Forty years ago, today would’ve been the sort of temperate, sunlit day that I might’ve spent with my buddy Mark, walking all over our borough until we’d seen all there was to see, solved a substantial number of world problems, and gotten myself thoroughly lost while mere miles away from home.
Or, we might have jumped on the subway into Manhattan, grabbed a reasonably-priced lunch at one of two Howard Johnson’s diners that still existed on Times Square, before venturing into the twisty escalators of the Loew’s Astor Plaza for an inevitably disappointing, pre-Star Wars genre movie.
On more ambitious days, handball at a local court. Probably the only sport in which I could claim some momentary competence, at least on days when I could get out of my own head and refuse to defer to almost any other human being’s presence.
