I had planned a walk to the Hoboken
or Weehawken waterfront, but the
rain hovers over the landscape with its gray shroud, making the walk seem
unlikely.
I can’t ever get enough of the New York Skyline, even though
it has changed so drastically from when I was a kid, and could see it in the
distance from my third floor bedroom on the highest hill of my home town.
During our trips to The Village, I used to insist on taking
one bus over the other at a point in town where the two buses converged, a
thing that puzzled my best friend, Frank, because the other bus always got us
to the city first.
But the slower bus always came down along the Weehawken
ridge over looking the river and the skyline, and like a child rather than the
teen I was, I fought to get the window seat so I could gawk.
I still gawk even when I live this close, and take in the
city in its various moods, knowing that how it felt I felt, knowing that if a
shroud of cloud covered it, I felt that mood as well, making me ache to get
there today for the same reason, as if after all this time, the city itself
read my moods and clouds itself in the proper garb so as to reflect me when I
arrive there.
There is a small park in Jersey City
that overlooks the back side of Hoboken ,
and beyond it, the great Manhattan
landscape, the towering manmade cliffs – although from that point the river
itself is invisible so that Hoboken
seems to run right into Manhattan .
If it rains, I may just go there and stare, and try to sort
out which side of the river is which, and how I feel on this gray day.