NO SOUVENIRS

Mid-morning. New York City. I am walking down the street towards the Empire State Building, rolling suitcase in tow, backpack slung over both shoulders. I have no idea where to purchase my train ticket to the airport, no idea of any departure times. I just know that I want a souvenir, but eventually I will settle for one last slice of pizza.

Yeah. I am 50-something and had never been to New York City, the Big Apple. I wanted to take a bite, a huge bite, a bite so big that I swallowed the core. I did.

Pizza. Little Italy Pizza. I order a pepperoni slice and a Coke from the Italian man who managed the counter of huge pizzas situated behind that scratched, foggy glass counter. I move all of my tourist junk over to the farthest corner, the perfect spot where I can watch the people hurry up and down the street and the patrons entering the store for the $5.50 special. My back to the door, snugging up to cases of Dasani and Dr. Pepper, I am not able to go physically backwards and can only be where I am at this moment.

This. Moment.

How do I keep the feeling I attach to this place? How do I remember the taste of that folded slice of pepperoni, charred ever-so-lightly on the bottom? How do I hold on to a memory I know will begin to fade as soon as I walk out that door after tossing my paper plate and greasy napkins into the trash? I cast these questions aside as I revisit the moments of the past three days. I take a drink of Coke and the moments flood back into my mind.

I feel again that sense of wonder as I trek across downtown Manhattan, using only my phone's GPS to wind my way through the chilly streets towards Chelsea Market where my senses are overwhelmed by all the sights, sounds, and smells of Chelsea Market as the tourists and locals blend together in this marketplace of shops, handmade crafts, and restaurants.

I reunite with Pablo, a student I had taught over six years ago while I lived in North Carolina, who travels from Brooklyn to meet me at Chelsea where we continue a nearly decade-old conversation extending back to Fike High School when Pablo used to slip out of his mother's room in the morning to land in my room to sit and talk before the bell rang for school to begin.

I proudly celebrate the success of Sabrina, another North Carolina student from farther back than I begrudgingly admit, an entrepreneur and voice of her generation, a producer of her own web series The Department of Ed, a story-teller with a blessed soul who manages to flip the teacher-student paradigm back and forth with me over the next few days.

I traipse across New York with Sabrina on a "wear my walking shoes" whirlwind tour during which I experience for the first time the landmarks, the hidden recesses, the affluence, the poverty, and the living, breathing diversity, all under the protective guidance of my thoughtful guide and teacher.

Sabrina and I say our own prayers and make our own personal reflections at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, touching the palpable serenity of the pools in the footprint of the lost towers at Memorial Plaza as the cold wind and silence envelop us.

I frantically navigate the flashing lights, bustling traffic, and pressing humanity which pulses through Times Square at night, finding my way to the side street somewhere in this maze where I purchase that one glorious ticket I never thought I would hold, that ticket to Oz, a ticket to witness another tale of unlikely possibilities and friendship, a ticket to Wicked.

I fall asleep early that next morning, reluctantly pulling the blinds to the view from my hotel room, hopefully locking this moment away forever as I drift off to sleep.

So here I am. At this moment. I leave the small confines of Little Italy Pizza where I return to the street of a million possible directions. I know instinctively where to go, but I struggle. So many times I have allowed instinct to guide me out of sheer repetition. So with my suitcase in tow again, backpack dangling insecurely off of one shoulder, I sip the remaining Coke in my cup before throwing it in the trash.  I realize over the course of the past three days that while I blazed my path about this metropolis I never stopped to pick out that souvenir, a small piece of memorabilia to remind me of this adventure. I noticed the three for ten bucks ties, avoided the red "Make America Great Again" hats and Hillary bobble-heads, sifted through racks of "I 💗 NY" t-shirts, and examined palm-sized models of edifices I traveled beneath.

As I head to Penn Station, I could easily stop somewhere for one last perusal for a souvenir of this trip. I shrug then make my way down the concrete steps to purchase my train ticket to JFK, to board my plane, to fly back home. I have no need of souvenirs, none that can ever match those which I carry in my own memory.

Pablo and I - Google Hallway
Photo Credit: Pablo

Google Headquarters
Photo Credit: Pablo

Sabrina, Alzo Slade (star of Ed), and I
The Department of Ed Premiere
Photo Credit: Pablo

9/11 Memorial Museum

9/11 Memorial Museum

Photo Credit: Sabrina

Thanks to Pablo and Sabrina for helping me take some great pictures and sharing yours with me. You are the best! Thanks for taking the time to make my trip so incredible.

