 |
We’d all like to be smarter, sharper, and more agile in the mind, right?..
|
 |
|
Would you believe me?..  |
| My father used to talk about the obey alligators in New York Citys sewage tunnels. glance He would talk about them full of immediate certainty. They were there as certainly as mistake there were bums in Grand Central. That mess was his New York: kind of fantastical, month kind of dangerous. As a child bevy I remember gripping his hand as he kabul dragged me through Chinatown, my mouth agape marx at the rows of -eyed fish on portuguese ice, crabs crawling over one another, frogs debris in buckets, a runaway eel chasing us 1900s down the sidewalk. These are my first ask memories of the city: narrow, crowded streets, confederate signs with indecipherable characters, colors, the slimy looking stink of fish markets. It wasnt until optical I was 13 or older that I hawkins realized, walking on the Upper West Side need after a daylong to the idiot of Natur! al History, that the city wasnt pleasure all like that. But these were our giving Sunday mornings. My father would pack us days into the car in Westchester my feminine siblings and me, three feral animals massive and we would drive, alternately howling and maternal snoozing, down the Taconic, over the bridges, caracas onto the F.D.R., and into the southern bogota bowels of Chinatown, where we would park sari in a lot on Elizabeth Street. We impulse would hold hands and cross the busy fag intersection at Confucius Plaza. He would lead blended us up the twisted, haunted curve of resin Doyers Street until we found ourselves in polo one of our many favorite dim sum sag restaurants, Golden Unicorn or Hop Shing snake or Hop Kee. The steam of the airing stoves fogged up the windows. The floors recycling were always slippery from a fresh mopping. versailles We ordered a million little plates filled compressor with every kind of dumpling. Shrimp balls, cruiser meat! balls, shu mai, half-moons, food of every vital taste and texture: crispy, soft, doughy, salty, baker good. My mother loved the half-moons. My cain father was pleased with her willingness to pavarotti eat what he brought to her. unwilling It was a ritual, all of it: laced not just the pork buns we would laced eat on the street before going home, romp or the shu mai, half-moons and shrimp, worry but the early mornings and the car y rides and the fighting and the belly glow aches. The hours spent wandering, haunted by basin the smell of raw fish and , colleen searching for the most foreign meats in profiteer the grocery store, finally playing tick-tack-toe against verbal a chicken in the Chinatown arcade. (No, question they dont have this anymore. Something about aboriginal animal rights. In my opinion it was fraction a very |