Peg Guilfoyle

I’ve never been interested in superstars, which I suspect might be a twenty-first century distrust of the superstar mechanism. We see most of our putative stars through a screen. How can one tell what is hype and what is super power? What is gloss and what is legitimate true shine? What is real and what is, well, fake news?

Meeting one in person is another matter. When I saw the racehorse Cody’s Wish standing in a shaft of sun, I knew I was in the presence of royalty at the peak of its powers, full of youth and strength and beauty. He trailed his backstory like an invisible ermine cape. He’d changed an ill boy’s life, and I felt a stirring in the rapt little crowd watching him. He could change theirs.

It is quite a backstory.

In 2018, the Make-A-Wish organization, which helps fulfill the wishes of children with critical illnesses, received a request from Kentucky. A boy named Cody Dorman, age 12, had a rare genetic disorder. He was unable to walk or speak, experienced frequent seizures, and had had many operations. At birth, his parents had been told he would not survive until his second birthday.

But Cody was beating the odds, and Cody wanted to meet a horse.

The request went to an enormous and prosperous thoroughbred operation called Godolphin, outside Lexington, and its Gainsborough Farm, where the broodmares and foals, the babies, were kept. The farm manager, Danny Mulvihill, remembered, as told to Equus magazine, that he “wanted Dorman to meet a foal but was concerned the young man’s wheelchair might be too scary. He chose an unnamed son of stallion Curlin…‘he was a nice quiet laid-back foal…It was important from my point of view to see if we could get a foal close to Cody, knowing he was in a wheelchair.” The young c**t sniffed around the boy and his chair. Then he laid his head onto Dorman’s lap, and something happened, and the little boy put his hand on the horse. They were connected, in the storied way that horses and humans can be bound together.

The c**t was just five months old when that tie was sealed. Godolphin named him Cody’s Wish.

Horse racing is a sport full of hope and dreams, aspiration, hard work, trouble, and much failure. As the young horse grew, he showed promise and then the promise of brilliance. As Cody grew, his health deteriorated. There was no bright future.

In 2020, Cody, then 14 and communicating through a tablet, told his mother that he had done all he could, and was “ready to go.” His parents suggested a reunion with Cody’s Wish, then a strapping two-year-old just ready to start his racing career.

Cody’s father said, in an NBC video, “As soon as the horse came out of the barn, it was like nobody was there but him and Cody.”
Paul Halloran, in the trade publication This is Horse Racing, told it this way. “They say true friends can go long periods of time without seeing each other and pick up right where they were the last time they were together…the horse walked over to his wheelchair-bound friend and put his head on his lap. Then he lifted his head and let Cody rub his nose.” Readers, I assure you that this is uncommon behavior for a high-spirited young racehorse, now in peak condition at around 1,100 pounds. “It was just like they picked up where they left off.” Around Cody, it was said, Cody’s Wish was docile. The boy followed the horse; it is said that he watched videos of the horse training or walking or racing for hours on end, and that his bedroom at home was filled with all things Cody’s Wish.

The young horse raced and traveled well that year, and come November of 2022, came home to Lexington for what would be his biggest race yet, the Dirt Mile (so-called because it is raced on dirt) at the Breeder’s Cup, the year-end championship that draws horses from all over the world. Horses customarily exercise for a time where they will be racing the big ones, and Keeneland tour guide Mary Murphy was trackside one morning a few days before the Breeder’s Cup, talking with excited fans who watched the hopefuls enter and then pass by at speed.

It was like a parade of stars, one after another going by, and people were thrilled. Mary spotted Cody and his family, coming up to the track. They seemed a little uncertain. They hadn’t been to the morning works at historic Keeneland before, so she, welcoming, approached and asked if she could answer any questions. Cody’s Wish was a half-hour late appearing, so they had time to talk at the rail. Cody the boy was alert at first, and then seemed tired. Cody’s Wish appeared and passed them within a few feet, and Mary saw that as soon as he saw the horse, Cody settled right down and seemed to watch him go by. Afterward, when Cody’s Wish was going by again, in the opposite direction, back to the barn, “I could see their connection,” she said. “The horse wasn’t paused or brought over. But I could see the connection between the boy and the horse.” “They are, she added, “on a level that is beyond us."

