Almond Macaroon Cookies, a recipe.

Chocolate-covered almond macaroons


Macaroons

1 can almond paste
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
dash salt
1 cup sugar
2 to 3 egg whites (I think) or enough to get the macaroon dough to the
consistency of thick mayonnaise

Put almond paste, almond extract, salt and sugar into food processor
bowl. Process until it's thoroughly mixed. Add a couple of egg whites
and process until mixed. Add more whites if you need them for the dough
to be, as I said, the consistency of thick mayonnaise.
Pipe or spoon about 2-tablespoon-sized blobs of dough onto baking
sheets that have been lined with brown paper. Do not use parchment of
Silpat pan liners. I just cut up brown grocery bags. The blobs should
be a couple of inches apart, at least.
Bake the cookies in a 350 degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes, or until
lightly browned. Cool the cookies on the brown paper. When they are
cool, remove them thusly: Wet the backs of the brown paper. They must
be quite wet. Then carefully peel the cookies off the front and put on
a wire rack.

Buttercream (I usually make a double recipe; here are directions for
one recipe.)

In a small pan, stir together 7 tablespoons each sugar and water. Bring
to a boil over high heat; continue to boil until syrup reaches 230 to
234 degrees on a candy thermometer (or until syrup spins a 2-inch
thread when dropped from a fork or spoon).
In a small bowl of an electric mixer, beat 4 egg yolks until blended.
Beating constantly, slowly add hot syrup in a thin, steady stream; beat
until mixture is thick and lemon-colored and has cooled to room
temperature. Then beat in 2/3 cup unsalted butter (softened, but not
too soft and still cool), a tablespoon at a time, until blended. Beat
in 4 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa. If mixture thins out and is dark and
runny from overbeating, refrigerate it, then beat it again.)

Chocolate glaze

5 ounces semisweet chocolate
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons solid vegetable shortening

Place chocolate and shortening in a small bowl and melt over simmering
water; stir until just melted. Cool until lukewarm.

Prepare macaroons, let cool. Prepare buttercream and mound a generous
tablespoon over the bottom of each cookie. Refrigerate until the
buttercream is firm.
Hold each cookie, buttercream side down, and dip in chocolate to coat
buttercream. Then place cookies on a pan or plate, chocolate side up,
and refrigerate until chocolate coating is set.

That Word.

"Hey, you remember that little faggot who came in here the other day? I was like, 'Why don't you just kick my ass?' But then he just walked away like a fag."

Thus from the lips of a scrawny, fiftysomething gentleman at the end of the bar, who spoke with a heavy outer borough accent and also proclaimed for all to hear, several times, "Fuck the Red Sox." That there were only four of us in there -- the diplomatic Irishman behind the bar, the squishy man about my age in a Cubs hat who sat to my right, the Red Sox hater, and yours truly -- seemed to trouble him not at all. In fact, it seemed to me that talking the way he was, loudly, to the bartender, seemed like a challenge to the rest of us. If one of us was a Red Sox fan (which I am), then we should probably speak up, or else we were "faggots".

I'm not really a violent person, and it's not often that I wish I had the ability to do harm to a person with my bare hands, but when people toss around that word -- faggot -- I start wishing I had spent most of my youth studying some mysterious and deadly martial art. Would you sit in a bar with strangers and talk about the "niggers" and "spics" you see on the subway? Of course not, even if you were dumb enough to harbor those kinds of thoughts. So why is it that a certain breed of low-IQ testosterone freak feels like it's perfectly acceptable to go on and on about "faggots"?

Okay, I don't really need that question answered; I can suss it out on my own. Homosexuality is the last vanguard of official inequality in this country; not only is there no Gay History Month, not only can gays not get married in most states in this otherwise-great country, not only is the language littered with vile weasel words like "traditional marriage" and "family values" that really mean "fuck those faggot fudge-packers right in the ear", but it is in fact handed down from on high, from pulpits and soapboxes, that homosexuality is, at best, "abnormal", and at worst, a mortal sin worthy of the death penalty. Don't even get me started on the idea of "love the sinner, hate the sin" -- what a weak, stupid, and impossible directive that is, a cop-out from religious types who would not own up to their own bigotry. Men, in particular, with our fragile sexual egos constantly at risk of collapsing, seem to find the idea of buggery somehow beyond the pale; a man who has sex with other men is somehow less than other men, though of course most will cloak that kind of bullshit in a thin patina of religion or politics, some trumped-up worry that the PC police and gay marriage will combine to destroy the "traditional" family.

