"On weekends we'd take the bus into the city-my father, my younger brother, and I. We lived in Brooklyn then, in Flatbush; this was in the late sixties, when I was nine or ten. My father didn't live with us. He'd pick us up late morning on a Saturday, and off we'd head to Manhattan-three explorers in pursuit of discovery."
"The speed of it! So many people, so many cars, and so much energy on those wide and sometimes narrow streets. In my memory of those trips, it's always fall, and everyone is wearing a trenchcoat, just like Suzy Parker on Madison Avenue in "The Best of Everything." My father, gone now for many years, was, in some ways, fearful of the world and bewildered by his boy children, but he was fearless when it came to showing us Manhattan."
I remember late-sixties weekends when my father picked my brother and me up in Brooklyn and we rode buses into Manhattan, changing in Williamsburg. The city felt fast and alive, always seeming to be in fall with trenchcoats and bustling streets. Our father showed us Yorkville, the Upper West Side, the Guggenheim, and the New York Public Library, making culture part of everyday life. He could be fearful in general yet fearless about introducing us to the city. Prejudice sometimes arose, but it did not limit our dreams. My father felt uneasy in Harlem and avoided live entertainment there.
Read at The New Yorker
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