Autumn in New York

"Autumn in New York, It's good to live it again."

Thanksgiving in New York meant going home, spending lots of time with my son and my future daughter-in-law, enjoying my new in-laws, breathing cool, damp air, walking beside the East River, riding buses past familiar cityscapes. I had a massage at the Om Yoga Center, near the Strand book store. That gave me the opportunity to retrace the steps of a pilgrimage that was part of my childhood. My mother would pay the electric bill at the Con Edison building on 14th Street. We would go around the corner to Horn & Hardat's for chicken pot pie. Then we would walk along Irving Place to 17th Street, stand in front of the Washington Irving High School and look across the street at the two small buildings that were boarding houses in the 1930's. There my mother met my father. Like the other residents, they were attending the Night School after work, with the intent to gain their high school diplomas. Instead, they married. Later things went wrong, but once there was a love story among hopeful people. That matters to me.