blue skies over brooklyn

Snapped this from my rental car while stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway yesterday, while I was still feeling optimistic about my ability to navigate my way first to Brooklyn, and then across Lower Manhattan and finally to Secaucus, New Jersey, where I did my business this morning.

That was before my first U-turn on Delancey (cut to sign reading: "Welcome to Manhattan"; cut to me with thought bubble over my head, clutched forward over the steering wheel, thinking: This isn't Brooklyn...); and before my wide loop around Willoughby and Adelphi in (finally) Brooklyn; before my second U-turn in Little Italy (Manhattan again, dark now); before I queried the guy in the tollbooth on the NJ Turnpike for directions to the nearest gas station (where I hoped to find a map of the wastelands that are the Meadowlands) only to find the station (after my third U-turn) dark and deserted along an equally dark and deserted row of warehouses.

But there was the call to A, who googled me a map and got me out of there, and there was the sound of gurgling babies in the background, twins, just six-weeks in this world, and the memory of holding one of them, sacked out and REMing[1] in my arms, just shortly before.

The reason for going to Brooklyn, the reason for all the U-turns and turnoffs; the best reason, only reason, really, to rent a car out of La Guardia, ever. (No regrets, but next time I’m cabbing it.)



[1] What do babies dream of, anyway?