You know what I really like about airports? Nothing. I guess I should probably find something, though, since I’ll be in a heck of one for the next few hours. But maybe I should start at the beginning.

Dad dropped me off in Moncton around 5:00 this morning (thanks Dad!). I expected to fly from Moncton to Newark, have a two-hour layover, and be in Ithaca by 12:30 at the latest. Well. My connecting flight was actually scheduled for 9:05 p.m., not a.m. as I had thought, making it a 14-hour layover instead. It wasn’t so bad, though; I decided to go in to Manhattan for the day.

I caught the express bus and got to midtown around 9:00. My first stop was Central Park, for no good reason really. I just like the park and I figured there might be something interesting and summery going on. I also wanted to get an egg on a roll and I figured I’d have to go for a walk to find a cart anyway. Did I ever go for a walk, by the way. I think I logged 50 blocks today, wearing my backpack the whole way because I was using it as my carry-on and didn’t have anywhere to leave it. It was stuffed, and that thing tests the limits of carry-on baggage regulations at the best of times. Earlier today I would have estimated its weight at around 140 pounds, although now that I’ve had a chance to sit down for a while and look at it more neutrally I would say more like an even hundred.

Anyway, as it turns out there was something interesting and summery going on in the park, as long as you’re four years old. There was sort of a miniature carnival thing that was, astoundingly, even lamer than the exhibition in Charlottetown. Still, it was some nice scenery and I got myself oriented, and I was extremely pleased to find a man selling breakfast foods. I also went for a walk and found a seller of something else, and got someone a Christmas present – it could be you! I’ll let the suspense build for the next few months. Try to stay calm.

 

One of the things I wanted to see but didn’t last time I was in New York was the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, so I went there next. It’s way downtown, so I decided I would take the subway and get off a stop early to walk a bit and look for a hot dog cart because I was still kind of hungry. 8th Street is 8 blocks from the southern tip of Manhattan, right? No it is not. I should have picked up a map somewhere along the way, but they’re surprisingly hard to find.

After a long and colourful walk down Broadway, I eventually made my way down Wall Street to the memorial, which was really very worth seeing. It’s basically a big wall made of glass blocks, and there are passages from letters and things written to and from soldiers in Vietnam written on the wall. The wall itself is kind of ugly, but the messages written on it are very poignant, or reflective, or both. This one stood out to me:

20 Oct 1966

Dear Louise,
    This morning, one of my men turned to me and pointed a hand, filled with cuts and scratches, at a plant with soft red flowers and said, “That is the first plant I have seen today which didn’t have thorns on it.”  I immediately thought of you.
     The plant, and the hill upon which it grew, was also representative of Vietnam.  It is a country of thorns and cuts, of guns and marauding, of little hope and of great failure.  Yet in the midst of it all, a beautiful thought, gesture, and even person can arise among it waving bravely at the death that pours down upon it.  Some day this hill will be burned by napalm, and the red flower will crackle up and die among the thorns.  So what was the use of it living and being a beauty among the beasts, if it must, in the end, die because of them, and with them? [. . .] Whether you believe in God, fate, or the crumbling cookie, elements are so mixed in a being that make him what he is; his salvation from the thorns around him lies in the fact that he existed at all, in his very own personality…
     The flower will always live in the memory of a tired, wet Marine, and has thus achieved a sort of immortality.  But even if we had never gone on that hill, it would still be a distinguished, soft, red, thornless flower growing among the cutting, scratching plants, and that in itself is its own reward.

Love, Sandy

He died of shrapnel wounds three weeks later, after ordering a medic to treat another man first. The whole wall is covered with things like this.

Entirely by accident, I then fell asleep for about an hour on one of the benches in the park around the memorial. I didn’t really do anything especially noteworthy for the rest of the day, because for one thing I was dead tired and for another a lot of museums and so on were closed because it’s Sunday. I decided to be good and early for my flight out to Ithaca, scheduled to board at 8:30, so I made my way out for 7:30. The flight’s been delayed until 10:15, so here I am. I can’t get Internet at the airport, so if you’re seeing this, I’m safely in my room at Ithaca.