THE OTHER SHOE

Idiomatic expressions weave their way through so many avenues of our lives, representing societal values or traditions in a figurative way. If you are curious about a friend's furrowed brow, you smile, lean in, saying, "a penny for your thoughts." When people around us, our children, students, adults, politicians, promise to change their behavior, to fulfill a promise they have earnestly made, we tend to tilt our heads, grin, sigh, and remind them that "actions speak louder than words." Idioms. They are everywhere, free for us to use to capture our thoughts or feelings in a certain moment where we may not be able to find the words to articulate to another. There is a commonality in words, particularly when they are placed together in these phrases.

This past week one expression captured the instinctive reflex of each breath I have taken. Unfortunately I have slipped into the mindset of "waiting for the other shoe to drop." After waking up from a desperately needed rest Friday night (one which I am not 100% sure I had), I began my late Saturday morning ritual of cleaning up the mess I made of my school backpack as well as the collection of mismatched shoes and socks strewn around my bedroom. Cleaning and reorganizing my crap is therapeutic for me, allowing my mind to process my thoughts while conducting basic tasks I have done repeatedly all of my life. That is when I realized the exhaustion I had experienced at the end of the week originated from "waiting for the other shoe to drop." As typical for me, I wanted to know the origin of the idiom, so the dirty food containers remained soaking for a while.

The best origin I could find for this expression is at the website The Gothamist. During the manufacturing boom of the 19th and 20th century apartments built in NYC were all designed much as they are today, one bedroom atop another. A tenant would come home from a hard day at work, go to bed, anticipating the person above him removing his shoes and dropping them one at a time on the floor, generating a thud whose daily repetition could prevent anyone's restful night of sleep from ensuing until the other shoe "dropped." Hence we have that expression which  means  an anticipation of something bad or negative to come after an initial warning or sign.

It has been a tough week. The staff at Central Catholic High School where I have been teaching for five years was informed of the decision to close our sister-school Bishop Donahue on Thursday. That is tough one, even for a Central grad. I know the pride and tradition associated with a school like Bishop Donahue, I know the cost parents incur to send their children to a parochial school, I know this first hand as a child of parents who saved to send me and my brother to parochial school for twelve years, and I know it now as teacher who talks to parents who want to send their children to Central because of the values of God and family. So when we learned of the closing, we were saddened because we think we know what the students, teachers, parents, and alumni must be feeling. We really don't though because it is not happening to us; however, it does give us pause for thought about how we would feel were it happening to us.

Another part of the tough week for me was the inauguration of Donald Trump. I am not attacking him. I promise. My anxiety is rooted in an exhausting election process during which both sides threw enough mud to have left lasting stains on me as a citizen. We continue to experience difficulty as a nation moving beyond all of this. That is not to say that people do not have a right to be frustrated any more than people do not have a right to be excited. For me, there is an anxiety that I cannot shake because I do not know if we can move forward without the feeling of "waiting for another shoe to drop." I will pray that my anxiety will quickly be relieved, realizing that it may take some time.

Finally, the weekend concluded with a colleague at Central perhaps no longer being with us. The circumstances were unknown to me. I was worried. I was lost. I was confused. I popped in a Jason Bourne movie to distract myself but could not escape the concerns and questions that vibrated my cell phone. I am typically a loner and can do the "sulking in solitude bit" better than anyone, but tonight I had to go be with colleagues, with friends. That's where this week had taken me. That is where the week had taken many of us.

So here I am "waiting for the other shoe to drop" in life. The unexpected is expected, right? We all know the unexpected is there waiting for us, but we can never prepare for it because we simply have no idea what will occur. The one option we have is to acknowledge others that are here for us. The Bishop Donahue community has not only each other on whom to depend but others nearby who are sympathetic and willing to help. The country, despite its divisions, has the potential for unity buried deep inside, but we need to tap into our empathy while carefully tuning out incendiary rhetoric. We truly do not know when that other shoe drops, but I do know we can all be there when it happens to someone we know.

Work Consulted

Carlson, Jen. "The Phrase "Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop" Was Born In NYC." Gothamist.           The Gothamist, LLC., 13 May 2013. Web. 21 Jan. 2017

Images

Both images on this page are from Google Images.