Another trip already, well, it is summer...

As most strange trips happen, this one showed up out of nowhere, turns on a dime and suddenly I’m not sitting at home in front of dinner watching TV. Wait, I just used that.

How about, it’s summer and the living is… no, wait, did that one too. The trip, the best parts the trip, no damn, used that one several times, all the way back to Russia. Well maybe we can just ease into it by saying I’ve just seen a face, I can’t forget the time or place, she’s just the girl for me and I want all the world to see we’ve met…mmmm… no that’s a Beatles song. Do you know growing up I thought you spelled beetles BEATLES, I didn’t get the play on words for years. (Beat- les, musical beat- les) Well, Teri and I went on a trip Sunday, yesterday and yes, hadn’t I ‘ve gone on enough lately, but this one was important and I thought might be fun. Teri has the possibility of working at a place in the Bronx across the street from the bat near Yankee Stadium. There were so many times I’d meet friends at the refurbished stadium at the bat. Little did I know all these years later after they tore down the ‘House that Ruth built’ I’d be taking distant pictures with my phone (A phone of all things, not a camera!!) of a new stadium…where the Yankees can’t seem to win a World Series.

We plan to leave the house at 10, Teri time and opposed to Muller time we leave at 10. Before we leave she puts the address in her GPS unit and it gives her three routes to take. And like deja vu all over again I’m questioning the program again. Could this be where skynet really becomes sentient (You better be getting the Terminator reference!!) The program keeps mentioning the McCombs Dam Bridge, the same one I crossed over on the previous Friday (There’s no toll, I’ll cross over it as often as I can.) but we don’t need to go into Manhattan. I keep pointing this out to Teri and she keeps not understanding what I’m saying. It gets more fun when we cross the Tappan Zee Bridge (Don’t even go there, we had this discussion during Friday’s trip) and I tell her to just follow the directions. She replies, and in hindsight, I understand, “ You told me not to follow the directions to the McCombs Dam Bridge.” Somehow we get started. We cross the bridge (Yes, I’m leaving it alone this time) Teri asks me if she is to follow 87 or 287? I don’t know numbers and I also see an opportunity to tell her about the time Elena and I approached this same intersection and how I told her how they had changed the way the road is built to reflect how traffic has changed. I think she told me to stop before she fell asleep, if she didn’t I’m sure she was thinking that. I get past the 87, 287 and the reconfigured exit 6 drama and are headed toward the Bronx. We see signs for Stew Leonard. I told her about the time I went to that store and they were giving out free chocolate chip cookies. It was a short story, I think she appreciated that. We calculated the price of tolls if she was to take this job at about $2,000.00 a year in current tolls. They're going up some time in the future.

We take exit 5 off the Major Deegan drive along deserted parking lots and at some point don’t make a turn which causes us to have to turn around. We find the location. It’s within a few hundred yards of the bat. Surrounded by parking garages. We park on an empty street. There’s no, well almost no one. A red Toyota is parked. We park behind it, so no one will notice us parked behind the red Toyota, on the empty street with all the ‘no parking signs’. We walk to the building, find the front door. It has a solid roll down gate with a camera, a reminder that this is still the Bronx. We find the correct parking lot she might park in if she accepts the job. I take those pictures of the bat, the empty street and the far away stadium. We’re there for maybe ten minutes. She’s done all the reconnaissance she needs to do. She wants to go. I ask her if she wants to approach the company and not make the wrong turn again, she says, “No, she is fine, she wants to go.” So we go. She drove so conservatively going down to the Bronx, I was very concerned if she could drive to this job without issues. On the way home, it’ll all different. She didn’t touch the third lane going down and was reluctant to pass anyone, she drove like an old person, (Yes, like an old lady!!) On the way home it was all 180 degrees different. I asked her about it and she admitted to being nervous. She said she’d be more comfortable going down to Newark at 7AM because she’d driven that route so often before, than going to the Bronx, right now. We have a late breakfast, brunch at the old Hogan’s Diner in Nyack, now just the Nyack Diner and we were home before Elena is out of bed. At 1PM her mother wakes her up by getting into bed with her.