Author: Mark E. Scott

I watched her face, kept glancing over, hoping it would light up in the way I imagined mine did 38 years before. It was unfair of me to put this pressure on her, unspoken though it was. At least I believed it to be unspoken. It’s possible, through a series of dropped comments in various conversations, that I gave myself away. It’s possible she already knew what I wanted from her, but if she did know she didn’t give it away. Though only sixteen she played her cards close to her chest. I would just have to keep observing, hoping she would give me something, something the opposite of what I was seeing now, now on the long shuttle ride from Newark International to the hotel in mid-town.

The van was full to the brim with visitors from various corners of the globe, all struggling with various levels of frustration at the time being consumed by the ride. The van, and we, were being guided by a harried but pleasant man of what I assumed to be Hispanic origin. At various moments, he had been scolded in French and, I believe, German as well and although he handled it well I felt sorry for him. I think my daughter did as well but it was hard to tell. The back of her head gave away little away as I stared at it from the third-row bench seat, so my opinion of her opinion concerning the emotional disposition of the driver is based on my general knowledge of her ability to feel empathy. (Instead of riding next to Lydia I had been assigned a seat directly behind her.) To my left was a frowning, sweaty, heavy set woman who also happened to be traveling with her daughter. Though in these types of situations I generally make some attempt at polite conversation, the frowning mother appeared to be no happier than the French or the Germans, so I left her alone and instead focused on keeping my daughter’s spirits up by saying dumb things to the back of her head.

“Why are you like this?” she asked with mock desperation after I made a more-than-obvious observation about the weather. It was raining and the van’s air conditioning system was valiantly fighting a losing battle against the internal and external humidity.

“Are we there yet?” I asked a tousle of hair on the back of her head.

“Dad, please stop.” She giggled while scolding me, betraying the otherwise well-developed affectation of annoyance. Or perhaps embarrassment. Maybe both.

Mercifully the Roosevelt Hotel was the first stop. I’m not sure if this was due to logistics or because I made a point to be nice to the driver, but it didn’t matter. Lydia and I were the first out. I expressed my appreciation with cash and a sentence in Spanish I had been working on since the airport. “Lo siento. Espero que tu dia mejore.” I said. (I’m sorry. I hope your day improves.) “Gracias, mi amigo. Muchas gracias,” he replied with a tired smile as he deposited our luggage on the sidewalk.

I picked the Roosevelt because it was close to everything we were planning on seeing and doing. And for its beauty. Walking into the lobby of the Roosevelt is like walking into an artist’s rendering of what a lobby should look like, the lobby in the painting built in grander days when everyone wore tuxedoes and formal gowns. Lydia was sufficiently impressed, the first hopeful sign since we got on the plane in Cincinnati. She was less so about the room, which was clean and decently appointed, but apparently beneath her standard for overall square footage.

“It’s so small!” It was more a smiling observation than a damnation.

“It’s New York, sweetie.” I really didn’t have a better answer even though I understood the context was, as yet, unfair. This was, after all, her first time in the city. Her first time in a hotel in the city. To what was she to compare her immediate experience? “You’ll see what I mean after a while.”

I needed to get her out and about. “Let’s walk over to Times Square.”

The weather hadn’t changed in the twenty minutes it had taken to check in and drop our bags in the room. An ever-so-slight drizzle still fell from the sky. It was just enough water to consider buying an umbrella but not quite enough to actually convince me to make the purchase, so the walk up 45th was punctuated by us ducking under the occasional awning whenever the drizzle morphed into something somewhat more than a drizzle.

“It’s like downtown Cincinnati.” We had just reentered the sea of humanity after a brief awning respite.

I thought for a moment, trying to see what she was seeing. “Well, yes and no. Not quite.” I could have explained the contrast between the two cities in any number of ways, population density being the most obvious in the moment, but held my tongue. These were facts for her to discover. For my part I walked with the joy I had always felt in the city and absorbed the energy of it. She would come around, I told myself. She would come around. I wasn’t sure what the trigger would be, but I knew it was out there somewhere.

It turned out the trigger was not to be found in Times Square. While certainly taken by surprise by the Naked Cowboy and amusingly observant of some tourists being used by a group of young men to glean money from other tourists, she found no magic in the place. Perhaps it was just too crowded, or too disorganized, or just too much generally. But there were signs of life.

