Pretend that Jethro Bodine and Elly May Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies took a trip to New York City to visit the biggest overachiever from Jethro’s class of 1973 back at Hillbilly High and you have a pretty good idea of what it was like when Dave and Betsy visited Dave’s high school friend Debbie Buell and her husband Charlie Henry in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn this weekend. The only thing missing was granny sitting in a rocking chair strapped to the bed of the pickup truck.
We dined at an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, strolled the Brooklyn promenade, watched the Yankees embarrass the hapless Mets, drank strong coffee while reading the Times, and sat on the stoop of the Henry’s brownstone watching the neighborhood walk by.
Sort of like an episode of Law & Order without the crime.
Along the way we found time to catch up on the events that have taken place in our various lives since 1973, much of it spent bragging about our kids. Fortuitously we got a first-hand report about the youngest Henry from Maggie herself; a firecracker columnist for the Cornell Daily Sun and a Big Red debate team member who appears to be on a fast track to matching her mother as the ultimate “power woman” (but only if she wants to).
The air crackled with Mag’s electricity.
Betsy and I packed up and left the condo in Lewes Saturday morning with a twinge or two of nostalgic regret, but mostly with a deep-seated concern about the looming question: “how in the hell are we going to get all of this crap stuffed into the truck?”
The short answer is, we didn’t; at least, not yet. In classic Pasley fashion, we punted; leaving the bicycles chained to the rack at the condo and dropping off some of our bulkier items at the Realtor’s office (story to be continued in a future post).
But even with those offloads we still had a mish-mash of detritus piled inside the cab of the truck. After we parked on the street in Brooklyn the detritus began screaming out to passersby; “break a window and steal us.” That prompted us to haul enough of it inside the house to be mildly embarrassed and further reinforce the hillbilly stereotype.
After a month in laid-back Lewes, New York City was a sensory overload.
There are a mind-boggling number of shops and eateries within walking distance (who in their right mind would drive and give up their parking spot) and seemingly more people milling about in a three-block area than in Delaware’s three counties combined.
Because of our extensive exposure to Law & Order we weren’t too surprised by anything we saw in New York - except for the overtly-friendly staff at Yankee stadium.
I’m serious. As many blog readers know, Betsy and I often critique customer service; both good and bad. Having complained so often about the latter I don’t want to give the impression that I am knocking the Yankees for their explicit attempts to provide the former; however, the gap between the effort to appear customer-friendly and the actual rendering of a tangible service was a little creepy.
Other observations from our 26-hour visit include the impossibly high ceilings in the Henry’s brownstone; my gleeful perception that the mighty Yankees’ $1.5 billion stadium is not as good a place to watch a ballgame as the hapless Mets’ $800 million CitiField; the huge chasm Debbie crosses every day between her life as a partner in a Wall Street law firm and her life as a mom in Brooklyn; that a lot more blue-state Yankee fans sing the national anthem than red-state Astros fans; that New Yorkers walk a hell of a lot, and; that there are a hell of a lot more fat people in San Antonio than there are in New York City.
Note to self: could there possibly be a connection between the last two observations?
I’m also debating which is more surprising to me; how far Debbie has come from the farm where she grew up outside of Liberty, Missouri, or how close it still seems to be.
The one thing that did shock me about Debbie was the intensity of her crush on Derek Jeter and the depth of her disdain for poor A-Rod, whose at-bats have been consigned to the lowly status of “blackberry-checking-time.”
When it came time to leave and we had hauled the last pillowcase out of the brownstone, stuffed the last bag of leftover mini-wheats into the truck and strapped on granny’s rocking chair we headed out on the BQE, crossed the Verazano bridge (for the measly toll of $13; it’s $8 going into the city?) and fired down the New Jersey turnpike like a couple of veterans.
Before long we were back on home turf, back in Delaware.
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