The length of time it feels like I'm talking about approaching the city roughly equals how long it felt like it took to GET THERE. (From The Cheesecake Truck To The End Of The Line, 15)

I like to add actual photos from my honeymoon to these posts.  Those actual photos are not "digital" photos because in 2000, "digital" meant "WHAT? THE INTERNET BARELY EXISTS AND MY PHONE IS STILL ATTACHED TO THE WALL." So these photos exist in an actual photo album, and to get them into the Internet I have to scan them into a computer and then upload them, which was always a somewhat tedious process but is made all the more tedious now by the fact that we bought a new computer, which means I have effectively been working a second job as tech support for the computer. After 2 weeks, I was able to recreate Itunes. I still have not gotten the sound to work properly, and as for hooking up our old printer to it and using it as a scanner? I am DREADING it.
So instead, I took a picture of the picture with my "smart"phone, and that picture was upside down.  SO WHATEVER JUST ASSUME NEW YORK WAS UPSIDE DOWN WHEN WE ARRIVED.

Just before I got married to Sweetie, I made a mixtape to take on our honeymoon road trip to New York. The other day, I found that tape and decided to tell the story of our honeymoon through the songs on that tape. This is part 13; click here for the Table of Contents.

So when I last actually wrote about my honeymoon in this series (as opposed to writing about how I couldn't write about my honeymoon due to technical difficulties) Sweetie and I were just approaching New York, the city, after about 12 hours of driving.

If you've ever watched movies, or television, or driven to Chicago -- which was at the time of my honeymoon the only other big city I'd ever driven to -- then you may have this idea, as I did, of what it is like to approach a big city, and that idea is this:  the "city" is made up of giant buildings that just pop up out of nowhere, so that one minute you are driving on a highway and the next BAM! (not literally) the city is there.

That's what it's like to drive to Chicago, after all.  In the Midwest, a city like Chicago sticks out like a sore thumb (not literally).  While actually driving into Chicago requires that you go through some outskirts, it is very apparent that you are in the city, as you do that.  The transition happens almost immediately, from prairie to city.

New York the city I expected to be like that, too -- that we'd come around a corner, or over a rise, or something, and it would appear, and just be there.  I wasn't actually prepared for how big the city itself is, and for how unimpressive the city would be until you were actually downtown.

I mean, New York! That's really all one should have to say.  This is a city that you hear about incessantly if you live... I was going to say "if you live in America," but I'd bet it's universal: if you live anywhere, America, Europe, Asia, Ganymede, you probably hear about New York, the city, all your life and are ready for it to be something. And by "something" I mean "obviously a city," and by that I mean "like, you know, Chicago."

So as we approached New York, the city, I expected that we'd see giant buildings towering to the sky, the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty,  possibly other buildings, I don't know, maybe Yankee Stadium? -- all those famous buildings were supposed to just exist, along with the Brooklyn Bridge and the 59th Street Bridge and the Staten Island Ferry, and all of them should have been visible at the same, at least in my mind.

Instead, this is how we approached New York (the city): as night came on, we got closer and closer, a fact that we knew only because we figured this must be true.  This was, again, the days before GPS and so we were going on a road map, one I'd bought at a grocery store, and so the only 'guidance' we had was a small reddish line that said that if we followed it, we'd get to New York.  We were still (in real life) on the road that was marked by that reddish line (on the map) and had been for 12+ hours, and going by the legend, which said that a length of line approximately equal to 1 inch was equal to some number of miles, I had calculated how many miles we should have to travel to get from Buffalo to New York.

(I had calculated this through the extremely scientific method of saying "the part of my index finger between the second and third knuckles is approximately one inch, so here goes," because who has a ruler with them, EVER? Even back in the dark ages like this, I never had a ruler, and I especially did not have a ruler when I needed one, like when I was supposed to measure the exact length of a line on a map to figure out distances, but even if I had somehow found a second-grader to borrow a ruler from, it still would have been approximate because the red line was curved.)

So we were using the honeymooners' equivalent of dead reckoning, and by that measure we would enter New York right...

NOW!

We drove past a sign that said something like "New York next five exits" or something like that -- I don't recall ever seeing anything like you see in small towns in the Midwest, a "Welcome To..." sign followed by a sign announcing that there is a "Kiwanis" club in town and noting how many State Track & Field Championships that municipality has won -- and assuming that meant we were in New York City, we cheered.

We really did: as we crossed (we thought) into what (we thought) was the municipality of New York, proper, we cheered,  saying "Yay!" and high-fiving because we were there.