But good God do I see red when I hear that word. I'm not a PC person, not in the least; I've been taken to task more than once for saying things that might offend the sensibilities of certain people. But you don't have to be PC to be made angry by hateful labels, particularly when uttered with the kind of vitriolic bitterness that the asshole at the end of the bar had in his voice. I didn't even finish my beer. I closed my book, dropped a fiver on the counter, and left. I made eye contact with the bartender as I left; he knew why I was going. I wish he'd had it in him to eject the other guy, but I didn't really expect it or anything. Shit, I didn't have the guts to say anything, either, because as I said I am not a violent person and I don't relish a fight.

But man, I had a vision in mind. As I was leaving the bar, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: seize the guy from behind, press the bony part of my wrist right against his windpipe like a fucking garrotte, and bite his ear clean off. I could feel the ear tearing between my teeth; I could see the blood on his face and my shirt, I could hear the police sirens howling outside as they came blasting up the street to get me. I even know what I would say to the judge:

"I was provoked."

And I was. But I didn't do anything. I'm still trying to decide if I feel good about that.

Nostalgia.

Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "The pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels: round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. -- Don Draper, Mad Men

Michael Chabon once wrote something to the effect that many writers suffer from nostalgia for a time they never knew, a time before they were born. That idea is most deeply evidenced in Chabon's most successful book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a sepia-toned look at the golden age of comics, and by extension, the New York City of the late 30s and early 40s. The book is successful, so far as it is, largely due to the obvious and deep love that Chabon has for the era and the place -- something far more powerful than memory alone. I can't remember the exact essay in which he writes about this, and I haven't got the book (Maps & Legends) to hand, but I do remember when I read that, I had a feeling of -- ah-ha! There's someone else who feels this, too!

I've always been afflicted with nostalgia for things that didn't need it: I have a tendency to grow melancholy and ruminative just before moving, even if I'm moving from a place where I was nothing but lonely and unhappy, and to drench every memory of even the recent past in a summery sunlight; and by the same token, images of places I have never been, from times before I was born, can fill me with a yearning that it is beyond my powers to express. This feeling is strongest with places and things that no longer exist: the shabby façade of Ebbets Field in the heyday of Brooklyn baseball, a street from inter-war London long since bombed flat, a line drawing of a Dutch schooner bound for colonies now rightly returned to native rule. I think this is why I have always had a love of old maps -- they give form to my fantasies of time-travel, of seeing the world before its entirety had been discovered.

I come from Oregon, one of the last places on Earth to be "civilized", in the sense that people showed up there and built roads and permanent structures and cities and suchlike. Perhaps related to Oregon's long-held (and deeply-treasured) reputation as something of a frontier is the fact that it seems to be a haven for "alternative" lifestyles, people uninterested in traditional religions and philosophies, who arrive looking to find God or the self somewhere in the communion of oddballs and naturists and professors and whathaveyou that squats out there in the rain. But frontiers, unfortunately, are swallowed, and become borders, and lines demarcate where we butted up against the limits of our space -- in this case, the Pacific Ocean. But this, too, feeds some people's need to search for something that may or may not be there, but they turn the eye inward, often, these days: in the possibly legitimate search for God, there is also, well, a certain narcissism.

Okay, I'm wandering from my original topic, which was nostalgia, specifically for times before we were born. The fact is that living in the West, where everything is new, there's not much of that feeling to be had, at least not the way it is here, in New York, where not long ago I walked through a cemetery in which some of the graves were planted before there was a country known as the United States of America. And so far, of all the places I have gone, the one that has evoked that in me most strongly, more than mid-town or the Brooklyn Bridge or the nostalgic syntheticism of Citi Field, is Grand Central Terminal, the largest train station in the world, a station that has now stood for 96 years, and dates from a time when the train was the way one got around the country if one was in a hurry.

I'm sure I must have been there once before today, but if I had, it was so long ago I no longer remember it. I probably wasn't old enough to appreciate it. Not that I really know how to appreciate it now; I know nothing of architecture or really that much of its history, but to stand in its main concourse, all gleaming marble and green ceiling, and look out over it, is to feel suddenly the desire to transport myself back in time, to see men in long coats and hats, sailors home from the war, women in crepe dresses, children in kneepants, to enter that crowd and be in it, to move among them, to walk out on the street and see black hulking cars, to ride the train downtown and walk through the Italian and Jewish and Irish ghettos that have long since been gentrified into hipster hangouts and yuppie pied-a-terres.

