On Hiatus?

I haven't written about my trip to Maine and Rhode Island. To do so would entail my writing about the members of my family, people I love very much. I respect their privacy too much to write about them in a public journal. I am now in NYC until the 13th, at which time there will be little less than a week and a half before school begins again. I find myself thinking, "Where did the summer go?"

The sounds of Brooklyn streets are so different from those of South Carolina. At home I hear no one rifling through the bottles left on the street for the recycling truck. There are no barking dogs where I live. Here, children cry and shout. Boom boxes play loud salsa, or rap as they pass the window on the way to the subway station. An ice cream truck parks in front of the house for fifteen minutes, its singsong, bell-like music repeats the same refrain. The many languages heard in the subway cars offer a rich cacophany of diversity. The sounds of traffic here in Brooklyn do not only come from the cars that pass before the window. The sound of traffic is an echo that fills the night; a groan that emerges from the depths of the city miles away. It is the sound of seven million people who create a constant drone, imperceptible to those who live here, but ever present to the visitor.

Since I arrived on Thursday the heat in NYC has been stifling, despite a surprising breeze that somehow manages to make its way between skyscrapers. The cool of the night promises to last through the day tomorrow.

For all my visits to NYC I have never had a celebrity sighting until yesterday. In a salad and sandwich place off Broadway, I stood in line behind Debra Messing as we told a white-aproned server what to include in our "create-your-own-salad" bowls. I ordered dried cranberries and feta and mushrooms. She passed on all three.

I have found a place to "hangout" in Brooklyn; the Court/Montague Street area. For the past three nights I have walked these streets, stopping into little restaurants for dinner, topping that off with espresso at Starbucks and making one last stop into Key Foods. I haul  the little grocery bags underground to take back home on the subway.
It is an exhausting enterprise to live in NYC without a car.  To actually drive one, I should think, would be stressful.