{"id":684,"date":"2010-08-11T21:36:19","date_gmt":"2010-08-12T02:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/?p=684"},"modified":"2010-08-15T11:02:27","modified_gmt":"2010-08-15T16:02:27","slug":"m2nyi30es-%e2%80%93-drive-and-arrive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/?p=684","title":{"rendered":"M2NYi30ES \u2013 Drive and Arrive"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>The drive to New York went surprisingly well, for a star-crossed journey. \u00a0Sure, I only saw my wife behind me on rare occasions, during extremely sharp turns, hidden as she was, three feet off my bumper. \u00a0With its bad brakes, the truck took so long to stop that I scarcely considered the possibility that she might rear-end me. \u00a0We negotiated the highways and bridges and and tolls and avoided the roadway hazards in near-miraculous fashion. \u00a0We had rough directions from my wife\u2019s Long Island relatives, and they served us fairly well&#8230;until we actually made it to Manhattan. \u00a0Their directions put us on the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Franklin_D._Roosevelt_East_River_Drive\">FDR East River Drive<\/a>, which is a lovely, fast route for traveling north and south on the east side if you\u2019re in a car. \u00a0Trouble is, the city has rather stringent laws against driving trucks on it.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" title=\"Da Po-Po\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp-img\/nyc_cop.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" \/>Stringent though they might be, breaking laws such as these does not really attract much notice in a city where the cops are beleaguered, with real crime to deal with. \u00a0I mean, if something bad had happened on the FDR, the final disposition of the legal case and the inevitable law suits would have gone against me. \u00a0As it was, frankly exhausted from the day of packing, unpacking, loading, unloading&#8230;and loading again, and then driving for several hours with brakes that technically didn\u2019t work until just before I was about to crash into the vehicle ahead of me, this little legality seemed like something of which I could plausibly deny knowledge.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>See, I saw a documentary once about training cab drivers in New York. \u00a0Driving around with the trainees, the trainer pointed out a rental truck and told the trainees, \u201cThe las\u2019 time dat guy drove dat truck was nevuh. \u00a0No kiddin\u2019. \u00a0Stay away from dose guys.\u201d \u00a0This image buoyed my spirits as I pressed on. \u00a0I practiced saying, \u201cAh didn\u2019 see them signs, Suh,\u201d in an uncharacteristically thick, sing-songy southern accent. \u00a0I thought it would be more persuasive of my utter ignorance in case I were stopped. \u00a0Drive Forrest, drive!<\/p>\n<p>Denying the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Moirae\">Fates<\/a> at least one laugh that day, we arrived safely at the high-rise apartment building that would be our home in the big, heartless city. \u00a0The city was big, all right, but it wasn\u2019t so heartless after all. \u00a0Once we found a parking spot for the truck and started to unload, the staff of the building were on duty and efficient and helpful, and luckily they didn\u2019t mind a little rain. \u00a0They were especially nice in that helping us required them to take a break from watching the girls walking to work at <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Scores_(strip_club)\">Scores<\/a>. \u00a0To be absolutely honest, though, the tailgate of the truck afforded them an improved and strategic view of the girls as they walked, oozed, wiggled, and bounced down the sidewalk. \u00a0Unloading the truck, this one last time, was one of the things that, unaccountably and against all odds, went well.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, my wife found a parking place for the car. \u00a0We shall return to that by and by, but here beginneth the saga of unloading the truck. \u00a0The stuff was really wedged in there, as I said, but with all the rattling and vibration of the trip, the load had settled and congealed into a mass. \u00a0As we worked our way through the stuff, pulling out things as they disaggregated from the mass, my wife slipped and scraped her shin, painfully, on a piece of metal.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I am sure that hurt, and I wouldn\u2019t want it to happen to me, but my wife has no <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pain_threshold\">pain threshold<\/a> whatsoever. \u00a0She has two states: \u00a0Pain-free bliss, and abject, debilitating agony. \u00a0She never had a headache that was not a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Migraine\">migraine<\/a>. \u00a0There is a medical instrument called, appropriately enough, a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dolorimeter\">dolorimeter<\/a> since it is used to measure pain tolerance. \u00a0Being in the same room with one of these would be too much for my wife. \u00a0Well, when she scraped her shin, and that drop of blood rose to the surface, she almost passed out. \u00a0She turned that greenish-yellowish-bluish, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cyanosis\">cyanotic<\/a> color of a fresh corpse and started teetering with her eyes rolling back into her head. \u00a0She was not of much use for the next few hours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The drive to New York went surprisingly well, for a star-crossed journey. \u00a0Sure, I only saw my wife behind me on rare occasions, during extremely sharp turns, hidden as she was, three feet off my bumper. \u00a0With its bad brakes, the truck took so long to stop that I scarcely considered the possibility that she [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoirs","tag-past"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":718,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions\/718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/byers\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}