Home and Away

The day before. The night before. The hour before. What are the reasons for these feelings of restlessness that do not quite amount to unease on the eve of a simple business trip?

Hopes become work, ideas schedules, ambitions chores. What flashed through the mind like fireworks, or hovered warmly in it as in a jacuzzi, will actually have to happen. Responsibility is a name we give the weight of reality. That is one reason for unrest.

Another reason is age, and its characteristic reaction to change. Age’s re­sponse to the impudence of change is indifference. Who could keep up with television? That is why I never watch it. Or with popular music? That is why I never listen, except passively, to anything recorded after the rooftop concert. Politics is taking on the same overpopulated surfeit. Rufus King, George Washington Plunkitt, Harold Godwinson — fine. J. D. Vance — why? If I resent the shifting shadows on the walls of the cave of news and culture, how much more do I resist alterations to my daily routine, or excursions outside my neighborhood. I have heels to take to my shoemaker, squats to do with my trainer, jokes to tell my wife. Why must I leave all these and go to another state?

A third reason is the little fear that stands in for the grand fear. All men are mortal. I am a man. Amen. Air travel is probably as safe as crossing the street, but thanks to a shorted wire, a gull in the engine, or a faith-based activist I may make the acquaintance of the undetermined eventual.

A fourth reason is hassle. I have performed all the little tasks of packing a million times, but that does not make them any less numerous on the million and first than they were on the first. Underwear and socks. Shaver and plug. Razors did the job better, but you always got nicked. The folded shirt always wrinkles. Umbrella? Check the weather report. Reading, necessary and recreational. Writing implements, necessary. In the old days a legal pad and a hotel pen, in case I forgot my own, sufficed; I covered 20 presidential hopefuls that way. But now they provide humble backup for the laptop. Although paper and screen are equally good for writing, only the laptop allows me to look up clips from old movies. Should I slip a couple of bandages into the dopp kit? Not if there are only finger bandages in the medicine cabinet. Remember to put “ban­dages” on the shopping list. Not while I’m remembering to print boarding passes, please. The husband of a cousin of mine spends six months a year in Antarctica for the Navy. Okay, so people take bigger trips. Nor am I boarding the space shuttle or the Santa Maria. But little hassles are hassles still. A crumb in the bed can keep you as awake as firetrucks in the street. These things of darkness I own as mine. They seem to own me anyway.

My wake-up call is the piano maestro on the spectrum. He bangs away at 150 mph because he can. Wakes me, he could wake the dead. But because I know I am to hear him, I wake up before he begins. Steal a glance at the glowing digits, to see how many more minutes I can clutch a pillow. Then in with the lenses that allow me to see, on with the laid-out clothes, out past the doorman beginning his day too, among dog-walkers, child-to-school-walkers, and sparrows.

I never downloaded the app that will summon a ride for you. Years ago when my wife had to make regular hospital visits we used a car service, and because it is owned by Israelis, I get emailed greetings on every Jewish holiday, including ones I have never heard of. But for all their fealty I have never used them since. My stubborn attachment to habits keeps me hailing cabs even though with COVID and competition there are noticeably fewer than there once were. The only upside of dearth is that no one else is trying to flag them. I stand off the curb of the greasy spoon across the street from my apartment building, leaning into the lane, arm up. Between the motorized bikes of the deliverymen that will not veer aside and the parked school bus that blocks half the upstream view, there is only a narrow slot in which to wave ahoy. Sometimes the rooftop light that indicates vacancy is so faint you cannot tell whether it is on or off. The double blink when a driver has seen and acknowledged you is, however, un­mistakable. Into the seat, carry-ons first.

My city, my poor city. It is coming back to life, it is almost back to life, but stigmata remain. The outdoor dining venues are a gallant convenience, but the walls and roofs are almost all slipshod, the efforts to pretty them up with plastic fake flowers — whose idea was that? — make them seem more so, and winter is coming. Roadwork, eternal roadwork, makes the avenues even slimmer. A turn in the 30s, where this magazine used to reside, then the tunnel.

And suddenly, anxiety gives way to anticipation. It can’t be because of the aesthetics of the tunnel. The light glares, the tiled walls are as sterile as a bathroom, the bathroom of a very long serpent. Experience, then, has trained me to think of the tunnel as a portal. Not an interruption, but an entryway. Now I will be doing. Doing something I hope to be good at. Doing something I expect, and of which I also have no idea exactly what it is. Lights, camera.

The tunnel deposits you on the island with the airport. I pass the stations of going across — the industrialized canal, the graveyards, the watchworks that has been repurposed as a corporate center, though time still marches on. Leave a tip, keep a receipt, wheels up. Another new thing.