Walk This Way...I Think

I don't always deserve the confidence I walk with in New York. 

Once, while trying to get my mom to the airport, I hurried us onto not one, not two, but three trains going in the wrong direction because we were so deep in conversation. By the time we got to the last train, which would take her on her own from the subway to the terminal, she was so late we hardly had time to hug.

"Go!" I urged, pushing her toward the turnstile.

She looked back at me, bewildered.

"I don't know where the f*#$ I'm going!" she cried.

"The train only goes one way!"

On an outing during her most recent visit, I changed my mind twice at one above-ground intersection, trying to decide which way to cross a street. Oblivious to my uncertainty and trying to finish some thought or another, my mom mimicked my every move like a shadow so that a crowd of people stepped back to watch. I think they thought we were some sort of pop-up vaudeville act. They don't know that's just how we are.

Anyway, being in charge of logistics in Manhattan can be exhausting, but it's more exhausting if the people you are logisticating don't feel like they can trust your decisions.

Last Saturday, Tiffany and I led my mom and five other members of my family and friend-family from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side and back up the middle to join throngs of other people for photos in front of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. Of course, they could have found the way themselves. But they were deferring to us as their hostesses.

"Do you think they can tell we have no idea where we're going?" I whispered to Tiffany as the group trailed behind us through an underground subway passage. 

"No," she said. "Walk confidently, and they never will."

This worked perfectly until we walked with confidence into an exit barricaded with a metal gate.

But I'll tell you what, you have never seen a U-Turn so masterfully executed.