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read it there are certain people you could call them dreamers or creatives who at some point in their lives have had an epiphany they have discovered exactly what their purpose is in this lifetime they have made a promise to themselves to pursue that purpose no matter what it takes for many this means coming to new york city the skyline of new york one of the great sights of the world is symbolic of that dream to recall that first moment they ever laid eyes on it is to blow apart the barriers that have been holding them down and bring their purpose back to life you could just about raise the dead with that two concise paragraphs i ve been asked where the full versions of the two stories that are tightly packaged into the comment can be found the story of the newly minted father is in this blog it was published on march 16 2013 go to the best day of your life the story of the dreamer coming to the city for the first time and seeing the new york skyline as we approached manhattan was published in my book confessions of a new york taxi driver i am including it here in my blog for the first time go to from jfk or just scroll down it s right below this post and then there was this in november a facsimile of jerry seinfeld s op ed on a gigantic billboard was attached to the facade of a luxury apartment building under construction in the upper east side unfortunately the comments section was not included read about it here posted by eugene salomon at 10 12 am 9 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels about new york city best day of your life comment that went viral dreamers first time in nyc from jfk jerry seinfeld my book new york city skyline ny times old yeller pandemic the media sunday may 23 2021 from jfk i had been waiting in the taxi lot at american airlines for half an hour or so on a pleasant evening in june 1990 when suddenly the line started moving two flights had come in simultaneously and the newly arriving passengers were jumping out of the terminal like popcorn popping within five minutes one of them was sitting in the back seat of my cab and we were on our way fortunately to manhattan when you pick up a fare at the airport you re always a little worried that the ride will be a shortie to brooklyn or queens manhattan is the place you want to go my passenger was a twenty something kid an agog er eyes all aglow at seeing the big apple for the very first time new york he said was the place he d been dreaming of coming to forever and finally his dream was coming true he was from the midwest somewhere and had studied documentary filmmaking at a couple of different schools and now at last it was time to take the big plunge his excitement was palpable even though we were still ten miles away from the part of new york that even new yorkers call the city manhattan you know i have been saying that one of my favorite kinds of fares is the one with elderly people who are still enjoying living let me confide in you now that my very favorite type of ride the one at the top of the list is this one the trip to manhattan with the wide eyed virgin so to speak i become the impromptu tour guide an embedded guru offering advice and insider skinny but secretly longing to experience vicariously the thrill i hope they are about to have when they see it for the very first time after twenty minutes of stop and go on the long island expressway we arrived at the last exit you can take before entering the midtown tunnel i did not want to take that route into the city and i got off there we drove a few more blocks and soon arrived at the exact spot where i needed to be for this particular ride the entrance to the upper level of the 59th street bridge on thompson street i made a right onto the long ramp that rises before it feeds onto the bridge above houses factories and the number seven subway line there are five bridges that span the east river but the one with not only the best view but the best feel is the upper level of the 59er and that s why i chose to take him this way i wanted him to feel it now here s the thing about the upper level first the broad skyline that endless vista of skyscrapers is one of the great sights of the world you can see many of new york s iconic structures quite clearly and that in itself is spectacular but the main thing due to its location and its clear sight lines is the sense you have of the city getting larger and larger and larger as you approach it new york that faraway dream is becoming a reality look look there it is it s really there and then as the roadway of the bridge begins to descend toward ground level the immensity of the place starts to sink in the buildings gradually surround you look you can see people inside them and one has the sense of being literally devoured by gotham finally touching down on east 62nd street the energy of new york city hits you square in the face people are crowding the sidewalks walking quickly as if they re late for something the traffic is bumper to bumper and hey look at that there really are yellow taxicabs all over the place the feeling comes over you that if there actually were a place where your dream will come true this is what it would look like i studied my passenger in the mirror he was gazing eagerly out his window trying to take it all in mesmerized and enchanted as i hoped he would be so what do you think wow we headed across town on 63rd street made a left on 5th avenue and started coasting down the avenue which runs straight through the middle of manhattan look i said there s central park oh yeah wow there s tiffany s wow there s rockefeller center oh yeah wow when we got to the south side of 34th street i suddenly pulled over to the curb and stopped get out i commanded get out yes get out and look up he did what he was told and found himself gazing at the tallest building he had ever seen you just can t appreciate the size and magnificence of the empire state building unless you re standing directly beneath it oh my god he exclaimed as he climbed back into the cab he smiled like a little kid at his own birthday party who was about to start opening a whole roomful of presents oh yes he had arrived it had begun excerpted from confessions of a new york taxi driver harpercollins posted by eugene salomon at 10 01 am 5 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels 59th street bridge dreamers first time in nyc from jfk harpercollins my book new york city skyline sunday june 07 2020 the rhinoceros story here s a story from the vault it s always been an oral narrative i ve told to passengers in my cab when it seemed appropriate but until now never written up it concerns a certain rhinoceros with anger management issues how could that have anything to do with driving a taxi in new york city read on first some history i grew up in levittown new york about a forty five minute drive from manhattan where i was a student in a typical american high school i graduated in 1967 it s common to look back at that time in your life as the good old days but not for me i couldn t wait to get out of the place it felt like prison to me this was the 60s and the tumult of the era was weighing heavily upon me the prospect of spending another four years in an academic environment which is where most of the kids i knew were headed had no appeal whatsoever i wanted to get far away and see the world however the idea of being drafted into the u