The Crooked and the Straight: March 2006 Archives

Spending a few days in New York City

I hadn’t been to New York City in something like ten years; not since my family took a short trip there. My parents, for whatever reasons, have always had a very different idea of vacation than I have. Their vacations involve waking up early every single day in order to take advantage of the (usually) free hotel breakfast, and then tearing off to parts unknown in order to cross off as many things on a To Do list as possible. Sometimes I feel as though I’m Neil Armstrong on the surface of the moon, carefully examining a lovely geological specimen, while Buzz Aldrin is waving frantically behind me and calling “hurry up, it’s just another damn rock! If we don’t get a move on we’ll never see everything! Look, there’s Central Park! Look at all those trees! No time for lollygagging, let’s move!”

That’s not entirely fair, but it is fair to say that compared to family vacations past, my few days in NYC were spent in pursuit of the anti-vacation. I slept in, I usually skipped breakfast, I had a list of things I might want to do but no set schedule or itinerary or anything like that. It was bliss. My trip to New York had several purposes: to explore a city, to catch up with old friends, and to meet some new ones. On all fronts, mission accomplished.

I don’t have a lot of stories to tell or a lot of pictures to share, but there’s not a lot about NYC that I could say or photograph that hasn’t been said or photographed before, better, by someone else. Case in point:

As someone with essentially no schedule, I found myself amazingly unhurried. I like Seattle because it’s a fairly laid-back city. My sister likes D.C. because it is a frenetic city, and New York feels like D.C. on fast forward. I felt at times like I was walking through the crowds in slow motion, rivers of people pouring around me while I ambled from one place to the next.

One morning, I sat in the sun in Central Park and ate a giant chocolate chip cookie, watching the horse-drawn carriages, the joggers, the inline skaters, the kids in strollers, the walkers, the hawkers of food and trinkets, as all manner of people swarmed by one their way from point A to point B. And I sat, at some point I didn’t even feel like giving a label, and just watched. People are fascinating.

I made it to the Magnolia Bakery and had a delicious cupcake, and visited several different and interesting bars and restaurants. I visited the MoMA, and whistfully longed to also visit the MET, the Guggenheim, and the American Museum of Natural History. Spending time with friends took precedence, though, and those museums must wait for my return. But I was never bored; I figure in a city of 12 million or so people, if you’re bored your doing something very wrong. I spent afternoons in two different, beautiful parks, and I spent a lot of time just walking around, taking it all in. It was almost a perfect vacation.

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Visiting my sister's school in the Middle of Nowhere, Indiana

My sister teaches at a private boarding school called La Lumiere somewhere in the middle of Indiana. The school is in a small town called Laporte where, as Rachael likes to say, “there are two streets, some antique shops, and some bars.” It’s true. I’ve been there. I’ve seen the antique shops and the intersection. Well, technically, the school is in an unincorporated part of the county that Laporte is also in, and so Laporte is merely the closest city and thus takes on the responsibility of delivering mail. When I say unincorporated, I mean it. The school’s property (some few hundreds acres of it) border, on one side, a hunting ground. The new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is a La Lumiere graduate, interestingly enough. I have it on good authority that he was only appointed to the Court because Dick Cheney once shot his father in the face with a shotgun. (There, I got my Lettermanesque zinger in there. Moving on…)

La Lumiere (or, as the hipsters say, La Lu) is apparently what you get when you combine the week-long mosquito-infested misery of summer camp with the years-long acne-ridden anxiety of high school. At least, that was my first impression after stepping out of my sister’s car in the parking lot. But parking lots can be deceiving, and this desolate and gravely pasture didn’t tell the whole story. The campus itself is quite beautiful; there is a lake and large fields for sports, lovely wooded paths, and apparently a ropes course. There are several small dormitories spread across the campus, and I learned that one of the things they tried to do was to keep the senior girls’ dorm and the senior boys’ dorm as far apart as possible. This is borne out by the fact that the girls live on one side of campus while the boys live approximately in Nepal.

Also, a word to the would-be smokers at La Lu (see, I’m hip too!): you’re all being incredibly stupid. The teachers all know where you folks go to smoke. They probably know places to smoke that you don’t know about because they have been there for years and you are young and stupid. Also, when there is snow on the ground, you leave these things called footprints. And Sherlock Holmes could be blasted out of his mind on opium and still follow your trail from the cigarette butts to your clique’s table in the lunchroom. So don’t act surprised when you get caught. Oh yeah, and when you smoke outside at night, people can see the glowing embers for miles.

La Lumiere, which means approximately “The Light” in French (either that or “The Ham Sandwich,” , my French is rusty) wasn’t bestowed some pretentious Francophilic name in order to engender thoughts of ivy-covered halls—they don’t have any—or hundreds of years of tradition—they only have 43—or anything like that. It was named after the family who owned the house and the land before they decided to turn it into a school. This was just one of many interesting facts I learned on a walking tour conducted by my sister’s most excellent friend (and coworker) Beth. I also learned that if I donate enough money I can get the island in their lake named after me for a year. And also that, much to my surprise, the students don’t refer to the Student Activity Center as the “Sack”. (I did learn where the funky odor in the SAC probably comes from, and you don’t really want to know.)

It’s a lovely school, really. It’s just that, as a public school student who graduated along with approximately 300 other people I don’t care about anymore, I can’t imagine only having 40 people in my entire graduating class, or having fewer than 200 students in the entire school. That’s far too few other kids around for me to disappear anonymously into the crowds, as was so often my modus operandi. I took comfort in being one of the dorks; I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be The Dork. (Although it would have been easier to contend with just The Jock, I suppose.) I went to a suburban high school, which certainly isn’t high school writ large, but I can’t imagine what it would have been like in high school writ small.

But I can understand the allure of one aspect of it, I suppose. With a school that size, it’s really more of an extended family than it is just another school. I get the appeal of that, of knowing all the other students, and all the teachers and staff, well enough to be friendly with all of them and friends with many of them. That would have made high school a lot more tolerable, I think.

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