To explore is to live

Thursday, July 01, 2004

Driving Miss Daisy... and Philadelphia's horny baboons

posted at 2:45 PM

Whew... I've been pretty busy lately. Go, go, go! It wasn't until I got knocked ass over tea kettle while rollerblading today in the park that I finally slowed down long enough to write in this blog. I've got a grapefruit-sized raspberry on my posterior, and my knee is kind of swollen, but as I always like to say, you should see the other guy! In fact, it was a girl. She lost control of her bike when her chain came off and creamed me from behind. She said she felt like she dislocated her shoulder, poor baby. And she was having lots of trouble getting her chain back on. Ho hum.

So with bag of ice under ass, let me prattle on about what I've been up to. It's been pretty interesting, actually, considering I'm again unemployed and totally broke. Through a friend of a friend, I landed a gig driving an elderly lady all over Cape Cod and eastern Massachusetts so she could find a place to live out her days. She's a lifetime New Yorker who wants to move to some quiet seaside cottage where she can smell the salt air. She doesn't drive, which is where I come in. Let's call her Miss Daisy. She put her east village apartment on the market and wanted to find something quickly. Daisy rented a car for me, which was good because someone recently stole the stereo out of my car, and I parked on a nail which left one tire totally flat while I was gone. Oy.

Anyhoo, Daisy also wanted to stay in a B&B on the Cape, and she happily paid for me to have my own room even though my aunt lived about a mile from the B&B. And on the five-ish hour drive to the Cape, I learned little by little her life story, which I found rather fascinating. Now 75, she was born in Brooklyn and moved into the city as a small child. She bought and moved into her apartment 41 years ago for the bargain price of $17,000. It's now on the market for a cool mil. She was married and said it took her "14 years to produce two live children". Her husband was abusive and insane, threatened suicide whenever she tried to leave, and he mercifully left her on their 20th anniversary for a teenager.

She's a liberal, and she spent much of her youth holding a picket sign and/or marching in protest of the issue of the day. She worked for herself always... started and owned a woman's clothing factory and later a health food bakery before health food was hip, has had a few books published, and is currently writing a novel. But the novel, as well as everything else in her life, is on hold for the time being while she looks to relocate. The events of 9/11 devastated her, and the untimely death of her son this past winter cut her to the core. New York is no longer the city she fell in love with so many decades ago, and it's time to go.

After driving around Cape Cod for two days, in and out of towns, up and down side streets, and utterly non-plussed by everything she saw, Daisy decided she wanted to go check out Cape Ann, which is about an hour north of Boston. This wasn't part of the original plan, but who was I to argue? She was paying me well, I might add, and I was her slave for however long she needed me. So we hit the road early on the third day and drove two and a half hours north. We were in Gloucester for no more than fifteen minutes when she raised her hand and declared, "OK, back to New York!"

"New York?" I asked. We were paid up at the B&B for another night (but had packed our things that morning just in case), and I thought maybe she misspoke. "Yes, New York. I know what I want to do!" she replied, suddenly a much different person than the woman I'd been chauffeuring for three days. Apparently, she had some good memories from Gloucester, mostly revolving around a young man in New York with whom she had an affair before and during her miserable marriage. It had been some 40+ years since she had last been to Gloucester, but she deftly directed me right to the very house where the young man had grown up, and where he brought her to visit his family after moving to New York. The man is now in his 80's, married, lives in Manhattan, and remains a close friend to Miss Daisy. She was so excited to see the house she had me pull over and let her out. It's an old, old, old house, barely standing and seemingly abandoned. Though the man still owns the home and rents it out, the current tenants were thankfully not home. All we could see inside the windows (yes, we peered into the windows) was a guitar leaning up against an amplifier, a conferderate flag hanging on the wall, and very little furniture. To me, it was a dismal shack. To my companion, it was a glorious monument.

I gave her my cell phone and she playfully called her old friend in New York to tell him where she was, and she sounded just like a teenager. And although we sat in seven hours of horrendous weekend traffic getting back to New York, in a torrential rain storm I might add, Daisy was probably happier than she'd been in many many months. So within a few weeks (with any luck), my new friend will be living in Gloucester, in a quiet seaside cottage, where she can smell the salt air.

Almost as soon as I got back to New York, I was off again. This time my destination was our nation's birthplace, Philadelphia, a city I've remarkably never seen. My friend Kris was there for a couple of days, and she invited me to join her. So I got the flat tire on my car fixed and drove to Philly amid deadly silence in my stereoless car. We did all the touristy shit... Liberty Bell (anti-climactic), Independence Hall (where all those important documents which are now being eroded were created), hummed a bunch of School House Rock tunes to myself, and even toured nearby Valley Forge. Did you know that George Washington LIIIIEEEED when he wrote headquarters requesting supplies? That's right... Mr. I Cannot Tell A Lie exaggerated the harsh conditions of the winter of 1777/78 in order to speed up the delivery and amount of supplies. Sheesh!

We also went to the famous Museum of Fine Arts, which is magnificent. We didn't go inside, of course, but rather we ceremoniously ran up the steps ala Rocky Balboa and jumped up and down. It was silly and fun, and I'm going to reveal my ignorance here by saying I thought there would be a Rocky statue at the top of the steps. Here are some photos.

Then the zoo... oh, the zooooooo!!!! I can't remember the last time I went to any zoo, but I'm sure wherever it was it wasn't half as impressive as this one. The Philadelphia Zoo, by the way, is the nation's first, having opened in the summer of 1874. We only had a handful of humans in the country at that time, so what kind of exotic animals could they have possibly had? Field mice? Turkeys? Well, today they've got tons, and it was clean and fun and uncrowded and gorgeous. We even saw a baboon playing with himself. Yup. Here's a whole slew of pics from Philadelphia's caged animal kingdom.

I'm finally back in New York, got a big ol' bruise on my left buttock, and I chug along. Oh, and I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. Everybody and their sister's half cousin's bastard love child is writing about it, so I'll leave well enough alone and just say it was magnificent.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
( --Preamble to The Constitution, adopted September 17, 1787...can you remember the School House Rock version?)

-KLP