Visitation

My aunt, uncle, and two of my cousins are here for a visit. We picked up my cousins at the airport yesterday (they arrived a day early). I armed them with a map and the location of my office and my phone number, and set them loose on the city.

I forget how huge and different everything seemed when I first moved here. They're from my same incredibly tiny village--it is actually called a village, and is a genuine village, not the West Village--and must be experiencing things the same way I did.

There are the usual questions of, "Do you go to the Statue of Liberty?" Er, no. And the more embarrassing, "How often do you go to the museums?" Uh, never. "What is that you like to do?" Huh. What do I do in the evenings and on weekends?

But some of the other kinds of questions make you realize just how much you take the stranger things for granted. For example, I walked Katie & Emma down to my usual spot on the subway platform, and as we waited for a train Katie asked, "Could we have gotten on back where we were standing?" Of course we could have. I just walked up here so we would get out by the escalator at West 4th Street. But somebody who isn't hyperaware of where all the exits are at all the usual stops would have no idea why we had to walk all the way down the platform.

Why is there construction everywhere?

Why are there so very many sex shops?

And why do we walk so fast?