It’s a funny thing with smells. How they can take you back to a time and a place. The smell of fish, Pop McSweeney’s pipe, and my mom’s perfume all do that to me. I don’t know what brand she wears but if some lady in a store is wearing that same perfume it always reminds me of this one day years ago when she dragged me into the city to go shopping with her at Macy’s to buy my dad a Father’s Day gift. I really didn’t want to go because what kid wants to go shopping with their mother. And to make it even worse, we were schlepping into Manhattan which meant it was gonna be an all-day affair. I forget what we got him but it was probably a sweater or some gloves or a tie and I’m sure we could have found it at the Green Acres Mall near our house, but my mom loves the city and she’ll use any excuse she can to jump onto the train to get back in there.
Usually, I hate these trips but what made that day special was after we left Macy’s we went for a walk all the way up to Central Park which is over twenty blocks away. We took Fifth Avenue up because my mom says there’s no finer street in all the world and she held my hand the whole time. I was younger then, so I was happy to hold her hand and even if I was older I still woulda been happy to hold her hand because it’s not like anyone in the city was going to recognize me and rag on me for being a momma’s boy. That was the day I realized my mom was pretty because as we walked, men in suits and guys standing on corners and even a cop directing traffic all turned and smiled at her as we walked by. And she smiled back and there was no sign of the sad eyes that day.
When we got close to the park, we stopped in front of a jewelry store to look in the window. There was a diamond necklace behind the glass, and she told me that one day you’re going to be so successful you’re going to buy your mother something like that. Instead of the necklace, we got a couple of dirty water dogs and sat on a bench in Central Park and looked at the ducks. As we sat there more men in suits walked by and smiled and said hello and my mom smiled back. Something felt weird about all this smiling, so I got up and threw some of my hot dog bun to the ducks.
“Wouldn’t that be something? To live up there with a view of the park?” she said as she pointed to the big apartment buildings. “When I was in high school, me and my girlfriends would walk through here during our lunch period and pick out which Fifth Avenue penthouses we were going to live in when we got married.”
I told her I wouldn’t want to live in the city. I told her I liked our house and our backyard and our front stoop and our block and if we lived here, I’d miss all those things.
She said, “That’s just because that’s all you know. That’s why I took you to the city today. There’s a big world out there and you need to be aware of it. There’s more to life than Marlboro Road.”
She gets quiet again, so I turn around and pretend to look at the ducks. A few minutes later, she’s up and takes my hand.
“Come on. It’s getting late. We don’t want to be in the park after dark.” Thankfully she doesn’t tell me about how safe the park used to be when she was a girl and how you could walk from Fifth Avenue all the way across to Central Park West without a worry in the world because that’s what she says anytime anyone mentions Central Park.
When we get to Columbus Circle, we take the subway back to Penn Station. Sitting on the train, she can’t help herself.
“It breaks your heart this city, doesn’t it,” she said. “One minute you’re on Fifth Avenue looking at a gorgeous necklace in the window of Tiffany’s like you’re some kind of Audrey Hepburn, and the next you’re on a graffiti-covered subway train stepping around some poor soul sleeping on a cardboard box.”
What do you say to that? I can’t tell her I think the graffiti looks cool and I’d rather sit on the train and watch all the different people and listen in on their conversations than look at a necklace in the window of a store and have strange men wink and whistle at my mom.
Of course when we get to Penn Station she starts talking about the old Penn Station and how they tore it down when she was in her twenties and what a gorgeous building it was and how she and her girlfriends from work came down there during their lunch breaks to protest the demolition but it did no good and how they cried as the wrecking balls swung and nobody seemed to give any thought to the craftsmen who cut the stone and chiseled the marble because no one thinks of those things in the same way that no one thinks of her father when they drive through the Lincoln Tunnel but thank goodness for Jackie O., or they would have done the same thing to Grand Central Station.
When we got on the Long Island Rail Road, I was so tired from all our walking and even more tired from hearing about how things used to be and how terrible things are now that I just wanted to take a nap but she stopped me when I put my face down on the empty seat next to us because who knows who was sitting here before us so she folded her coat up as a pillow and I fell asleep with my head in her lap and with the smell of her perfume in my nose.