Then we kept driving, for about a half-hour, without seeing anything that looked like a city. We just kept seeing road signs that announced various things that meant nothing to us, and no buildings or anything that looked like a city.  Granted, it was dark out, but we were pretty sure that at least parts of New York -- well, those parts that weren't overrun with homeless crack-dealer muggerrapistmurderers -- would be at least partially lit and/or have buildings.

We drove on, wondering what they'd done with New York, and kept not seeing any signs of the city, or of our exit, although we did see a sign that said "Trucks Carrying Explosives, Use Exit --" which seemed worrisome to us: how many trucks carrying explosives were there, that they needed their own particular exit?

After what seemed like a hundred years, we still hadn't seen the city, or anything resembling the kind of place where Kevin McAllister gets lost or Kurt Russell escapes or people get to finally be a part of it instead of just longing for that, but we did see our exit, and so it was time to get off the highway and drive into New York, assuming it was there because honestly it still didn't feel right.

We were staying at a hotel that I'd booked several nights before, after the debacle in Cleveland.  The hotel was near LaGuardia Airport -- an airport I felt as though I was sort of connected to, having flown into it (twice!) on my trip to Morocco six years earlier, so I was like an expert on this area of the city if you don't pay attention to the fact that I hadn't, technically, left the airport buildings on either of those occasions, so I would really only be helpful if we were to have been staying in LaGuardia itself, which we were not.  This part of the city was "Queens," which I understand is a 'borough' of New York, which to me feels weird: how can part of a city have a whole name for itself and be like a whole separate city but still part of the city? If you just say that everything around you  is part of the city, well, then, yeah, it's a big city, but that seems like cheating.

The idea that parts of cities have their own nicknames, and their own identities, and a quasi-separate existence that somehow rises above the level of "the local residents are making it up" seems kind of weird to me, but that's probably because I was raised in a suburb and the nearest big city was Milwaukee, which really isn't big enough to have "boroughs," or even "parts," although they tried, in Milwaukee, because I remember from living near it, and in it, that Milwaukee wants to have 'parts' or 'boroughs' or something, and probably most cities do, but in the Midwest, owing to our farm-raised simplicity or our laziness or our German heritage or something, we haven't really progressed to the point where we can do the whole 'parts of the city' thing right, i.e., we don't really have them have their own identity or names or anything.

So in Milwaukee, there was the "South Side," which was loosely made up of the southern part of the city, something I always assumed meant "that part of the city which is south of I-94, the federal highway that runs through the city from Lake Michigan, on the east, to the western suburbs of Milwaukee County," but I was apparently wrong about that, as the "South Side" starts somewhere south of that natural dividing line, and is mostly confined to the easternmost part of the southernmost part of Milwaukee, the part that's south and east of the brewery/tanning factories that give Milwaukee its memorable stink when you first enter it from the west.

There was also "the North Side," which, if you were a suburban kid, was where you went if you wanted to get shot.  And the "East Side," which was where rich people lived.

That was the Milwaukee Geography I learned as a kid.  Once I lived there, I learned that there were other neighborhoods, too, places like "Downtown," (self-explanatory), which was always being 'revitalized,' starting with the Grand Avenue Mall 30 or so years ago, an opening of a mall so Grand that it even drew my parents all the way from the suburbs to shop at it, once, before they decided that they didn't want to risk going into the city to shop at a mall just because it had a glass elevator in the main atrium.  (The glass elevator back then was deemed the height of glamour.  Three decades in, I'm hard pressed to think of a mall anywhere that doesn't have one.  That's progress for you: we focus on the least amazing part of Willy Wonka's factory, and make it commonplace.  Where are my lifting bubbles, people?)

"Downtown" is still being revitalized, today: I was there (on business!) a few weeks ago and it looks much the same, only it was hotter than I remembered.

There was also the neighborhood known as "the Marquette neighborhood," called that because it was in and around Marquette University, which is famous for its basketball team having changed its name from "Warriors" to "Golden Eagles," something that is still controversial twenty years later because the kind of people who care about Marquette's team name have nothing real to worry about in their lives, and Marquette University is famous also for its proximity to where Jeffrey Dahmer lived, although to be fair he technically lived off-campus and had no formal affiliation with Marquette.

Finally, there was another "East Side" in Milwaukee, one that somehow was less East than the place I'd previously learned was the "East Side," but was still east of most of the city, and had "Real Chili" and a concert hall where indie bands would play a lot, and then there was "Riverwest," which was a neighborhood just west of the Milwaukee River where you would go if you wanted to get shot.