“Do you want to see if we can walk to Central Park?” She asked me this after we bought tickets to a comedy club from a street vendor. We had also purchased third row tickets to ‘School of Rock, The Musical’ from the theater’s ticket window, an act which had definitely given her a charge and something for which to look forward.

“Let’s go for it. Can you get us there?” Neither of us understood we were at least thirty blocks from the park. We just knew it was somewhere in the middle of the island. We also didn’t understand just how crappy Google Maps is in Walk mode. Lydia gave it her best shot but we gave up after a few blocks.

“Hey sweetie, why don’t we go back to the hotel and change. We can grab some dinner at Shakespeare’s before we go the comedy club.”

“Ok.” Lydia was not (and is not) a sullen individual, but clearly she was not gleaning the energy from her surroundings in the same way as I. Indeed, her energy was flagging. We walked in near silence back to the Roosevelt.
I was going to keep Shakespeare’s in my back pocket for another day or so, holding it in reserve, but I needed help. It was in Shakespeare’s that I started to love the city. I was sixteen on my first trip to New York. I was with other high school students and had not had a good first day. Thirty-eight years prior, pre-Guiliani, I had been even less impressed than my daughter. The city was dirty. It was overwhelming. For the entire first twenty-four hours of that initial excursion I could find nothing to love about the place. But on the second day things changed, and it was dinner at Shakespeare’s that turned things around. First of all, they allowed us, a bunch of midwestern high school students, to drink. They didn’t even ask for identification. This was a dream come true for the average sixteen-year-old boy and the alcohol helped me to relax and open my mind and soul to what the city had to offer. It was a turning point for me and I knew, I just knew, it would be for her as well. The fact that Shakespeare’s was still alive and kicking decades later only served as a further testament to its glory.

We arrived ten minutes before our reservation time and were given a small table and an Italian waiter. Upon questioning we were informed my daughter could not be served as she was underage and even though the Italian took it upon himself to represent our case to management it was to no avail. I was not going to argue with the law, but was saddened by the perceived loss. When did the city become so straight laced? It couldn’t all be blamed on Guiliani, could it? There was still the Naked Cowboy, after all, or at least the Tighty Whities Cowboy. So, while dinner was fine and I was able to re-stomp some of the ground from my youth, it was an otherwise disappointing experience. It wasn’t that I had any particular interest in seeing my daughter drink, it was the idea that there still might be a place where the rules could be bent, a place for at least a little rebellion for a generally obedient teenager.

The sun hadn’t yet set as we emerged from the restaurant and hailed a cab to take us to the comedy club. I made a point to take a picture of Lydia in the cab and text it to her with the caption “Lydia’s first cab ride.” She was appropriately amused. It had been a day of firsts, a day of pictures with captions starting with “Lydia’s first…” but so far the balloon of excitement I carried to New York had yet to be inflated. And the cab driver was no help. He was more interested in conversing with someone on the other end of his cell phone than with his current fare, in a language we did not recognize. Lydia registered her thoughts on the ride once we were out of the taxi.

“I though cab drivers were talkative. They are in all the movies.”

“I guess he doesn’t watch the same movies.”

We were the first guests to arrive at the comedy club. The first by ten or fifteen minutes. The employees were quite cordial, however, and sat us at a table almost immediately. A table along the back wall opposite the stage. A table in an empty room. No matter. The server arrived immediately to take our order. I looked at Lydia before ordering.

“Black Russian?” She loves the things. As do I.

“Sure!”

I looked up at the waiter. “I’d like a Black Russian and my daughter and I would like one as well.”

“Sounds good, sir. I’ll bring those right out for you.”

Lydia and I smiled at each other, both attempting to hide our surprised joy, as if she and I had been on a drinking tour around the city and this was merely our latest stop. After the waiter was out of sight we traded a low five and felt the gloom begin to lift. Maybe things would go our way after all. Maybe it had even stopped raining. I mean, we couldn’t know for sure. The room in which we sat alone was windowless. But it certainly felt like it might have stopped raining. Regardless our drinks arrived and we toasted our good fortune as the room began to fill.

The two-hour show featured a half-dozen comedians of various levels of experience and ability. All were funny on some level. One or two were truly hilarious. Lydia laughed at the R-rated humor and did not seem embarrassed by it, even as she sat next to her father. I suspect, sitting there amongst a crowd of twenty-somethings, a drink in her hand, that she was feeling fairly mature, that she could now envision herself in this bit of potential future.