I have always had a sense that New York, like many Eastern cities, had a heyday that lasted just through the end of WWII, a time when industry boomed and great things happened in places like Chicago, St Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. It is true that cheap cars and cheap suburbs and freeways sucked people out of these cities back in the 50s, and long stretches of them were given over to urban blight. There was even a time in the 70s when it looked like Los Angeles, that bastion of all things not-New-York, the sprawling metropolis of cars and sun and constant culture clash, would surge past New York to become the country's largest city. What a shame that would have been; I have lived in both now, and I must say, New York is an infinitely better place -- bigger, smarter, less likely to swallow your soul and spit it out soggy and somewhat the worse for wear. Anyway, I have always desired to see the New York of that heyday, when baseball was still played in Manhattan and Brooklyn, when WEAF beamed Guy Lombardo and Bob Hope across the entire eastern seaboard. In Grand Central, you almost can. Not quite, but almost.

I didn't really do much at Grand Central, because I didn't have anywhere to go, and once you leave the concourse it is, like many public buildings, given over largely to food courts and hot little tunnels where people walk quickly without ever getting anywhere. I just mooned about, trying to hear Red Barber calling a Dodger game in my mind, thinking, wishing.

The truth of the matter is that, much like the rest of New York, Grand Central is going through a bit of a renaissance in the last fifteen years or so. Gone are the days when New York City teemed with murderers and crack fiends, when the Bronx burned through a hot night's blackout, when the city threatened to sell off the station to make way for office space. Another set of tracks is being added to the 67 already in existence. An enormous renovation in the 1990s was largely successful. Nearly all the trains run on time, and if you lose your iPod, there is apparently just a 1 in 50 chance that it won't eventually turn up at lost and found. And rail! Rail is the hot new way to get to grandmother's house, or at least it will be if we wish to stop those ice caps from melting -- don't you think?

So maybe it's not all nostalgia in Grand Central. But forgive me if I wish to let it wash over me just a little bit before I get on a train and go anywhere.

Meet the Mess!

The year 2000 was a bit of a high water mark for the New York Mets, at least those of recent vintage; led by Mike Piazza and Edgardo Alfonso, they wandered into the playoffs as the wild card, and somehow found themselves playing against the then-dynastic Yankees, albeit a team at the tail end of its dynasty, one that had staggered through the regular season with only 87 wins and the next year would begin a run of postseason futility to which people might ascribe supernatural causes if it had happened to a team not called the New York Motherfuckin Yankees. The Mets may even have been the favorites in that series. But they lost, and fairly easily, amid a haze of does-Clemens-hate-Piazza? yammering and Subway Series buzzing that failed to touch the hearts of anyone in the country west of the Hudson, north of Nagatuck, or south of Jersey. It was a fairly pathetic whimper from a team that had rolled over a couple of favored opponents earlier in the playoffs with a series of bangs.

It was a bit of a high water mark for me, too. I'm not a person who sits around going "those were the days" a lot, mostly because I tend to believe that "the days", such as they are, are probably ahead of me, but 2000 was a good year for me. I finally learned to fit in at a college I'd begun to think was going to remain permanently beyond my grasp, I did a lot of very fun drugs, I was moderately popular with the ladies -- more so than I had been until the recent past, anyway -- and generally I felt good about things. Maybe I didn't make the World Series, but I had a pretty good playoff run.

Since 2000, both the Mets & I have been, despite some God-given advantages, somewhat dysfunctional, sometimes moderately, sometimes severely. I won't go into my own sob story, but suffice it to say that it includes rather too much drink and not enough going out and changing the world in lots of awesome ways. The Mets, on the other hand . . . well, their story is well known. Blessed with hundreds of millions of dollars, and several very great players, they've managed to fail out at the end of the regular season each of the last two years, and this year have stumbled badly and collapsed in a heap of injury and recrimination, in an almost poetically sad coda to a sequence of events that has gone from the truly epic (2007's collapse, among the most improbable in history) to the more prosaically unheroic (2008's more run-of-the-mill fall from grace).

