Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“I always felt like an outsider here,” he said, which brought back the memory that, as
young boys, my brother and I would often race to the corner of our New Jersey street at
dinnertime to wait for my father's bus to arrive and to watch him step off. The realization
that I had thought of him daily as a returning hero and that he had thought of himself
as a retreating soldier was a poignant shock.
For the nineteen months that my father lived in Manhattan, he had a good time. We
saw each other once or twice a week. I took him to the theater with me, sometimes to
Off-Off Broadway stuff put on by twenty-somethings in second-floor living rooms or
empty garages that left him agog at the creative energy oozing from the city's every crawl
space. We took the Number 4 subway to Yankee Stadium or the Number 7 to Shea, or we
watched the Giants on television. I took him out for Indian food at a restaurant near his
apartment and it was a revelation to him—“Tandoori chicken! Lamb saag! Naan!”—so
we ate there frequently. Or he came downtown for dinner at the Knickerbocker, a steak-
house and bar on University Place not far from my apartment, where the owner, Steve
Jones, took a liking to him and treated him as a regular.
He began shopping for food in specialty shops, treating himself to the variety and
quality he'd denied himself for many years. I finally convinced him to tip waiters and
waitresses less grudgingly.
“Dad, let's say you did it my way for a year. How much would it cost you? Three hun-
dred dollars? Four hundred? Would that make a difference in your life?”
“No,” he said.
“It would in theirs,” I said.
“Ah,” he said as the lightbulb went on.
He started going to museums and taking classes and going to lectures at the 92nd
Street Y.
“I've been sitting on the steps of the Met all morning,” he called to tell me on the
phone once. “The girls are unbelievable.”
And after a while he joined an online matchmaking service and started dating. I never
met any of the women he went out with, but he approached me often for advice. Over
dinner one night he said he was perplexed by the emails he was getting from younger
women who all said the same thing, that they were looking for a “generous older gen-
tleman.” I informed him that
gentleman
means rich and that
generous
means really rich,
and he nodded soberly as if I'd explained to him a murky clause in an international trade
agreement.
“But there's this one,” he said. “She keeps writing me. And I finally said to her, 'What
do you want with an old geezer like me?' And she wrote back and said she's always been
attracted to older men because they don't play head games.”
