The fact that my dad was going to leave me in NYC on my own hung over us like a cloud. We’d gone on multiple trips throughout the summer to look for apartments and teaching jobs for me, and I’d finally secured both. I had two suitcases of stuff and about a month before school started.
The night before he left, I stayed at the hotel with him, instead of in my new furnished room at 107th and Amsterdam. I remember we got ice cream at the nearby Ben & Jerry’s that last afternoon, and that I wore flip flops that thwacked against my feet. When it started to pour, they slid under me just like I felt the whole world was.
Post-college adult life had officially begun. The last person who loved me for hundreds of miles was pulling his suitcase behind him to go.
My dad had this cheap umbrella he’d bought earlier at a dollar store on Broadway. It was an ugly yellow and brown that suggested disease more than it did a giraffe or banana. I’d picked it out.
Under our separate umbrellas, we cried for all the work it had taken to get to that point that had been so hard to talk about, the finish line that restarted everything. We cried, because we were scared.
My dad got in a cab, and gave me his umbrella. He wouldn’t need it from the safety of a car and then a plane and then the home I’d left. I used the umbrella twice more over the next year. It broke in a drizzle far less powerful than the one the day he left and I suppose, I arrived.
There’s not a rainy day in Manhattan that I don’t remember this. The walk to that rented room in that strange apartment that would become my home was the longest, wettest four blocks I’ve ever traveled.
I can sympathize with you in more ways than one. My dad had to take me to college by himself because my mom was in the hospital. It was one of the hardest days either one of us faced not counting his death. But now I look back and smile thinking of it as one of the greatest days I ever spent with him.
I also had the same NYC experience but with my mom. She stayed for two weeks getting me set up in my apartment but it seemed like 2 days. Watching her drive off in the cab to the airport was the loneliest feeling. But hey I would much rather have those memories of loneliness due to significant change than not have them because I stayed in Texas and never lived.
Beautifully written!
I still remember the day I flew into the city. When the cab driver didn’t know how to take me to my new address, I almost caught the next plane home to Georgia. But ,of course, I’m glad I stayed.
Art and Colleen, I feel the same way. NYC will knock you down and steal your lunch money, but I love it.
Sherri, thanks always for the feedback. It keeps my fingers on the keyboard.
Enjoy these memories, Amanda, my dad died last fall and I am glad I have so many great memories with him. Beautifully written…made me cry.
Amanda-
I loved this one - The day Daddy left.
I’m not a New Yorker, but I live close enough and visited enough to know I’d probably cry if I was left there alone. But I’m guessing you feel the world is ahead of you. Embrace it! Love it! Live it!
p.s. Made my way over here from the online edition of The Printed Blog.
Um, so this is probably the fifth time I’ve read this is the last few years and every time “the finish line that restarted everything” hits me like a ton of bricks. It summarizes exactly how I feel about moving to a new city (which I seem to do every year). Every year the plan has been to move to NYC and we always end up somewhere else. The new projected date of arrival is summer of 2012, just in time for the end of the world, I guess. =)