So I set out from my location in Brooklyn to the end of the line in Queens last week, less to see the Mets than to see their new stadium, said to be modelled on the legendary Ebbets Field, and their opponents, the St Louis Cardinals, who led the NL Central at the time and featured the most transcendent star of the "post"-steroid era, Albert Pujols ("The Great Poo Holes"). One was a disappointment, the other was not.

CitiField is a nice enough place, I suppose, set deep in a park near Flushing Bay, and superficially, it does resemble Ebbets, at least from the outside. And watching a ballgame there isn't any kind of troublesome experience, as I hear it was at the notorious pit that was Shea Stadium. But it's a cookie-cutter experience, not much different to what I've experienced at mallparks in Seattle and San Francisco: cosy, expensive, draped in nostalgia -- particularly bizarre nostalgia at Citi Field, where there are pictures of Jackie Robinson splashed across the walls of the rotunda, and the facade was designed to resemble a long-demolished stadium that housed another team, Robinson's team.

But the Great Poo Holes did not disappoint. He had been in a slump, apparently, though one would not have known it by this night. I managed to miss his first at-bat, because it turns out it takes rather more than an hour and a half to get from Park Slope in Brooklyn to Flushing in Queens and then procure one's will call tickets, but sure enough, as though he was saving the fireworks for my arrival, he singled to lead off the fourth -- and then he really went bananas. He doubled in the next inning, and then, leading off the eighth, he hit the sort of home run one does not often see: several feet over the sign in center field that reads 408, plunking down next to the gigantic apple that would apparently rise into the sky if the Met ever homered.

Not that there was any danger of that in this game. The Mets managed to cobble together more than a few runs, but there was a sense in the ballpark, as soon as it became clear that Johan Santana didn't have his best stuff, that their loss was inevitable. The runs they did score seemed piddling. A scrubby hit there, a groundout there, that sort of thing -- when the Cards scored, they scored with authority, on towering home runs and the like; when the Mets scored, it felt like, "whoops! We scored a run! Would you look at that?" When the Mets staggered into the top of the ninth leading by two, the big Jamaican guy next to me leaned over to his girlfriend and said, "Don't get ready to go or anything."

I'm not going to lie to you, as I watched tiny closer Freddy Rodriguez dashing through a field of green to take the mound at the top of the ninth, my hopes were suddenly and irrationally high. Everyone around me assumed the worst was at hand, but there was something heroic in that little white speck lifting the weight of the entire game as 35000 fans and 50 ballplayers stared at him. I'd somehow been caught up in the drama, and found myself rooting for the Mets, irrationally confident in the abilities of a pitcher whose magic has been sloooowwwwly fading since the day he walked off the mound after striking out the side in the eighth inning of game 7 of the 2002 World Series. Mets fans around me clenched their buttcheeks, and I thought, "Hey, this is all going to work out okay."

Here's some advice: trust the experts. Rodriguez was bombed in spectacular fashion, giving up the tying runs and loading the bases before finally getting the third out. With two outs and the bases loaded, the Jamaican gentleman next to me leaned over and said, "How do you think this is going to end?" Before I could answer, the guy on my right said, "I assume he's going to walk him," or words to that effect.

Well, not in that moment, but just you wait. Rodriguez escaped that mess, and was gone for the tenth, but the Cards managed to load the bases on two singles and a walk anyway, and then, with two outs, Mark DeRosa, in an epic slump ever since switching leagues a few weeks before, came to the plate. The Jamaican guy next to me shot me a look and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. On the very next pitch, Mets pitcher Brian Stokes plugged DeRosa square in the shoulder, forcing in the go-ahead run.

The sound that ensued from the crowd was not what you would call a groan. I think maybe sigh would be a better word. All at once, thirty-five thousand people sighed resignedly, like a man who goes to the store late on a 100-degree day looking for popcicles and finds the case empty. They knew what was going to happen. It made the next thing a bit of an anticlimax.

You see, the Great Poo Holes was not finished. He came up to bat with the bases still loaded, and promptly unloaded on a fluttering nothing-ball from Stokes, sending it deep into the stands in left. Before it had even landed, everybody in the stadium had stood up as one and headed for the exits. That the Mets still had an at-bat left mattered not. Everybody knew that they weren't going to score or anything. It was fait accompli. As I descended the steps toward the parking lot, a teenager in front of me said to one of his friends, "They could still come back." His friend shot back, "Yeah, but they're not gonna."