s army and being shipped far away into the world of the viet nam war also had no appeal so the thing to do at least if you were a white middle class american boy was to get yourself into college that was your ticket to stay out of the military at least for a few years it was called a student deferment so i needed to find a college that could serve both of these needs and find one i did in an offbeat school which had just recently been established not far from my hometown by the society of friends the quakers it was called friends world college actually it was an institute when i enrolled in september of 67 it was so new at the time that it was still in the process of becoming accredited by the state of new york when that occurred about a year later it could then officially be called a college the basic idea of friends world college was to create a learning experience in which students could grow into young adults with a world view for four years they would spend successive semesters living in different parts of the planet this would not be sitting in classrooms reading books and taking exams it would be an integration into the cultures in which they were living it was very loosely structured there were no examinations or formal courses the only real requirement was the keeping of a journal of one s thoughts and experiences seminars and field trips were offered mostly having to do with topics which were progressive in that era such as ecology civil rights consumer cooperatives regional development universal suffrage intentional communities and socialism individual projects were encouraged and advisors were assigned to each student to offer guidance my first semester was spent at the north american campus if you could call it that on long island in a converted barracks leftover from a decommissioned air force base named mitchel field there were 37 kids in my class we not only participated in student activities but we shared work responsibilities like cooking and cleaning so this was not just a school really but a community here i had finally found a group i could fit in with spirited intelligent socially conscious to the point of being willing to do something about it adventurous iconoclastic these would all be apt descriptions of the kids there and of the faculty too plus we all traveled around in the preferred mode of hippie transportation in those days the volkswagen bus my second semester was spent in kenya in east africa now this was far away indeed not only in distance but in time kenya had only recently obtained independence from great britain and in 1968 was barely a nation state being there was like traveling back in a time machine to an era when people lived in tribes subsisted from the land had very little if any contact with the outside world and needed to be aware at all times of the dangers posed to them by their own predators the animals our center was in the capital of the country nairobi it had many of the basic things we took for granted back home such as buildings electricity running water paved roads telephones a post office and a hospital but once you were just a little bit away from nairobi wow were you ever in a different world some of the things that remain engraved in my memory are living among people who never in their lives owned a pair of shoes over the years the bottoms of their feet eventually became so calloused that they actually became their shoes realizing that in the months i lived in kenya not only had i never seen a tractor i had never seen a horse drawn or ox drawn plow what i did see were women bent at right angles tilling the soil by hand going on a field trip with a few other students which was led by jesse a young man employed at the center who escorted us to the village where he d grown up we had to leave our vw bus behind and walk the last mile because there were no roads which led to the village only trails at one point along the way jesse suddenly screamed get down and we all hit the dirt just as a mass of bees the size of a truck flew right over our heads damn continuing on we were greeted effusively by villagers some of whom bestowed presents upon us we were only the second group of white people they had ever seen jesse had brought students from the previous class to his village a few months earlier they were the first we were graciously welcomed by jesse s parents who served us a wonderful meal the homes in their village were made by building a frame from sticks and filling in the gaps with cow manure when it dries it hardens like clay and keeps the rain out should a big storm come and wash the homes away the villagers simply build new ones the school rented a house in the village of machakos i stayed there for several weeks one day a long line of ants somehow entered the house marched across the wooden floor and exited on the other side of the place the soldier ants formed two columns and remained stationary in the lane they created the worker ants moving swiftly carried small bits of food this went on for about an hour and then quite suddenly they were all gone just passing through one of the few other places in kenya which at that time could be called a city was mombasa on the indian ocean 273 miles from nairobi these two cities were connected by what was then the only paved road in the country other than those within the cities themselves once while traveling in a car on this road with one of the faculty members we encountered some elephants standing right in the middle of it blocking our way we moved forward quite slowly but got a little too close to them suddenly one turned raised his trunk and started running toward us in a most unfriendly manner not wishing to dispute the point the car was hastily thrown into reverse and we backed up until the elephant was satisfied we were far enough away from him then he went back to his buddies we sat there for what felt like half an hour before they finally went on their way we ll move when we damn well feel like it it was on this same road one day that six of us students none over the age of nineteen were making a journey from nairobi to mombasa in one of the vw buses i don t remember why we were going to mombasa but i do recall that we were in no rush to get there it was to be an all day trip but not an urgent one we had some time to kill and to explore whatever might come our way and what came our way was tsavo tsavo pronounced sah vo is kenya s largest national park it s an area set aside for animals to live in their natural habitat no towns no factories no taxi garages just wide open land if you re a human you come with the understanding that you re in animal town sometimes when i speak about places like tsavo to people i feel a need to emphasize the size of these so called parks this is not a theme park like a great adventure or disney s animal kingdom these national parks are extraordinarily huge tsavo s land mass is 8 494 square miles 22 000 in kilometers that s almost exactly the same size as the entire state of new jersey in the u s and slightly larger than wales in the u k we d been rolling along in the bus for a few hours since departing from nairobi just looking at the usual sights along the road the landscape in this part of africa is primarily flat open plains not heavily vegetated as you d find in a rain forest or a jungle your field of view is usually relatively unobstructed allowing sightings of things like baobab trees and herds of zebras and an...