New York, day 7

Perfect music for today (or really any day): The National, especially this song and this one, and my favourite.

Had the most interesting taxi driver today. He told us how he moved here from Ghana in the ’90s, when rent in the Bronx was $400 a month, and how he moves people into their Manhattan apartments that are no bigger than his taxi and there’s barely enough room for the television sets they bring with them. He talked about how different his sons’ lives are from his, that “they think it’s a crisis when they run out of Captain Crunch” and how he tells them to work hard because he went to school for the first time when he was fifteen and they have so many more opportunities than he did. He talked about studying Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats—he said “I may not be pronouncing them right” (he was), “but I studied hard”. He didn’t mention exactly why he chose New York, but he said that he loves this country, that the first time he saw a copy of Reader’s Digest he was so excited, but that he’s afraid to get old here because people don’t take care of old people the way they do where he’s from. He encouraged his sons to “adopt a grandparent”; he thinks that’s the greatest idea. He said Manhattan’s a place for young people—that the appeal of it is how easy it is to blend into the crowd, how you can become a new person here because no one knows you. He was just an incredibly fascinating person. I’ve never had the experience of wishing my taxi ride could go on longer, but I wanted to keep hearing his story. I wish I’d gotten his name at least. He told me that his first day on the job as a taxi driver someone asked to go to Northern Boulevard, but he didn’t know that it was in Queens and they had to explain to him how to get there.

The weather is a bit miserable—half-rain, half-snow, falling sideways—so I didn’t do much aside from trips to Duane Reade (for composition notebooks, film for my camera, Fig Newtons, and to smell the Demeter Fragrances) and a foray into the stormy evening for warm, delicious apple crumble, then back to the room to watch HBO’s Girls.