But they're not gonna. I'll level with you. As I was watching Rodriguez charge in from the bullpen to, um, "nail down" the game, the thought flashed across my mind that I was about to witness the win that would be the beginning of a Mets resurgence. I thought, "Maybe people will talk about this game for years to come." The fact that it wasn't was a bit of a disappointment, but maybe it means something, something about where I am in my life right now. Unlike the Mets, I'm not in the midst of an all-too-predictable implosion. For the first time in years, I feel like I have things in order, my ducks in a row. Maybe I thought the Mets were about to mount a comeback because I suspect I'm about to do the same thing.

I've grown a little attached to the Mets, though I've been in the city just more than a week now, and I can tell that I'll probably always follow their foibles with more than the usual sympathy, given that I am a professed fan of the Red Sox, the last team they beat in the World Series. But unlike the Mets, I think you can look for me in first place fairly soon, and I don't intend to vacate that position for a long time. The Mess -- er, the Mets -- may be lovable losers; I am determined not to be.

Going to Queens.

In New York City
in the middle of July
the air was heavy and wet
the air was heavy, your body was heavy on mine.
I will know who you are yet.
-- The Mountain Goats, "Going to Queens"

I'm going to be honest with you. Like many, if not most, people from those lowly hinterlands known as "the rest of America", my conception of New York City comes almost entirely from movies. Annie Hall, The Godfather, Do the Right Thing, Goodfellas, The French Connection, Ghostbusters . . . the list goes on and on. I've learned of Woody Allen's Coney Island childhood, Don Corleone's Little Italy empire, Spike Lee's kaliedoscopic Bed-Stuy . . . a lot of icons. But I've noticed something: there are movies set in Manhattan (even one named Manhattan), movies set in Brooklyn (Crooklyn comes to mind), movies set in the Bronx (A Bronx Tale, anyone?), even movies set in Staten Island (Saturday Night Fever and Working Girl, famously) -- but there are very few movies set in Queens. I was trying to think of a movie that might give me an image of Queens, and unfortunately for that borough, home of the Mets and the pretty end of the Triborough Bridge, the only one that came to mind was Coming to America:

Semmi: But where in New York can one find a woman with grace, elegance, taste and culture? A woman suitable for a king.
Prince Akeem & Semmi together: Queens!

The joke being, of course, that they end up in a horrible, desolate project block and all the good women are already dating Eriq la Salle. Suffice it to say, this was not a pretty picture to have in mind about a place. In my mind, Queens was a place where people took advantage of Eddie Murphy's sweet nature to rip him off and Samuel L Jackson stuck up fast food joints with elaborate weaponry. So when my cousin said, "Wanna come out with me tonight? I'm gonna go meet some friends and have beer in Queens!", my first thought was, Good God, girl, we're gonna get killed!

But, in the spirit of doing rather than not doing, with it in mind that real life is in fact never as good nor as bad as in the movies, I shoved Coming to America to the back of my mind and we set forth on the subway -- with which, by the way, I am already much-improved. When we emerged in Astoria, just on the eastern brink of Queens, abutting the brackish East River, I discovered something: movies are, for the most part, not true. Just as Mekhi Phifer is as yet to attempt to sell me crack in Brooklyn, and Diane Keaton has not yet bowled me over with a white Volkswagen in Manhattan, so, too, was I not forced to defend myself with a mop handle in Queens. Queens is, in point of fact, quite nice. At least the part where I went was. I'm sure there are less-nice parts of Queens, parts I might yet experience, just as I experienced some of the more dire and frightening areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington when I lived in those places. But Astoria? It seems like a pretty good place to raise a passel of poly-ethnic children. That seems to be what most of its denizens are up to, anyway.

We went to a beer garden, which was packed to the gills. Apparently, this has been one of the coldest summers on record here in New York City, with not a single day pushing into the 90s, and the sun had been out, and it was a Saturday night, so pretty much every piker with a day job had flooded into his or her local, and this place seemed to be the local for a lot of folks. There was music (bad -- the world does not need another yob in a driving cap playing covers of Dave Matthews Songs), there was food (pretty good, though the pierogi had more in common with ravioli than the real deal), there was beer (the selection of which has much improved since the last time I lived back East), and there was a large collection of people with a great deal to say, including a fiercely libertarian soon-to-be lawyer who is making an amateur study of all the synagogues on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a very friendly hippyish sort who informed me that blue was the "color of purity" (in the context of the fact that I was wearing all blue, as I quite frequently am -- don't know about that purity bit), a fledgling financial analyst who had put together the rather odd (and oddly unpopular) double major of psychology and economics in college . . . the list goes on.

