A Christmas Story

     Every day that I can do it, the family Volkswagen Bus rolls out of the garage and two of our four kids jump in for a ride from our Queens, New York home to Amsterdam Avenue on the west side of Manhattan where they attend school.
     The children are a boy and girl. Both are students at the LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, Music and Art. In fact our other two children also graduated from the same school.
     Twice they made a movie about the school, called “Fame.” The title song in that film has a line in it that says: “I’m Gonna Live Forever.”
     At times I think the line should be changed to “I’m Gonna Live At Home Forever."
     In any event my wife and I are dancing as fast as we can.
     But it’s for the youngsters that sometimes two, even three times a week, we ride around inside a vehicle once described as a “big comfortable living room on wheels,” with a tiny engine about the size of four Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes.
     The ride is the thing.
     Most people dread traffic.
     This year, I have discovered that often the morning news is much worse than traffic.
     Call it “new normal” post 9/11 for a lifetime New Yorker.
     Since family is the real refuge in life, I try to spend as much time as possible in the embrace of sibling rivalries, better marks in math, and watching my son, the actor in a movie called “The Ringer” that I totally do not understand.
     I have also tried to get in step with my oldest daughter, who is an immaculate writer and in fact, one of the best young writers in America, and her current love interest, a boyfriend who is making movies in college. Our ride to school begins on 188th Street in Hollis usually about 07:15 a.m.
     The highway is always crowded.
     Cars are entering New York City on the road called the Grand Central Parkway (GCP) from Long Island.
     Long Island sticks out from the mainland for about 100 miles, but most of the people coming into New York City are from Nassau County, not from Suffolk County that continues where Nassau stops, to the end of Long Island.
     Drivers even at this early part of the day are serious, riding bumper to bumper because the road narrows in Queens and the speed limit dips to where just a short way down the road the Kew Gardens Interchange forms one very bad bottleneck.
     The kids, by the way long before we get as far down the road as Kew Gardens, are snuggled up under airline blankets and snoring while some Mozart echoes softly around inside the bus.
     Moving along past the Kew, we come upon the Long Island Expressway (LIE) once aptly described as “the world’s longest parking lot,” for its monumental traffic jams.
     As we roll, the landscape below and above melts past our windows.
     The VW Bus has lots of windows, the untinted kind that let all the light and life going on around you in.
     Yes, it’s true, you can only look out one window at a time, but in 1966, VW built a 21-window bus offering vistas ahead, behind, alongside, plus a half a dozen narrow slots that look all the way up to heaven.
     Nissan copied that idea for a 2004 SUV.
     Just beyond the LIE, we slip through a corridor formed by the GCP, which features on both sides what is left of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fair, including the “theme” of the 1964 expo, a stainless steel globe of the world called “The Unisphere.”
     Most folks know the Unisphere as the Continental Airlines logo. CO created an abstract image of the sculpture that was done for the Fair by U.S. Steel.
     Today, every time I see a CO aircraft with its “globe” tail I think of the Unisphere.
     The CO logo sits since 1964 behind the NYC Building while a rather large Lufthansa billboard just down the road proclaims:
     “A Dozen Times A Day To Germany—And That’s No LIE,” entreating a million mad road warriors a day to get off that road and fly away to Deutschland.
     Everybody loves New York, we think.
     We pass Shea Stadium home of the NY Mets baseball team and chug onward toward Bowery Bay where LaGuardia Airport is located.
     LaGuardia sort of extends itself out to the GCP. In fact when an aircraft is arriving on final over the road you notice that the lampposts are shorter in case (god forbid) the aircraft comes in too low.
     Sometimes when a B757 passes over your car, low and fast you think you could almost touch the aircraft swooping over the road and fence and landing.
     Remember that all of LGA fits quite neatly inside the oval roadway system of the passenger facilities at JFK six miles down the road on Queens, New York’s south shore.
     The wonder is, how does this 600-acre airport stay open, let alone handle 20 million passengers annually?
     People just like LaGuardia Airport.
     First, they liked Tim Peirce, who as manger of the airport for 22 years was an absolute genius working with the local politician Helen Marshall (who now is President of the Borough of Queens) at getting a hostile neighborhood to realize that airport fear was nothing more than another big city trauma.
     Those two (Tim died January 2000) could have collided, but ended up creating a much-copied template for the public and private sector to quit screaming at each other.
