the dirty little move

It all happened very fast. At a Bright Eyes concert in midtown on friday, Conor Oberst stalled and Lou Reed (a thinking reed), all muscles and new york and deeply lined, appeared. He and Oberst sang waiting for the man and dirty blvd to a full, standing audience. Then to home and then to bed, because the next day was the day I left New York City, my Dirty Little Move (DLM, coined by LWT): a more apropos send-off than Lou Reed's surprise performance couldn't be asked for. Early Saturday I picked up the moving truck (watching a good portion of a good-old-shoot-em-up western while waiting), and H*s, SWT, and E.G. and I packed her with all my manifold belongings. H*s and I said our goodbyes to 1018 manhattan avenue, apartment 1, hopped (literally: she's pretty high off the ground) into the penske, and set out for the west. The DLM started off inauspiciously, though with high good humor: I managed to make the first wrong turn possible, and taking the Queens-Midtown Tunnel was made more exciting by the police search of the penske for midget wrestlers (not to mention the surprise $9 toll), and we had to drive straight thru manhattan on a holiday weekend and figure out how to get a truck into the Lincoln Tunnel. From then on, however, the DLM unfurled with surprising smoothness. At some point, when we passed a sign instructing us not to take horses on to the highway, the penske acquired the moniker Betsy. About 8 hours after entering the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, Betsy, H*s and I made it to my brother and his family's apartment in lovely-but-difficult-to-navigate Pittsburgh, PA. That day was a mere three-state day: News York and Jersey, and the uncounted mountains of Pennsylvania.

We primed the pump of the second leg of our trip with lots of baby-holding and bagel-eating; a slow sunday morning, thoroughly necessitated by the events of the days past. Then, with our new (and later, we discovered, needed) atlas and this highly recommended book of NYT crossword puzzles, Betsy, H*s and I set out once more. Through more Pennsylvania and mountains, West Virginia, several thunderstorms, Ohio, four crossword puzzles (two Tuesdays, one Monday, and one Wednesday), Indiana, a beautiful sunset, Illinois, endless darkness, Iowa, an hour of Nebraska and several hundred dollars worth of gasoline we drove, 17 hours, and arrived this morning around 6:30. You can't ask for a better road-trip companion than H*s--grab him for your next one. Nor are there better pit-stop hosts than my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece, and their dog. And the crossword puzzles were perfect for keeping both driver and passenger awake and focused. Google maps did well by us, with one small exception (a momentary Pittsburgh confusion with no adverse effects), and we only really needed the atlas for the small portion of the trip for which we'd come up with directions ourselves (a bad move).

We are now paused, and Betsy is parked, in Lincoln, and we'll shake the final leg, to North Platte, later this week.

. . .