Today we had tickets for the Yankee game at 1 pm so we left Westbrook on the early side. We took advantage of the fact that we had a little leeway with time to see if we could find two of the places Bill lived in Greenwich when he was a kid. Finding the first house on Halsey was not too difficult. It was exactly where he recalled it being.
The second house on Riverside Avenue was not far from the first but it took Bill a little longer to find. He has a really good memory and used a lot of neighborhood clues to figure out where the house was. Whereas the Halsey house was right on the street, Riverside was down a long driveway.
We drove down that long driveway to see it up close but we didn’t linger. We didn’t want to get accused of trespassing.
From there, we returned to the hotel, checked in and dropped our bags. We had an hour or so before we needed to be at the game so we took Mason on a driving tour through Manhattan and Brooklyn.
We were happy to point out Carmine’s. We ate there in Washington D.C. but this was where our memories started in the Theater District.
Times Square was buzzing. We also drove down to our old apartment in Boerum Hill. To our great delight, Mitri, our former landlord, was standing right on the stoop. We quickly parked the car and jumped out. He was just as we remembered him. His daughters happened to be there visiting and we got to say hello. Talk about timing.
Then we were off to Yankee Stadium.
This was one of our gifts to Mason for his birthday. We were fortunate to have seats close to the field and also in the shade. The game was fun even though the Yankees lost. We had a fun group of fans seated in the row behind us. Every time the stadium queued up the Banana Boat Song (Day O), the guys called out, “We said day, we said day, we said daaaaay O.” It made the crowd go wild and made us smile.
Under the category of “It’s a Small World After All,” a scout family we know was sitting in the next section over. I knew they were going to be at the game, but I didn’t expect to actually see them there. And then, in the even smaller, small world, just before the game started, the boy from camp who we met at the St. Louis Airport walked down the aisle and sat a few rows ahead of us.
We stayed until the last out and then waited for them to play New York, New York. Bill ducked out right away to get to Newark for his flight back to St. Louis and Mason and I lingered in the stadium a bit longer. Finally, we hopped on the number 4 train to Grand Central and went back to the hotel to catch our breath.
Dinner tonight was at Main Noodle Shop on Sixth Avenue. It was just an ordinary Chinese restaurant but that’s the amazing thing about New York. Even at a random restaurant, the food is often extraordinary. Mason chose Shrimp Lo Mein and I had a Tofu Vegetable Casserole with Cellophane Noodles. Each of us left with happy faces and tummies.
By this point, we were both exhausted and we got ready for bed. We would have gone to sleep immediately had we not had the great fortune of being roomed on the 30th (and top) floor of the hotel with a perfect view of the fireworks over the East River. We watched in our pajamas from the window. No traffic and no commute. It was just what we needed to end our 4th of July in the city.
Love small world stories!