None of that prepared me for the fact that "Queens" was a part of a city that I hadn't yet seen, but it was also very late, past 10 o'clock, and we'd been driving a long time, and so we found our hotel and went and checked in.

And then assume it began SLOWLY to roll over.

So it turns out that the digital revolution has a few drawbacks, nostalgia-wise. (From The Cheesecake Truck To The End Of The Line)

Just before I got married to Sweetie, I made a mixtape to take on our honeymoon road trip to New York. The other day, I found that tape and decided to tell the story of our honeymoon through the songs on that tape. This is part 13; click here for the Table of Contents.

Here's two problems I ran into this morning.

First, I haven't actually written an entry in this ongoing series in three years.

Three years.

When my randomly-selected topic came up this morning as "Cheesecake Truck," I went back to see the last time I posted something in this series, and the last time was June 3, 2010, which seems impossibly long ago.

Impossibly long ago.  Just a quick, off-the-top-of-my-head list of all the major things that have happened since June 3, 2010 includes:

-- I almost died of bee stings.
-- I had a heart attack.
-- Mr F ran away from home
-- I ran for judge
-- I stopped running for judge.
-- I got made a partner in my law firm.
-- Mr F and Mr Bunches started school.
-- Mr F hurt his head and had to have surgery
-- The Boy started college
-- The Boy stopped college.
-- Middle finished college.
-- Middle got married

And that's just the big stuff list.  We've also gone on vacation to Florida and moved my office from downtown to the south of town and Sweetie's dad's wife died and there've been movies and dates and adventures galore.

Three years seems too short of a time to fit all those things in there.

Let alone how long it's been since we actually went on our honeymoon -- thirteen years, and I'm not even going to begin to list all the things that have happened since then, since that would amount to re-creating this blog.

I was thinking about that, actually, as it happens, yesterday afternoon, when we got back to the house from the field trip.  I took yesterday off as my Memorial Day: since Mondays off are stupid, and while Mr F and Mr Bunches and I were up at the Little Park On The Mountain I was trying to think what it was Sweetie and I had done for Memorial Day the first weekend we were married.

I was in part trying to think that because I like to look back at my life, sometimes, and see where I am and where I thought I'd be.  "And you may ask yourself," I always hear in the back of my head, at those times, "How did I get here?"

So I look back, now and then, and think "A year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago," and that's what I was doing yesterday, thinking back as I helped Mr F get up onto the slide, to what I was doing last year on Memorial Day.

Last year on Memorial Day weekend -- remember, I work every Memorial Day -- I was likely getting ready to go on the family reunion trip to Florida that would start in three weeks, and packing up my old office to get ready for the move to the new one, and breaking in my new associate and new paralegal and new law clerk, since last year at this time I for the first time in 13 years with my firm had full-time employees who worked for me, spreading the workload around.

After that, it gets a bit hazy. Memorial Day isn't the biggest holiday for me, you know?  We never really do anything to celebrate it, which was probably why I was thinking of that this week.

When Sweetie and I had our weekly budget meeting on Wednesday night, I asked her what money she wanted to request for the budget this weekend.  She decided how much she needed for groceries, and for gas, and then I made my requests for gas and for some money to use as incentives for the people who work for me -- every week one of my staffers gets a $10 Amazon gift card -- and then, before we adjourned the budget meeting for the week, Sweetie said:

"I'd like to request $50 for the weekend."

"Why?" I asked.  "What are you doing?"

"Nothing," she said, and went on:  "I don't know.  I just thought maybe we'd do something.  Go get ice cream or order pizza or something.  We never do anything for Memorial Day. So I thought we'd do something."

So I agreed we could use fifty bucks to "do something" this weekend, without knowing what we were doing and what we might want to do to celebrate Memorial Day weekend.

(So far, we have used part of that money to buy McDonald's yesterday for lunch on the way home from the field trip.  Sweetie got the cheeseburgers.  I got the "Ranch Chicken BLT" because I decided a week or two ago that I shouldn't just limit myself to McDonald's cheeseburgers, because it is possible that I am just a little bit too hooked on them, no, seriously it is, so I decided that I would not eat another cheeseburger until I had tried every other thing to eat on McDonald's menu except for the "Filet O' Fish" because that is disgusting.)

(So you can see that as my life progresses, I am also growing as a person.  I don't know if it's sad or wonderful that I live in a time when I can actually have as a personal growth device/goal "Eat every kind of sandwich at a fast food restaurant.)

(The decision to give up on cheeseburgers for a while is a facet of number 7 on this list of 1001 ways to improve the world.)