The show ended and we learned that it had, indeed, stopped raining. Lydia suggested we jump directly into a cab and head back to the Roosevelt. I suggested we walk, at least for a while. It was after eleven on a Thursday night in Manhattan and I knew there was still plenty to see, plenty of energy still available to the both of us. She did not protest and we started walking in a westerly direction, generally in the direction of the hotel, redirected only by a blocked sidewalk or two where men were repairing things, things unseen and subterranean.

“They work this late? Jeez!”

I peered over the edge of one of the manholes. “Apparently. I suppose working at this time of night is easier for them and easier for all the pedestrians. Or maybe it’s an emergency fix.”

We walked on in quiet conversation, each of us finding points of interest along the way, until her feet could no longer abide the cute-but-uncomfortable shoes she had donned for the evening. We hailed a cab with a wave of an arm, another feat she had only witnessed in movies, and finished the evening’s journey in conversation with the driver, a marked contrast from the anti-social gentleman who had delivered us to the club hours before. As the bellman opened the cab door for my smiling daughter I was sure I could feel the shift, the shift for which I had been hoping. She had begun to see the city as more than a cloudy, hulking, over-crowded Cincinnati. I went to bed feeling hopeful.

The next morning, we laid out our plan for the day, and decided we would go everywhere on the subway. After all, Grand Central Terminal was just a couple blocks away and as we approached the station my daughter was again enthralled by the sheer mass of humanity entering and leaving the building, and blown away further by the architecture and liveliness of the interior. Before we could even get to the subway ramp she had me posing for pictures on stairways and in front of signs. Given the opportunity she would have spent another hour exploring the main floor but I took it upon myself to keep us on schedule, assuring her that we would be in and out of the station quite a bit over the next four days. Once underground we found ourselves standing in line for tickets, time we used to figure out the ticket machines and study a map. Before long we were on the 4-train headed for Battery Park.

As sneakily as was humanly possible I took her picture with my phone and immediately texted it to her. “Lydia’s first ride on a subway.” She giggled at the caption but said nothing. I was sure she was waiting to see if the train would actually take us where we wanted to go. It did, of course.
The long weekend became something of a whirlwind. We kept busy doing the things tourists do. The Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and Central Park were all on the agenda, along with a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and dinner in Dumbo. Before the first day was done I turned over the keys to the subway to Lydia, allowing her to direct us around the city, find the best places to stand on the platform and learn the difference between an express and a local train. The one time I intervened I was chided deservedly for unwittingly dragging us onto a local, which stops at ever station along the way. Indeed, after that first night all our travels around the city began and ended at Grand Central. The trips to the park, the bridge, the statue and other points all started with a day pass. Pershing Square, a restaurant located beneath a bridge across the street from the train station became our regular breakfast place. We had it figured out. We had merged ourselves with the locals and others who knew their way around. Not even the nearly continuous car horns outside our hotel window could deter the mood. They were just part of the experience.

It was Monday and our flight back to Cincinnati didn’t leave until the early evening so we used the day and took one last ride on the subway to the Metropolitan Museum which, depending on how our paths crossed, we explored separately and together. She was fascinated by the Asian textiles and basket weaving while I spent most of my time viewing medieval paintings, mostly religious in nature.

“It’s so big. It would take me weeks to get to everything.” She related the observation to me while we waited in line at a hot dog stand in front of the museum. The moment before I had taken her picture. “Lydia’s first time at a hot dog stand.”

“No doubt. You know what? This was my first time here. At the Met, I mean.”

“Really? I should take a picture of you. ‘Dad’s first time at a museum.’”

We laughed at her jab, walking toward the subway station as we ate our hot dogs. She seemed content. I felt content as well, contentment tinged with sadness. Like all good vacations I didn’t want this one to end. Lydia and I had always been good travelling companions and I knew, considering her age and the fact that she was now driving, that a chapter was ending. I had gone through this with her older siblings as well, but she was the last one, the youngest of the group. There was no backstop, no more kids behind her to absorb my excess fatherly feelings. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing, but figured not, thinking that sixteen-year-olds are always looking forward, and for that reason she most likely did not share my sense of pending loss. For her there would be many such trips, some with me and some without. For comfort’s sake I told myself the same thing and that everything would be fine even if, on future trips, she wanted to bring her stupid boyfriend.