Disorientation With the Familiar

Riding through Ridgewood.  When you take these buses back up out of the city, they sometimes make a stop here.   It’s not much of a “stop.”  Just a little shelter on the side of the highway.  Two people were standing there, just now.  But this must not have been what they were looking for.  This is some other highway that runs through suburban New Jersey, like 17, which we take on the way down.  Like 17 there are countless mini-malls on the side to pull off and onto.  When we caught the Korea Day Parade in Manhattan not long ago I noticed that one of the marching bands was from Ridgewood.  I have decided that Ridgewood must have a big Korean population. 

Oddly, the map application tells me we are on Route 17.  It’s hard to believe.  Perhaps what’s happening is that at night, as a passenger, as opposed to when you drive through behind the wheel, your eyes are drawn to different things, like the actual road side establishments instead of the car in front of you.  Why they even have a Sheraton.  I’ve stayed in so many.  I wonder if I’ll ever have reason to stay in that one.  Looking out, I’m still confused.  It just doesn’t look the same. 

I started out with Coltrane’s “Setting the Pace.” And it sounded lovely as I looked out at the nighttime, winter skyline in Manhattan.  My mind rifled through the various Coltrane stories I’d read about in his biography thirty years ago, like when he was forced to walk the bar and play at one joint, which he hated and how devastated he was when one night he had to do so when Bird was in the audience.  And as if on queue, the random shuffle of Spotify has begun to play a version of “Summertime” by Charlie Parker.  And right after is a version of “I Can’t Get Started.”  I resisted the urge to look until I’d laid my money down on just who it was:  Guessed it right; Prez.  If I don’t know the tune.  I find it hard to correctly pick between Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. 

A friend met me today and drove me us both down to a meeting near Nevins in downtown Brooklyn.  It’s always disconcerting to drive around Manhattan and catch views you wouldn’t otherwise associate or connect neighborhoods that are otherwise separated by too much distance for a pedestrian.  We must have come down Seventh Avenue and I was surprised to suddenly be in the West Village and then have an unobstructed view of the Woolworth Building up ahead, before I realized we were on Canal St.  A theme then today of disorientation with the familiar.  I think I’ll look at all the black and white photos I snapped on the Manhattan Bridge heading over to Brooklyn and of the Brooklyn Bridge taken on the way back before we headed north on the FDR. 

Sunday, 01/26/20