     It’s funny, but the old van sometimes drifts toward the exit that says LaGuardia with its Kiwanis Kids’ Day, and pillows and blankets for people left on the floor of cancelled, snowed-in flights.
     Today there is a terrific young man who is as big as a bear out prowling around all the time from end to end of that airport, named Warren Kroeppel.
     Warren, who reminds us of the character "Bull" on the old TV show "Night Court", is the manager of LaGuardia Airport.
     The face, dear Warren puts on a place that elsewhere might be sterile and impersonal, is of efficiency and concern, a human touch that Ed Ingraham and dear Tim (the two managed LGA for more than 50 years combined), perpetuated like a badge of honor.
     Next landmark is the Triborough Bridge. Most New Yorkers know that the Triborough is usually the fastest and best way to get into “the city” (most everybody outside of Manhattan, even residents of the other four boroughs that are part of greater New York City refer to Manhattan as “the city”).
     Built for the 1939 World’s Fair and the opening of LGA Airport, the Tri-Borough Bridge touches Queens, Manhattan and The Bronx, thus the name.
     But once across the span we jog off onto 125th Street in the heart of Harlem and quickly down to 116th Street.
     We stay away from the FDR Drive named for President Roosevelt because it is always flooded when it rains and always slow and busy even on clear days.
     The FDR is a predictable traffic mess of BMW’s and exotic cars with Connecticut, New Jersey and New York license plates, full of people who don’t know or wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere in Harlem.
     As we move west on 116th Street the early morning deliveries are just beginning.
     You get a real sense of just how cosmopolitan New York City is. Breakfasts can be Chinese dim sum or Chilean Empanadas of egg and cheese or bagels and coffee or even the old standby, McDonald’s.
     Along our ride on 116th Street, there simply is no excuse for anybody to complain that there is no choice.
     Of course as the music plays and the kids sleep we never stop but rather enjoy the scene, planning to return some day when the pace is less frenetic.
     After a quick left turn onto Fifth Avenue at 116th and then a quick right onto Central Park North at 111 Street, the best part of the trip unfolds like a magic carpet under our wheels and all around us.
     Now we are in Central Park.
     There is no greater place on earth than Central Park. It’s a miracle that keeps amazing, every time you are there.
     The park is hilly up north and the roadway that is only a couple blocks or so from Central Park West twists and rolls through dense tree-lined areas that completely obliterate any view of the mighty city surrounding.
     There are joggers and people out for horseback rides, and stands of pine trees and black birch abound.
     An early December snowfall made the park feel like Vermont. People were out on cross-country skis while off in the distance horns were honking beneath a steel gray sky.
     When you are in Central Park you feel the pressure release instantly. What a wonderful interlude our ride through this magic place always is.
     We exit at 67th Street West, past Tavern on The Green where all the trees have those little white lights twinkling all the time.
     But just across CPW on 67th is the greatest restaurant in New York and the only place that you should ever make certain that you visit no matter what, at least once in this lifetime.
     The place is called “Café Des Artistes.”
     What makes this place so great? Is it the playful nudes made up as wallpaper adorning the walls of the restaurant? Is it the food or all the rich and famous people who frequent the establishment? Is it the price or the tough reservation at the café?
     All of the above, we think.
     But don’t miss it.
     We have not been able to afford to eat there in a couple of years but the memory of our last visit makes just being on the same street a pleasant ride.
     A quick left off 67th and down Columbus Ave past Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and around to Amsterdam, which is behind Lincoln, Center and we are at LaGuardia High School.
     The kids mumble their thanks just as long as we stop where the other kids arriving by subway cannot see that “Daddy” drove them to school and we have moved through one of the busiest rush hours of any city in the world in just under 40 minutes arriving usually at about 07:50.
     After goodbyes, it’s uptown on Manhattan’s west side to 81st Street and Broadway for a takeaway coffee and croissant at Zabars.
     Zabars is the greatest deli/appetizing gourmet store in New York.
     The retail part of the place is legendary with prepared foods, cheeses and breads that are beyond compare anywhere else.
     In fact, the entire idea of top line specialty foods, prepared foods and the rest was a fixture at Zabars before anywhere else.
     A left turn from 86th Street (at 96th Street a cop will give you a $70.00 ticket) and the bus moves down to the Hudson River and the West Side Drive.
