Gazing From The Peaks Of Darien

So for ten days I was wandering around Manhattan, Cambridge and parts of New England.  Wandering misrepresents my  experience; I was confronting advancing balance problems that kept me on a cane, and even then in serious danger of falling.  The last day as I hailed a cab on the corner of Fifty Seventh and Ninth to go to Penn Station for an early train, I did indeed situate my body out at angle to attract a passing cab's attention and fell off the curb and to the ground.  Luckily it was early Saturday morning and the traffic was light, luckier still on the deserted sidewalk two construction workers saw my plight and rushed over to assist.  Lucky for me the one knew how to pull a man to his feet by having the man who had fallen put his arms around his neck and hold on as the burly fellow had the strength in his body and moreover in his neck muscles to raise the body up to a standing position.  In seconds I was face to face with this hunky gentleman, brushed off and assisted into a cab.  Not much damage, and his heroic demeanor and great good looks and obvious physical strength and extreme kindness were my last impression of the city.  On Sunday last my younger daughter drove me to New Hampshire to participate in Trinity Sunday services at my other daughter's church.  Being with them and an participating in the church service were memorable, but what more forcibly struck me was the sensation of spring in New England, an exotic and deeply sensual visual color experience for one just returned from parched and barren tropical lands: palm trees, which I adore to look at as they shake their fronds in the wind, have none of the soft, luxuriance of a the manifold greens of New England trees budding out in spring.  The church was in a small urban cluster of mostly eighteenth century houses, a moment in the history of American urban architecture that can't be beat.  Then brunch at the Exeter Inn where we were surrounded by the creme de la creme of early teenage prowess and success and as those things often go, physical beauty and great good manners.  All happy making.  Yesterday my Cambridge based daughter accompanied me on the subway out to the airport since she was concerned that I would fall if I were alone, a very sweet gesture, since indeed, i had grown increasingly wobbly on this trip.  I shall never forget my last impression which was the row of riders sitting in this early morning stillness, still waking up and hence, monumental, still, somewhere else just as statues, a row of them on either side of the long bench of the subway car.  The cream of the intelligent youth of the Cambridge area,  seeming to be so in control of their thoughts and destinies  looking, so serious, so gracefully pensive, physically beautiful, silent, gazing in repose on their inner thoughts.