(There is a reason this post recalls so many other of my blogs: It's because I'm thinking about my life, which I have written many blogs about.)

But we have also agreed that probably today -- which is gray, and rainy, and cold, and miserable-ish outside but fun inside, as we've already made pancakes and cooked an egg sandwich for Sweetie and now I'm doing this -- we will go play Skee-Ball, which is fun for Mr Bunches, who wanted to do something fun, and fun for me, because the only place to play Skee-Ball is at one of the two pizza places near us, which means I'm getting pizza for lunch, which is extra-great for me because it also means that I'm having nearly a full day of pizza, because Sweetie wants, tonight, to get delivery pizza and watch the movie "Mama," which means I may be able to do 24 Hours Of Pizza, and this blog is starting to feel like a clip show, isn't it? I recommend right-clicking those links and reading them later so that while I'm having 24 Hours of Pizza, you can have 24 Hours Of Me and develop a deep and profound sympathy for Sweetie.

It seems impossible to me that 13 years ago we didn't do anything to celebrate Memorial Day, because back then I didn't work Mondays, and in fact, back then I didn't work for my firm at all.  Sweetie married a self-employed (?) lawyer who had his own office, a two-room windowless brown paneled "suite" in the basement of an office building not far off campus, about a half-mile from the law school I'd graduated from just two years earlier, and thinking back to then it also seems entirely possible that we didn't do anything to celebrate Memorial Day back then because we probably had almost no money,  at all, or if we did we were earmarking it for rent or a car payment or something.  Life as a self-employed, new lawyer doing criminal defense and divorce work sounds glamorous -- no, it actually doesn't -- but it doesn't pay well, either, or at least it doesn't if you are me and you are not very good (at the time) at getting paid well.

When we got married, I contributed, to the marriage, mostly potential.  We were married in 2000 and that year Sweetie probably earned twice what I did, which is to say, not very much, given that we already had three kids.  We lived, when we got married, in a three-bedroom apartment only about 1 1/2 miles from where we live now, but that 1 1/2 miles has stretched out over 13 years to be longer and longer and longer, until it seems now that the 1 1/2 miles could wrap to the moon and back.

The apartment was nice enough, and we spruced it up with some stuff we bought with our wedding money: the "big chair," and a rack for plants on the small balcony where we almost never sat, and some bar stools for the breakfast bar, and things like that -- things we don't really have any more, except for the plant rack, which stands on our back porch now and holds not plants, which only I ever cared about and now I don't care about having anymore, but instead the plant rack holds a few bricks and a toy plastic bulldozer that has sat outside for the last five years on the plant rack, until this year when I moved it to the back yard as a decoration.

I used to believe in having plants in the house.  Up until a few years ago, we always had at least a few plants.  I had, when we got married, a fern-like plant that was growing in a small brown cup that I'd brought back with me from Morocco years before.  The cup was painted on the inside with some black substance that was supposed to make the water cold the instant it touched it.  I don't know that it worked, in the cup, but it worked in Morocco, where you could walk around the bazaar and there were these guys, I forget what they were called, but they'd sell you a sip of cold water for a nominal price, usually maybe a dirham, which is the Moroccan unit of currency and was, at the time, equal to about a dime, so even a poor college student like me was impossibly rich in Morocco.  The water these guys sold was always ice cold, which was a miracle, in Morocco, where refrigeration was not common either as a desired thing -- cold drinks are not especially prized, there -- or as a thing that was possible.

I had, too, some other houseplants including once a nearly-10-foot tall "corn plant" that was made by cutting a piece of Sweetie's mom's plant and putting it in a big pot we bought and growing that, the plant looking remarkable to me in our living room, so big.  I would like, still, a living room full of plants and sunlight, so that I could feel like I was sitting outside without actually having to go outside, where nature is.

But over the years, the plants died, as I became busier and cared less about them and more about my job or my kids or my wife or my other hobbies, which are too numerous to count and are always being added to.  (Or not.  Yesterday, at the farm on the field trip, I saw that they sold chickens for $5.  "I have five dollars!" I told her.  "No." she told me.)

The only plant that didn't die is the one in my office, the one that Sweetie gave me one year and which has grown and grown, faithfully, over the years, moving to its new location in my new office, where it presides over a collection of baby toys that the boys have outgrown but which I keep in my office as decoration, and where it stands next to the three hopeful red cups of Mr Bunches Traveling Salvation Garden (Office Edition.)