     Some days it’s a drive a bit inland north past the tomb of General Grant while other days its right down to the drive which moves along the river offering a clear view across to New Jersey and ahead to the George Washington Bridge (GWB), the most beautiful steel arc across any New York waterway.
     We always look closely approaching the GWB straining to see the little red light house that once served mariners on the busy Hudson River before the bridge was built, and still stands, although a bit overpowered in 2006.
     There is a wonderful children’s story titled “The Little Red Lighthouse Under The Great Gray Bridge,” that every child should read.
     We are moving toward the Cross-Bronx Expressway (CBE) now, leaving Manhattan’s West Side with one quick last glance at the Palisades of New Jersey which just beyond the GWB looks much as they did over 400 years ago when Henry Hudson sailed for the first time, down the river that today bears his name.
     Across the northern part of New York City on the CBE, the trusty VW Bus moves until we reach the southern most part of the Hutcheson River Parkway where we head south, crossing the Bronx Whitestone Bridge which connects via the Whitestone Expressway to Astoria Blvd. which leads into our parking spot near Air Cargo News offices at the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport.
     Our early mornings are free of other worldly matters, free of much attention to anything more than family, the familiar and the comforting.
     Cost is 8 bucks for tolls, about five for gas and unspecified amounts for Zabars.
     Our journey lasts for only about an hour. But what an hour of power that is always there for us and cannot ever be taken away. (Geoffrey 12/24/2002)

2009 Postscript:
     Since this story originally appeared seven years ago, the kids have gotten bigger and have gone on to greater heights, but my bus and I are still rolling along, older to be sure, but somewhat well ordered over in the right hand lane.
     Our younger daughter Emily (right) is a senior at Brooklyn College, she refers to it as “The Harvard of Brooklyn.”
     So now our occasional “us on the bus” routine plays out along a thoroughfare called The Interboro Parkway that begins where the Grand Central Parkway ends, a few miles away from our Queens, New York home.
     The Interboro that runs to Pennsylvania Avenue in Brooklyn is one of the oldest limited access highways in USA, and was created about the same time as the original Autobahn in Germany during the early 1930’s.
     Unlike its German cousin, Interboro is a narrow serpentine roadway that in 2009 is among the most outdated and dangerous highways in the universe.
     A couple of years ago they named the road for baseball great Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodger who broke the color lines in baseball and was also a hell of a third baseman.
     Naming Interboro for Jackie, I think, is an insult.
     Jackie was smooth and always ahead of his time.
     Maybe they should name that new sports center in Brooklyn after him.
     In any event, my impression of Brooklyn College is that you learn something and probably manage to remember the place fondly when you get older.
     Centerpiece of Brooklyn College are the glorious main campus buildings.
     But best of all is The Library.
     The Brooklyn College Library is a mammoth structure with a twelve-story clock tower topped with a golden brass dome and spire.
     The effect is heightened by a circular set of windows leading up to the spire. The windows light up at night and the place looks simply stunning.
     The Brooklyn College Library is just outstanding.
     My first 2009 New Year Resolution is to go to this magic place with my wife. When it is warm enough for the crocuses we will make some cucumber sandwiches and sit under a tree and just relax and enjoy that campus, if we can get past the guards.
     As Emily finishes up college, the other kids include Ralph (above pictured with Gabriel Byrne), who is at work in Manhattan at Paradigm Talent Agency in charge of film—utilizing his conservatory education while working with major and upcoming talent.
     Our older daughter Florence (left with me) splits her time editing Air Cargo News FlyingTypers whilst otherwise writing every moment she is not managing a big Times Square restaurant.
     Geoffrey II married Christina in October and a film that he played a major role in titled 500 Days of Summer has been nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Picture.
     Geoffrey just finished another major role in the new movie “Devil” for M. Night Shyamalan in Toronto that will be out next September.
     The group shot (below) are Groomsmen including Geoffrey, Ralph & Geoffrey II pictured enroute to the wedding. Others include (far left) Vincent Kartheiser & Mike Damus and far right Daniel Gritzer.
     Café des Artistes closed in August and although we did get to visit the restaurant only a couple of times, I’ll miss the European patina of the place—it would have been at home in Paris, London or Rome.
     But now it is time to close down another chapter in our journey together.

     Thanks for the ride and all your good wishes and comments about our work.
     As Christmas 2009 is upon us, our hopes and priorities for 2010 are getting clearer:
     Merry Christmas, peace and goodwill to everyone.
Geoffrey 12/24/2009