Connecticut Graybeard revisits "The Big Apple" : Land of Perpetual Turnover

I suspect that everyone who has ever lived in New York  believes, at some stubbornly resistant mental level,  that the city of their experience is the one true Manhattan and all that has happened since represents nothing more than a fabricated imitation peopled by charlatans.

My wife and I, who first met in a graduate class at the City College of N.Y. many years ago, were on our way, from our quiet suburban cull de sac, via railroad, to meet our younger son at Grand Central Station. While waiting at the Shoreline East station for the train we met another young man in his 20s who was heading into the city for a preparatory course offered to those who would be attempting to pass the CT Bar Exam. He had attended law school at George Washington University in St. Louis. Strangely, the course was being presented not at some hotel with work tables but at a theater with cushioned reclining seats more condu cive to napping than to paying rapt attention. In response to a question about the NY Bar vs the CT Bar raised by my wife he expressed some regret at not having signed up to apply for both simultaneously. He now realizes that he will have to prepare a second time at some future date. But then again, he can't be sure he would ever need NY registration.

Our seats on the train faced backward but even the trains forward motion was taking us backward through the succession of places we had lived and worked over the years as we kept moving further and further northeast away from NY. : Trumbull, Norwalk, Darien, New Rochelle and then finally the long blackened tunnel entrance to NYC through Grand Central Station. 

We exited onto Lexington Ave. and noticed immediately it was different. In our past most recent visits we had always come to the city on Sundays. This day, in contrast, was in the middle of the week and even more tellingly, it was lunchtime. The swarms of office workers had departed their cubicle hives seemingly simultaneously and blotted out much of the background street scenes. They bunched up at the entrances to restaurants that had already been swollen with patrons but their conversational buzzing continued unabated. Then there were those who brown bagged it and opted to be outdoors in the sun. Because there were no benches they draped themselves upon every imaginable surface, marble walls, sculptures, architectural innovations, nothing was sacrosanct.  

( To be continued ) See CT Graybeard -----------: Part II