look at Google Maps, like I just did, to find out what the hell the name of that road you were stuck on is called and see that it is called Route 678, which isn’t what anyone else in New York calls it so you zero in closer and see that it was, the Van Wyck, it suggests the trip from the Whitestone Bridge to JFK is fourteen minutes of drive time, which may well be the case at 2:00AM, but at 3:30PM its more like an hour and fifteen minutes. 

I barked at my younger one as I tried to welcome my older one, as I pulled up and immediately caused a jam with the people behind me yelling and me sharing the love.  We couldn’t get the trunk open.  Her luggage was too big to fit in the back seat and we generally made a mess of it.  Speeding off we got back in traffic.  The ride to my sister’s where we to pick up her gifts to bring north should also have been about fifteen minutes but was projected to be and our and a half away in rush hour.   Waze had us off the BQE and into some crosstown neighborhood that may have been Midwood, then on to Ocean Parkway and up into her Sunset Park neighborhood.

She’d sold us on having our dinner in a redone warehouse shopping and dining complex near her home called Industry City.  There was supposed to be a vegan joint named Renegades and we headed there and parked in the lot by the Marine Terminal.  Renegades was closed but we spied people dining in another part of the complex and headed into a rather wonderful Japanese food complex and soon were having ramen, okonomiyaki and some kohada, and saba sushi, served by grumpy, middle-aged Japanese men that was outstanding.  At the table next to us two guys my aged whom I figured were Russian had an adorable girl of nine or so with them who seemed to be to be what a nine-year-old daughter of my best friend might look like and they turned and asked waitress who served them: “Are you Japanese?”  I could have told you how she would have responded, before she did, in fact say: “No.  I’m Chinese.”  But then if I asked them if they were Russian I may well have been wrong as well.

                       

Saturday 11/21/19