The Night Walks

Night is different.  When it gets dark that’s all it does. It just gets dark.  Places don’t close and things don’t stop, but they do slow down.  The sounds of New Yorkers doing their daily business change to laughter and music at the end of the day as friends meet to relax.

The Streets are a constant parade of black Uber cars and Yellow cabs going to their separate rendezvous somewhere in the city.  Being told to hurry and get out of the way by the various delivery trucks, buses, and construction vehicles with constantly blaring horns.  And then there is the frequent siren from an ambulance trying to hurry through the traffic maze on their way to some unknown emergency.

The people have ended their day and are headed somewhere. The New Yorkers are walking briskly by. Some going home to their family, some on their way to meet friends at the hundreds of café’s, bars or taverns lining the city boulevards.  The tourists are out seeing the sights of the bright lights, stopping to take selfies, stopping to consult the maps, pointing off in a direction in more of a question way rather than a statement way.  So many acts, all playing out different scripts at the same time on the same stage.

We are doing something new and different.  We have started taking night walks.  Long leisurely strolls, lasting an hour or more.

We leave the apartment sometime after 9 pm and just start walking.  Wandering.  We walk up the streets and down the avenues stopping to window shop as if we were in an old Norman Rockwell cover on the Saturday Evening Post.  We have seen windows with dozens of antique clocks, every imaginable chess set array of warriors, military regalia from every war era of the past 75 years, an eclectic mix of crystal balls, satanic symbols and religious artifacts. This goes on and on.

And we just keep strolling right on by.  On these evening walks, we aren’t taking a bite out of the big apple, we are just taking a moment to savor the taste and the aroma of the fruit.