My flight out to LaGuardia was delayed by three and a half hours on Tuesday. Two hours in the Kansas City airport, forty-five minutes on the tarmac in Kansas City, and the rest sitting on the tarmac in New York. By the time I found myself in the taxi line, it was 1:30 a.m. and the line was at least sixty people deep. The temperature congealed above ninety degrees. I watched some people ahead of me laughing to each other, and despite my intention of keeping a good attitude, I couldn't wrap my head around how anyone could laugh at that point in the trip. I stumbled into my hotel room at two bells, texted Beloved and fell into bed.
The next morning I felt much better, despite having way less than my requisite amount of sleep and a half-functioning window unit air conditioner on the 16th floor. I even figured out in my haste booking the trip last week, I'd confused Midtown East with Midtown West in my favor and instead of having a twenty-minute walk, I had a ten-minute one. Two days flew by.
My story really starts when I tried to leave on Thursday afternoon at five. I walked out into a sweltering New York afternoon. The heat index was well over a hundred, and the haze seemed to be leaking out of everyone's pores. I found myself nearly in the street trying to catch a cab at West 43rd and Fifth Avenue, along with every tourist in New York City. I expected it to take a while. I've been to New York before; I lived in Chicago for fifteen months. I forgot, though, the helplessness I would feel when I realized after fifty minutes of standing on that street with my arm in the air that I might not get a cab, that I might not make one of the last flights back to Kansas City, that all the adrenaline I'd used up powering myself from the moment I found out last week I had to take this trip until that very minute might be for nothing if I couldn't get myself home in time to get up, unpack, repack and drive to my in-laws' house in Iowa on Friday morning.
I started to sense my defenses crumbling a little. Then I felt someone staring at me and looked over my shoulder to see a small blond woman with a very large camera click-click-clicking away. I scowled at her and turned my back on her, waving my arm harder, thinking if I could just get a cab I could get away from this weirdo taking my picture. She kept circling around me to get different angles as I tried to ignore her. Finally I looked right at her as she pointed her camera at me. "You aren't putting these on istockphoto, are you?" I asked in exasperation, pissed that talking to her required me to take my attention away from the cabs that kept rushing by with other people inside them.
She smiled. Her accent was thick, European. She tried to show me the photo. "It's just so typically New York," she said, as though that meant I should be happy to be featured. "These are really very good." I saw the desperation on my face in the photo. Yes, I thought. That is typically New York for me. Every time I am here I am worried I will never escape. I want to like New York and Chicago, I really do, but I am accustomed to big sky and big horizons, and the street feels so confined to me, so crowded. Instead of seeing it as a challenge, I always end up seeing it as an ant farm.
I abandoned my spot on the street and tweeted my desperation. My friend Karen told me to find a hotel and get in their cab line. I couldn't find a hotel. I was by the library. As I tried to cross the street, a cab finally slowed, and a minute later the cab driver was berating me for my stupidity in apparently not allowing twelve hours for myself to catch a cab and get to the airport at rush hour.
"What, you thought you'd just walk onto the street and get a cab?" he said.
"No, not exactly. I admit I was surprised it took 57 minutes."
"You're going to miss your plane, you know." I'd told him my flight was at seven. It was at 7:40.
We drove in silence for a little bit.
"Okay, it's not really at seven. It's at 7:40."
He laughed. "Oh, you thought you'd make me go faster?"
"Well, you thought I was stupid, anyway."
He laughed and laughed. "I think you will make your flight."
We cleared an accident -- lightssirenscarspeoplewavingarms -- and barreled over a bridge. We arrived at the airport at 6:30. I would've made the plane probably even if it was at seven, ironically. I made it through security faster than I thought I would, all of us stinking and sweating in the cattle line. I stood behind one of those ethereally thin young women who turns to the side at the last minute and you are shocked to realize she is at least eight months pregnant and you can't tell from behind.
The flight back home left on time from LaGuardia for the first time in my fifteen-year business traveling history. When I got back to my car at 10:15, I actually had to sit in the seat and pump myself up to drive the 45 minutes home, the last leg, I told myself, you can do this. It's the last part.
When I walked in the door at 11 on Thursday night, I thought of that woman and her camera and wondered if my photo would remain in her private collection or find its way onto the Internet, forever marking me as a cog in the New York machine, a typical scene.
If that was a typical scene, it makes me sad. Because I was nervous and annoyed and very, very sad at that moment, thinking I might miss my plane despite all my planning and three days of carefully orchestrated timing, despite the extreme energy it had taken me to plan the trip at the last minute, pull myself through the meetings with good cheer and quick decisions, navigate unfamiliar subways and streets late at night, sweat with the rest of the city -- that I might be undone after all that by the lack of a taxicab ... I hope that kind of quiet desperation is not stereotypically New York.
I went out to look at my flowers and tomatoes when I got home, even though it was dark. They bloomed quietly, the only sound the cicadas and tree frogs. Despite the oppressive heat, I could see stars. No one tried to take my picture. And I went back to being my kind of anonymous. The kind in which I realize people might try to take my picture if I go to BlogHer '11 or stand on a street corner in New York, but no one will here, because I am just not that interesting, not part of the scenery, and that is absolutely fine with me.
Ever since I started working on my YA novel (I'm still plugging, still plugging -- querying is The Suck), people have told me I should read Sarah Dessen. So I did -- see what I thought of What Happened to Goodbye at BlogHer Book Club!