But all these brilliant minds together, laid low by pitcher upon pitcher of beer, turned out to be just another group of people who liked to play hackey-sack and hang out in the park, gazing across the silken East River to the Manhattan skyline receding away to the south. New York is a city of islands -- the only borough that is not on an island is the Bronx -- but in Brooklyn it is easy to lose track of that fact, because it is so massive and so massively populated. At the brink of Queens, under the Triborough Bridge, one can get better in touch with the fact that he is disconnected from the mainland, on an island with a few million other like-minded souls, drunkenly staring at the stars.

This Ain't No Time to Get Cute.

It seems like people move to New York with a plan to take the world by storm. Maybe it's not ten steps to the top, but there's a course of action plotted out, an end goal in mind. You know. Small town kid comes to the big city with it in mind to climb to the top.

I realized recently that I, in fact, am not one of those people. In fact, I came here very explicitly without a plan, unsure of what I wanted or what my end goal was, other than to change. I came here with it in mind to become a braver, larger person than I had been. That's all I knew: I didn't much care for the person I had become, a timid, unambitious person easily discouraged by the smallest of failures or obstacles. The kind of guy who talks to a girl at a show for an hour and doesn't get her number. (Sorry about that, Horse Feathers girl. My only excuse is that I was leaving in a day or two anyway.) The kind of person who won't get onstage with a guitar or a story for fear of being laughed at. The sort of person who mistakes defeatism for humility.

So I arrived at JFK International this afternoon with nothing more in mind than to say "yes" where I used to say "no", and do the hard thing where I used to fall back on the easy one. (Well, that and to go to graduate school, but the graduate school was more a reason to come to Brooklyn than anything else.) I had thought I was going to take a cab from the airport to my hotel, but as I walked past the cabbie calling me "sir" in his obsequeous tone and saw a sign for the train, and thought about the $60 fare for the cab ride, I just thought, "Fuck it, I can do this. The signs are in English, the maps are straightforward." So I boarded the train.

I'm not prepared at this point to call it a mistake, but let me put it this way: your first day in New York is no time to get cute. My first mistake, easily corrected, was to debark the Air Train and go stand on the wrong platform for a while. It’s a good thing no train came, because I would have ended up in Rockaway Beach, which is apparently not the hoppin’ center of the universe I had assumed it to be by the sound of it. I had to cross back over to the other platform, to board the A train toward Manhattan (apparently it goes without saying that “toward Manhattan” also means “toward the part of Brooklyn where everything is”, though you could have fooled me). I suppose now would be a good time to give you an inventory of what I had with me:

1. A pair of cheap rolling bags, not waterproof, each containing a shocking percentage of the clothes that I own in the universe, and one containing some shoes and big, heavy books.

2. An extremely dorky backpack containing yet more books, as well as a high ratio of important documents such as chequebooks, passport, and so on, hefting at something on the order of the weight of a golem’s soul.

3. A leather briefcase containing my laptop and various electronic sundries, as well as a couple of notebooks and a book of crosswords.

All told, these things came to something more than a hundred pounds, in my guess. What I discovered in the course of this adventure is that train life contains a lot of stairs. And stairs are hard to negotiate when you’re carrying half your own weight on your back, in your hands, and in your pockets.

So, up the stairs, to the other platform, and onto the A train, thinking to change trains at Franklin, some several miles into town. Only, as I’m sitting there watching Brooklyn flash by like some out-dated movie montage, I start to realize that the closer we get to the center of town, the more prone the train is to skip a stop here and there. At first it’s only one at a time, but then, once we’re underground, they begin to fly by, three, four stops at a go, viewed only as a flash of faraway tile and grumpy faces as our train barrels headlong toward Manhattan. I start to get worried. But I placate myself: surely, there’s no way we’re going to skip a stop where transfers are made, are we?

Well, I was wrong about that. We fly through Franklin, and stop at the next stop. What is there to do? I get off at the next stop, transfer to a train headed back toward the airport, and try to reach Franklin from the other direction.

Are you seeing the mistake I made? Do you see it yet?

