A New York Trip in Three Acts

My family has a charitable foundation. My father was a very successful guy who reached a point where he realized he had more money than he could ever possibly need and decided to devote a good portion of his life to giving much of it away in ways that really benefit society. One of the things we do (I'm on the board of the foundation) is endow an internship and travel program at Barnard College. My father went to Columbia and my sister went to Barnard, so there's the connection. The grants allow students to do paid internships with nonprofit organizations instead of doing work study jobs. There are both travel grants and local activity grants. Every year they have a dinner to honor these young women and so we can meet them and I'd never been before.

Act I - To New York
Unfortunately, the dinner is in Upper Manhattan at 6PM on a weeknight and I, unlike the rest of my family, do not live in what the traffic reports call "The Tri-state Area" (though nobody really calls it that or even thinks of it that way). So I make a 4PM train reservation, look at the school schedule that has me finished at 3:30PM, and hope for the best. The plan is to get everything I needed in the car, park the car right outside the building where I have my last class, let the class out early (Shh!) and dash down to the train station and just barely make the train, if everything goes perfectly. It didn't. For one thing, I left one of my bags in my office and had to drive my car the 150 feet from one building to the other so I could grab it and go, and then the ride to the train station didn't take a LOT longer than I'd hoped, but it definitely took longer, even though I (accidentally) ran a red light and almost hit a school bus. I was 10 minutes late, enough that I don't even bother to run in from the parking lot. I walk into the station to see when the next train is and the board shows that my train is still there. So NOW I'm running and get my tickets and on the train about 45 seconds before it left.

Act II- The Dinner

The restaurant where the dinner is held, Terrace in the Sky, is a pretty space on the top floor of an anonymous Columbia-owned apartment building with a 360 degree view of Manhattan. Columbia celebrates owning this gem by not including it on any one of the many campus directories that dot the campus. Fortunately, the first person I asked for directions (yes, us guys do that sometimes) knew exactly where it was. When I get there I realize I'm the only guy there without a jacket and tie, but I guess I'm old enough now that they don't force me to wear the size 46 blue blazer they keep in the coat room for the heathen to borrow. And of course the students could care less.

So I start chatting with these girls, mostly college seniors but some juniors too, and they are amazing. Maybe my perspective is warped because I was such an idiot when I was in college, as were most of my friends, but these girls are so smart and energetic and engaged in life that it really blew me away. I sat at a table next to a girl who had spent her summer working in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital (!), and with others who did stuff ranging from researching using stem cells to grow pacemakers to writing a thesis charting the history of labor unions in Senegal from French colonial days to independence to French/Senegalese interdependence. Oh, and the paper was in French. I also talked with a young woman who'd studied ethnography, specifically the societal ramifications of multiple family residences in Bangladesh. This was particularly jarring to me because I realized that I know absolutely nothing about Bangladesh, or the whole Indian subcontinent for that matter (well, at least I know it's called that) because who cares about a part of the world where a quarter of the world's population lives.

I'm guessing the rest of the girls were equally impressive, but there wasn't time to talk to them all. I also felt like I talked way too much, but I guess that's what happens when you're out of your comfort zone. Nobody seemed to mind.

Act III - Back Home

I decide to cab it to the train station, and my cabbie is great. Did you know there are TVs in the back of New York cabs? I really need to get out more. He was one of these cabbies who drives 60 miles an hour in the city and complains the whole time about how much of a rush people are always in.

As we approach Penn Station, we're flying down a side street and someone suddenly opens their car door and we almost knock it off its hinges, but the driver swerves in time. We start laughing and the cabbie says this happens to him all the time and that people are in too much of a hurry to bother looking. I mention that it's a completely different experience to have someone open a door if you're on a bicycle, and the cabbie agrees that that can be very scary and dangerous. About 10 seconds later, the cab stops outside the entrance to Penn Station, I open the door to get out and WHAM! a delivery guy on a bicycle smashes into the door and topples over like in a cartoon, Chinese food containers scattering everywhere. I close the door and the cabbie and I are laughing hysterically. I felt kind of bad for the guy, but really. I always check if I open a door on the street side, but you never expect anyone to be stupid enough to try to pass a taxicab that just stopped outside Penn Station on the curb side of the cab. What did he think was going to happen after the cab stopped? Fortunately, he wasn't badly hurt and rode away, muttering at me in Chinese.

I made the train with 5 minutes to spare and was home a couple of hours later. Routine all the way.