Making My Way Around Manhattan

My last visit there was a little scary, because I was so insecure on my feet.  Midday, still somewhat off balance from the jet lag I went down to Times Square to get tickets for a play that evening.  On the 59th street platform waiting for the train there was some delay with the result that an inordinate crowd of people were gathered to enter and exit.  These people, almost all of them much younger than I, seemingly much taller, with bodies strong and muscular, outfitted with back packs and large purses or totes, flowed furiously to and fro and I discovered that my declining body mass, height, and general frailty left me to be no more than a tattered leaf blowing in the autumn winds.  I was reminded of a friend my age who absent mindedly followed her instinct to crush herself into the subway car as the very last person and the next stop the crowded disgorged knocking her to the ground and breaking her hip.  I stepped back and waited for another train which indeed came soon and had far fewer occupants.  Of course the stairs to and from the platforms is always a challenge because young people run up and down the stairs letting their baggage bump out at whoever is nearby, and no one is being mean, it's just that when you're young in our culture you don't see or care about the little old people hanging for dear life on to the railings on the stairs.  Of course many people have long since given up riding subways for the dubious pleasure of standing for hours waiting for buses.  In Times Square the mass of movement was equally terrifying, and I vowed that when I returned that night for the theater I would find a more circuitous route to the theater to avoid 42nd Street and 7th Avenue.  This I did and took a cane for good measure and the trip was successful so much so that when I left the theater I walked in the pleasant Manhattan night all the way up Sixth Avenue  to 57th Street to catch the crosstown bus.  The next day I was coming from the Metropolitan Museum and waiting for the M11 to take me down Columbus.  When it came I had to laugh.  There were two ladies with walkers taking the right front side for the elderly and handicapped and I grabbed the last on the left, between two challenged walkers with canes, and then another fellow got on who was so unsteady and determined to sit that he pushed and shoved--there was nothing else to do--between the ladies with the walkers.  Meanwhile two sets of the new Upper West Side parents got on with their giant baby carriages which also seemed to  carry half the tot's wardrobe and luncheon aboard. This took some manuevering just to get past the walkers and canes at the entrance, and then just some space to shut the contraptions up and stow them under the seats.  But the great thing was nobody got exasperated.  Life is now lived very much i slow time on Manhattan buses which pass through the neighborhoods where children are coming into existence and old people are not dying off.