So we probably didn't have much money, Sweetie and I, when we got to that first Memorial Day as a married couple 13 years ago, and we probably didn't need to do much, anyway,  as we'd have been home from our honeymoon for only a couple of weeks, anyway, the honeymoon that we'd celebrated by driving to the worst possible hotel in Cleveland ever, and then to Buffalo, and then to New York, and then to home, all backed by the soundtrack I'd prepared,

on cassette tape, which now poses a problem in listening to those songs.

Because they are on cassette tape, and therefore are at the moment completely inaccessible to me at present.

One of the things I liked about mix tapes, back when mix tapes were still something that existed, was that they could sort of freeze time, in a way, through sound. I had a technique that I used throughout law school to study.  When I'd study a given subject for an exam, I would listen to the same mix tape over and over again, using that mix tape only for that subject.  Then, the morning of the exam, I would go to the law school and just sit and relax and listen to that mixtape.  (I never studied the day of exams.  You either know it or you don't, and when I see people frantically preparing at the last minute for an exam or trial or whatever, all I can think is "Last minute 'preparation' should always be in quotations, because "last minute preparation" is a synonym for "not having prepared.")

With some of my old mix tapes, when I listen to them, I can remember biking along Lake Michigan in the summer when I was in college, or getting ready for my first jury trial, or a snowy Christmas when the kids gave me the "Jimmy Eat World" CD as a present.

And, of course, with the "Honeymoon" mixtape, I could easily conjure up almost every aspect of the trip, from singing along with the songs on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the first time we saw Times Square to the wayside where we bought some "Ohio" T-shirts on the way home, just because.

One of the reasons I started going back and writing these series -- "94" and "Cheesecake Truck" and "Vacation" and "Pole-Vaulting" (and note my restraint in not throwing up more links to those) -- was that I worry about my memory.  As I move forward, my memory doesn't grow longer, it seems to me.   It stays the same, like a kid dragging a blanket behind him.  The blanket doesn't stretch out from his bed to the stairs to the hallway to the couch.  It pulls the same length behind him, and if it brings anything of the bedroom to the couch with it, it's by chance, caught in a fold of the blanket and able to drop out at any time.

That's how I feel my memory works:  just keeping pace with me, not bothering to hold onto stuff, getting rid of things as easily as we got rid of the big chair that we bought with our wedding money, which was not easy at all, actually: it moved from the apartment to the duplex, from the duplex to our living room in our first (and still only) house we bought, then from the living room to the family room in the basement, and finally, after it got too old to even be wanted by the older kids for their apartments, after it smelled too much of old cat and mildew to salvage, it went to the garage, but soon, it will be hauled to the dump and then it will be only a memory and then someday it will only exist in pictures of the older kids when they were little, all of them piled together on the chair and smiling at a camera I hold.

That worry, that my memory can't hold everything it wants to hold, is bolstered by the fact that so much seems to happen that I want to remember or need to remember.  I have lists and reminders and two calendars and emails and post-its and more, and I have Sweetie, who is Memory, Personified -- she remembers the birthdates of nephews we have never met, nephews I don't even remember.

"We're sending a present to" some name, she'll say, and I'll ask who that is.  "It's your sister's son," she'll say.  But sometimes lately I will call Mr F by Mr Bunches' name, and vice versa, because that is what dads do, or at least what I do.

I take pictures incessantly, worried that some aspect of the trip to the beach or the trip to the mall or the trip to the McDonald's that is only a mile away will be forgotten and I won't want it to be forgotten, but it will, anyway,  replaced by some newer memory that maybe won't be as good.  I know my life keeps getting better and better, but that doesn't mean I want the older memories packed into a garage and then shuffled away.

And then, one Saturday morning, the rain stopping and the sun still not coming out, I decide to write again about my honeymoon, get a little bit more down on paper and see if I can't freeze some more memories here so I can go make some more there -- replacing, maybe, the souvenir store in Times Square where we bought The Boy a small Statue of Liberty, a Statue that last year Mr Bunches found in The Boy's old room and played with for a while -- replacing that with Skee-Ball or a trip to the airport or something -- and I find out that I can't even play the mixtape, and I can't remember what songs are on it, and now I'm stuck just generally reminiscing about things, wondering what the next song was and what memories might come out when I play it, and wondering, too, if I can convene and emergency budget meeting to free up ten bucks to go to the Dollar Store or Walgreen's and see if they don't have an old cassette-playing Walkman I could buy.  They must, right?

They must.

I can't be the only person who still has, in the back of a drawer in his old dresser underneath old postcards, a cassette tape of songs he put together to perfectly symbolize the marriage he was entering into with the love of his life, right?