Surprise

     I offered to wake the kids.  She just smiled and shook her head.

     Surprise Number One:  We left the kids behind.  She had dropped hints they’d be coming, but she arranged for my mother to watch them.  Four consecutive kidless days.  And nights.  The most we’ve had in over eight years.

     As we drove away before the dawn, she pointed to a wrapped box on the back seat.  Two guidebooks, a travel itinerary, little envelopes with tickets inside. 

     Surprise Number Two:  I have been there before.  She had said “we’ve never been there before,” which is technically true, for she’d never been there, so therefore we’d never been there together, but it’s a place I once lived and often travel to on business.

     Reading the itinerary, I see names like the Hotel Plaza Athénée, Per Se, One if By Land, Avenue Q and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. 

     Surprise Number Three:  I have never been there before.  When I lived there, I barely lived, those years a nasty brutish and aimless blend of poverty and loneliness, my series of dreary post-college dead-end jobs pulling me under the poverty line, my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend dating others on the other coast, my low-grade depression manifesting itself in a surliness that effectively repelled all potential friends and acquaintances, my life’s potential already buried under my youthful failures.  I remember just sitting in my darkened room, staring out the window, watching the world pass me by.

     Thankfully, things picked up after I left.  But since then, I’ve never really returned, though I’ve been there many times, just business trips consisting of car rides from and to the airport with conference rooms and hotel rooms squeezed in between.

     This trip promised to be different.  Very different.

     And boy was it ever. 

     Surprise Number Four:  I may have turned 40, officially over the hill, a massive midlife crisis looming just over my horizon, my faded youth a distant memory, but I’ve never been happier or luckier, never felt more carefree or alive, than during my long birthday weekend in The City of New York.

     I can’t wait for 50.

Comments

[DarkoV]

There was one of those human interest pieces on the local channel. Something about a dashing couple dancing up and down Broadway, a pickup truck trailing them with a portable sound system and humungous speakers, and a cast of onlookers bestowing cheers of all sorts, including Bronx ones. I only caught the tail end of the piece. Didn't know the two of you looked like that!
Wow!
Perhaps living in the Land of the Lotus-Eaters is the positive turn to one's life.

[Amy]

Happy birthday! Being 40 means you've entered a new peer group -- you are a very young old person.

[andrew]

its hard to imagine a choice more important than who you choose to wake up next to every morning, sounds like you chose VERY well...

it's a really interesting internal meterological phenomenon, how returning to an old haunt can be SO different, not because the place itself is different, but because you, the viewer, have changed...

especially a place that has difficult memories associated with it, misery can be a tunnel vision producing mindset......

40, hmmmmm, an excellent age, you are still young enough to run up the mountains, but old enough to appriciate the view & compare it to other mountaintops...

[R J Keefe]

Happy Vito, Happy birthday!

[shank]

Huzzah!

[Mary Morrell]

Sure sounds like a you made a wonderful memory! Living here I don't often get to take advantage of all it has to offer. Sometimes I do play the "visitor" and get out to the museums, or a play, or even One if by Land - one of the more beautiful restaurants in the world - you should see it at Christmas! Too often I just trudge along to the next day. Glad you had such a marvelous 40th! Ta. M!

[Oorgo]

That sounds wonderful, Happy Birthday, and here's to decades more of surprises and renewal.

Now you've got me thinking about visiting my hometown (of which I hated for decades).

[stephenesque]

Big four oh in the big apple. It's all big, isn't it. Lucky you.

[Julia]

Congrats on the milestone, Mr. OL. Your wife is a rockstar for pulling that one off.

[Waterfall]

Happy Birthday, Outer Life Guy!