Yeah, there it is. Turns out express trains go both ways. Who knew? Not this yokel from the sticks. Back in Portland, we don’t really do subways. Not that we wouldn’t like to, but there isn’t any money, and we have these earthquakes sometimes. So basically, I’m much more at sea than I was willing to admit to myself before. We blow through Franklin again, and I again get off at the next stop, having pieced together now that what I need is a local train, going back the other direction. First I go down to the local platform going the wrong direction, thinking I’ll be able to cross. Then I come back up. You want to know how many stairs there were? I’ll tell you. There were seventeen stairs between the express platform and the local platform. I counted them.

Back up on the express platform, I approach a transit cop with the following distinguishing features: 1) He appears to be about twelve years old, despite 2) the massive scars that spider in vivid pink all across his right cheek and 3) his thick Bronx accent, which, I have to tell you, as a Red Sox fan, I have always associated with the enemy. Anyway, I approach this gentleman, and ask him, desperately, how I get to the other side of the station. He asks where I’m trying to get to. Franklin Station, I say. And he says:

“Shit, you could just walk there. Go upstairs. It’s three blocks.”

Rather than protest, I think, Well, it will be nice to get off the train. So I slog my way upstairs, and realize once I get up there that I failed to ask the following key question: Three blocks in which direction, sir?

Let me tell you: Not the direction in which I walked. I threaded through a very crowded and run-down commercial district that seemed to be peopled largely by recent Caribbean immigrants who sold phone cards and Bob Marley paraphanalia to one another for a living, a district in which I was probably the only white person for several blocks in any direction, and let me tell you, though I did not feel in the least unsafe, a whiteboy in an orange shirt carrying two bags, a dorky backpack and a briefcase with a laptop in it gets some funny looks as he drags himself along the avenue in that part of Brooklyn. Finally, having walked six blocks in the wrong direction, I realized my error, and turned around to try again, the whole time looking at the lowering afternoon sky, thinking, Gosh, I hope it doesn’t start raining.

But I made it to Franklin Station, eventually. Subway stations are, in my experience, unbelievably hot and muggy places that smell faintly of piss and tend to be populated mostly be people with the rough appearance and demeanor of zombies, dotted here and there with the gregarious and/or legitimately insane, who do entertaining things like sing, dance, swear violently, slaver elaborately, or huff as though preparing to blow a house down. Franklin Station, as far as these things go, is unexceptional, and so I spent a long time -- a LONG time -- sweating and trying not to stare at the gentleman in a Miami Heat jersey who was threatening to kill “him”, whoever “he” was -- God, by the sound of it, given the scope of what this person seemed to hold “him” responsible for. But then we boarded the train, which went to Prospect Park, and I felt like I was almost home. Back on track, not that far from my hotel.

It was at Prospect Park station that I discovered that it had begun to rain, politely at first, and then with increasing enthusiasm, progressing onward toward Biblical violence as I negotiated the transfer to my next, and last, train. Oh yes, let me tell you about that: down a hallway, up a staircase, up another staircase, down another hallway, up a staircase, over a street, decide not to take an elevator, turn down an offer of help from an Israeli gentleman I suspect of trying to steal my bag, up thirty-four more staircases, and then get on the wrong train for a second before realizing my error and dashing for the next one and just getting on it. And then, two stops, and voila -- I’m home.

Except not. I got of at 7th Avenue, assuming that my hotel, which is in the 600s on Union, would be not more than half a block west of the subway stop. Oh, so naïve! Such a downy innocent! Turns out nothing is NEARLY that simple around here, and to top it off, the rain has neither abated nor even appreciably relented, AND every few seconds there is a bright flash followed by a percussive clap of thunder, so as I wander through Park Slope -- beautiful neighborhood, by the way, all venerable brownstones and leafy trees -- with no coat, sweating, my glasses sinking a little further toward the tip of my nose with each step, I am alternatley pelted by rain or harrassed by lighting. I’m not usually frightened of thunderstorms, but I’ve got to tell you, this was a bit much.

But, eight long, wet, hot blocks later, I arrived where I was going, and eventually sank gratefully onto a bed in a cool room and stared at the ceiling. After a while, I conceived of a yen for beer, and sprinted out through the rain to a shop about a block away, where I paid rather too much for a beer that wasn’t that great. (Brooklyn Lager, not bad but not worth ten bucks, not even in New York.) As I exited the shop, and glanced to the left after traffic, I noticed something:

A subway stop.

Ah, well. That’s what I get for having no plan, at least on my first day. Here’s hoping the rest of the adventure is somewhat more salubrious. I’m safe and sound now.