Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis That our fellow citizens of Big Apple are the most feeling, helpful and cooperative, not just for the holiday season but for all-around, is best seen on the busses, M16 and M15, servicing the Bedpan Alley, First Avenue, between 14th Street and the East Eighties, where the city's main hospitals keep us moving, literally as well as mentally. A person with a walking stick will have any number of young, middle-aged as well as older women as well as men, renegadless of race, ethnic background and language, getting up to offer their seats, particularly those in the front benches parallel to traffic. The young do it without waiting for an acknowledgement, and walk away to the back of the carriage; the older will exchange smiles and words. This becomes complicated when the same local bus carries two wheelchairs and accepts more four-wheel walkers, sometimes with shopping bags and packages in the seat space. The modern pavement-level entrance buses also have an over-the wheel storage platform, where such packages can be unloaded, allowing the owner to collapse the walker. Wheelchairs, and also strollers with infants make the movements harder; everyone has to pull in their feet, to allow passage. But people cooperate, and the stronger travelers help the weak, passing the gear through, with hardy a complaint.Necessity makes good neighbors, it is evident. The many truly elderly add their own types of problems to the mix. Recently, entering the Rusk Institute for my ailments (arthritis-related), I saw a woman patient crying at the sign-in counter, “I left my wallet in the Yellow Taxi while paying, please help me!” The receptionist gave her a phone for full use, and suggested the 311 help from the Mayor's office, and the patient, between talking, phone menu waits and losing the outside line, got nowhere. Then another wheel-chaired patient's helper stepped in. "I see you still have your American Express card, did you pay with it?" The patient acknowledged, and the helper told her to call AmEx, to identify to payment's recipient and to call the taxi. That was a great solution, absolutely brilliant, and everyone around praised it. But the patient kept misdialing until the helper took over, and had AmEx locate the cabbie, who then found the wallet, sans any money (there had been several passengers.) The helper dialed the cabbie, to ask him to deliver the wallet to Rusk, but the patient took over, insisting that she could not wait, and declared that she would take the bus home, somehow getting the return fare together, and would call the cabbie from there; she did not want to have the driver lose time, and he should not be on the cell phone, legally. That evoked several rational protests regarding the strategy, until a bystander offered the solution, that the patient use her AmEx card, again, for quicker return. This broke up the conference, and everyone went about their businesses, feeling good. It still left me with the question of how she kept the AmEx card in hand and did not try to put it back in the wallet, but the helper and I agreed that advanced age can play odd tricks on behavior and memory, and let it go at that. This friendliness was also noted in Times Square area on New Year's Eve, when we arrived at 2pm for a matinee at the Roundabout, near Sixth Avenue. After 4pm we could not return, the Times Square entrance was impossible to access, with entry lines laid out south to 37th Street. But people on the street were friendly and exchanged movement strategy information freely, whether right or wrong - even the friendly cops, who arrived with uniform blue lunch boxes in preparation for a long tour, had suspected stale instructions. We decided to linger, exploring Bryant Park, not visited for years. In November and December the central lawn, west of the Library, turns into a skating ring (free), and the bushes in the surrounding square miraculously transform into 100 or so gunmetal and glass pavilions (calling them booths is too inadequate) with parquet floors, a miracle of temporary construction, with an additional two story glass and metal frame structure with a shiny dome, in the northeast corner. Arts and crafts, jewelry, leather and clothing, and food and drink must move in fantastic quantities, to pay for the up and down work of this temporary city (closing January 7), although the presence of the name of Citi seems to indicate a benevolent sponsor. But the thousands of tourists seem willing to spend (in 2007 56M foreign visitors came to the US, 35M to NYC, spending $125B and helping provide 7M jobs, mostly in the 29 states that call tourism their 1st, or 2nd or 3rd industry (shame, America, once the industrial center of our planet). Our Union Square Holiday Market (closed December 24) was far more simplistic, with wooden booths and similar goods, though less pricey. It was the 18th annual event, and it was good to see returning vendors. How much this takes away from the city's sales tax receipts remains a mystery, but it builds our image as the world's refuge for the wealthy (as contrasted with the super-wealthy, who buy coop mansions.) More of our fellow citizens’ kindness later. Meanwhile, T&V and Wally wish you a healthy and forward looking 2012, and more jobs.