Impressions Of The Day

After the worst sleep last night I have had in months I no more felt like going out this morning than I did in jumping off the Empire State Building six blocks away from us. However I forced myself to eat breakfast and get ready for the day. I staggered along the three blocks to Grand Central Station with my husband, collapsed on a slippery plastic seat on the 6 train a couple of minutes later and from there the day was a happy blur of sights and sounds, but tonight I have no stamina left to record the events chronologically in much detail. At Union Station deep below Times Square we transferred to Q train and began the long journey deep into the borough of Brooklyn: flashing past underground stations, flying over Manhattan Bridge, water and boats and the Statue of Liberty glinting in the morning sunshine, descending back underground for half an hour before the train disgorged us onto a narrow pedestrian walkway, mostly deserted of other passengers, with a long walk to the Exit….it reminded us of the deserted, terrifyingly narrow pedestrian train platforms in rural Japan. I was still staggering about trying to clear my fuzzy, exhausted brain but I noticed right away the buildings being only three or four storeys high, the sidewalks far less crowded than in Manhattan, a general welcoming grubbiness and a few trees scattered here and there. We walked for several blocks into this neighbourhood so deep into Brooklyn we were close to Coney Island, and located the reason for this long trip on public transportation: Eichlers! It is a retail store for all things Jewish, a much larger, brighter, more well stocked store than the little hole in the wall shops tucked away on the side streets in Williamsburg where we have done our Jewish accoutrements shopping in the past. The bright lights hurt my eyes as I gazed at rows and rows of books written in Hebrew, music recordings and a huge section dedicated to teaching young children the faith. While I was having visual overload my husband was purchasing a new  prayer shawl and it is some beautiful. He has been looking for a way to revitalize his Daily Office, (Anglican clergy daily prayers) and if this gorgeous, full body enveloping tallit doesn’t accomplish that I don’t know what will! 

By the time he led me out of the bright lights of Eichlers I was about to lose consciousness, but he got me onto a transit bus a block away. We travelled almost to the Coney Island connector bus before getting off this bus, crossing the street and boarding another of the plushy, more expensive express buses to take us miles and miles across the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway back to Manhattan. As we flew along the expressway I admit I dozed off for a few minutes and when I came to I was gazing across the water at the Statue of Liberty for the umpteenth time this week. I flopped my tired self off that bus back beside the Bowling Green subway station, beside the Jewish Holocaust Museum, expecting to hop on the subway to immediately go home and go back to bed, but somehow found myself being propelled several blocks farther south along the sidewalk back to the waterfront, past the Staten Island Ferry terminal with its plethora of security guards with sniffer dogs, around to the eastern boardwalk to Pier 11 where my husband gleefully produced two tickets to ride the ferry all around that arm of the East River, eventually docking back at the terminal only a few blocks from home. The trip is a blur of choppy waves, seemingly interminable stops, being forced to sit down topside by a lovely couple from Chicago who were determined I would be better off sitting in a hard chair facing the opposite direction to where we were heading the whole trip, instead of standing comfortably at the rail enjoying the view and keeping my tummy from jumping, who talked incessantly even though all I could hear through the gale force wind was, “Mwaamp, mwaamp, mwaamp” as I tried to keep my heaving, seasick tummy in check. My husband, still standing happily at the rail taking phone photos of the Manhattan, Williamsburg and Green Point skylines, had no idea even at this point, four hours after leaving  home, that I had not overcome my morning stupor was grinning and hollering, “Surprise honey! A ferry ride! Isn’t this great?” Hahaha. He was having the happiest morning ever and who was I to disillusion him? After 45 minutes out on the choppy water we finally docked at home. Getting off the boat and out of the wind….but thank God we’d been sitting outside on the top deck instead of inside on the lower deck where I would have been very ill indeed….I started feeling a bit better; enough better that when my husband took us for lunch at Townhouse Diner I was able to ingest a sandwich and keep it down. No wonder I had been dizzy and ill on the ferry: besides being sleepless most of the previous night, it was at that point six full hours since I had eaten breakfast! No wonder I was so woozy! Thankfully the sandwich helped me feel considerably better. I will never confess to my happy husband, thrilled by both his new tallit and his ferry ride surprise for me, just how wretched and miserable I was feeling from the moment we left home today. He is such a sweetheart and wasn’t able to return upstate to see the Motorcycle Museum or take a trip over to Roosevelt Island, which he was very accepting of, despite how badly he wished to do both things. As far as he is concerned I had as wonderful a day today as he did and once we finally arrived home and had a nice visit with our son I was feeling a lot better. As groggy and fuzzy as my head was today, I managed just fine and I love my husband's attempts to make me extra happy. 😊 Bless him!