Off To The Big City

I'm going to NewYork City for a couple of days at noon today, and I am not sure that I will wrestle the techology of my IPad into place so as to attach the keyboard it, plus go out to a public spot with WYFI.as I believe they call it, and get the appropriate signal to send my blogs off for the next three mornings.  I have been told that there WYFI at any Starbucks, rather obvious actually when you see their clientele, all youngish, lean techies sitting for hours over their silver dime-thin computers.  I never feel comfortable among them, not that I could easily find a place to set my gear down.  In the world of Manhattan where pencil thin pants, cashmere sweaters clinging to male chests which must be measured still in twenties of inches, clash uncomfortably with a 44" chest, 36" waist, tufts of white hair here and there, better I shuffle off to MacDonalds, which, startlingly enough, also has WYFI.  Getting to the city will be feat enough, and I cannot quite conceive of rushing out again immediately to find my neighborhood MacDonalds, a restaurant I am too resolutely much of a snob ever to have entered before.  I am going from Hull to Quincy for a doctor's appointment en route. Good enough, but the commuter train stop at Quincy has no escalator, and I am quite sure, no elevator, and a very tall set of stairs, tortuous for one who damaged himself in London and now sports the daily, unremitting shooting pains of arthritis. A new phase of life, a new set of existential complaints.  Last year it was all my friends going into early dementia; well, I have said goodbye to them, and now will say hello to constant pain.  I cannot get out of my mind a memory of the thirties which is the ranks of elderly men and women trudging home from their working day in my hometown (it was the depression, few had cars, the city had a minimal bus service), their ankles often conspicuously swollen grotesquely, their gait shuffling and lopsided, limping.  And the horror of it is they were probably only in their fifties.  I remember our old cook rubbing her hands and if she thought no adult was about moaning ever so softly.  Oh, those hands, some nights when our nursemaids were out, she came as a great act of kindness to massage my crippled body, and I would cry out in complaint at the rough texture of her skin which since six in the morning had been every day immersed in the hot waters of dish washing or down in the basement helping with the laundry.  Back to Quincy; so I must climb those stairs, then after the appointment, heading to Boston, when later I go to get on the Red Line subway, down another set of stairs I will be required to hop gently to spare the pressure on my knees.  Once in South Station I will want to avoid the pain of standing in line forever for the Acela so I will ask the Red Cap to take my little tote with Sarasota Public Library on it--my luggage, so to speak--but he will take it for a few dollars (Oh, the squalor of the bribe!  I always offends me) which allows me to board early and settle myself in my feeble pained state before the hordes begin to confuse me. I may not have dementia but I am moving that way.  When I get to Pennsylvania Station I have to fight my way along that narrow platform overloaded with people and luggage until I can find an escalator, thank god, they have them here and there in that pit of confusion.  And this time I will go up to the surface and get into the cab line.  After the stairs in the tube station in London ruined my knees by waking up the sleeping arthritis I shall simply take my children's inheritance and spend it liberally on cabs.  I've even convinced my husband whom I must escort to Brigham and Womens for a heart procedure some one of these days next month at 6:00 am that we shall hire a car and driver.  If we are going to live in the desperate wastes of ex-urban Boston then we must give ourselves a few breaks