A few days later, Cody’s Wish went off as the favorite, and won. Cody Dorman and his family went to the winner’s circle, with the Godolphin representatives, and the jockey and the horse, draped in victorious flowers. By then, they were called Team Cody.

The horse had a good year, with Cody watching from afar. This year, the horse was not favored to win another Breeder’s Cup; two consecutive such victories are uncommon. The race, which would be the horse’s final appearance on any track before retiring to stud, was held at Santa Anita in California. Cody Dorman, a month shy of his eighteenth birthday, traveled there with his parents and sister. According to writer Halloran, they were brought to the paddock so Cody and Cody could see each other. The race was a hard one, but Cody’s Wish came all the way from the back of the field to triumph in a photo finish that brought the crowd roaring to its feet. He won by a nose, the horse and jockey covered with flung-up dirt. The horse had gone out on top, just like Cody predicted to his parents the night before.

After the winner’s circle, with its photographers and blankets of flowers, and wild excitement of Team Cody, the horse was taken away and so was Cody Dorman. One day later, on his journey back to Kentucky, the boy “suffered a medical event”, and passed away.

Along with Dorman’s family, the racing world has mourned, both publicly and privately. Tributes poured in. The boy was buried less than a week after the race, with his family and friends and many of his racetrack family bearing witness. At his funeral, farm manager Mulvihill was one of the pallbearers. The Churchill Downs bugler played the “Call to Post”, and later, “My Old Kentucky Home.”

I’d watched the Cup on television, watched the horse come hard from the back of the field to win, heard the short-form replays of the backstory, seen the boy slumped in the chair in the winner’s circle, and the dirt that covered horse and jockey. And a few days later, I had the opportunity to see the horse up close at Godolphin Farm, shown with the other stallions for horse folk considering who they should breed their mares to. The barns are immaculate, the grounds manicured, the pastures immense. Cody’s Wish came out of the barn like a prince, on a loose lead, as proud and fiery as any fairy tale steed. He was electrifying. Many stallions just barely off the track need watching behaviorally, but this horse seemed settled and almost steady. After an initial regal perusal of the watchers, he lifted his head and looked off against a blue Kentucky sky. Every inch of him was gleaming, from the perfectly formed star on his face right down to his shined hooves. Someone muttered “That’s the best-shouldered horse I’ve ever seen. Plus a pretty head.” An elderly horseman who’d seen many champions come and go stood quietly and said “This horse is not just good-looking. He’s gorgeous.” His breeding and race history, and new triumph at the Breeder’s Cup were described; many or most of the listeners knew the story of Cody. The staff and grooms were settling Cody’s Wish into his new home. When they went into the stall to pull him out so his racing shoes could be removed, the horse was calm. “Well, I could have led him out on a shoelace!” one fellow said. He made a hugging gesture in the air, and went on. “I thought to myself, I’m going to love this guy.”

That’s good. The horse’s friend Cody is gone. He’s embarking on a new career. Admiration and attentive handling are assured. Love will be in order.

The first foals from Cody’s Wish will hit the racetrack in 2027.

Motley Peg, a series of free short essays of wide variety, about twice a month. Read the ‘why’, and other Motleys, at www.pegguilfoyle.com with option to receive them direct to your inbox.

Grateful for the many reports on Cody’s story, and for my time in Kentucky.

Photo by the author.

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Essayists can, occasionally, be confessional, so brace yourselves, readers. I have a problem with bundt pans.

In the years of dedicated home-based volunteerism, there are many situations in which one brings food to a gathering. Committee meetings, celebratory gatherings, mourning gatherings, teacher gifts, children’s parties, graduation parties, retirement parties. Welcome to the team. Farewell and best wishes. Parent groups can be particularly pernicious, since there is often someone who bakes or cooks competitively, living for the moment of reveal, sweeping the cover off their elaborate creation, created in their shiny home-based test kitchens, smiling modestly at the cooing of observers, with ears sharply pricked for attention.

I never really enjoyed that, although I admit that these solitary-in-preparation volunteer efforts were infinitely preferable to group decision-making. (I remember spending thirty minutes early on in a group of women trying to hang a banner in a school auditorium. Should be higher. Lower. It’s not centered on the wall. It’s crooked. Could it be less wrinkled? “Oh,” I remember exclaiming, “look at the time!”)

I was not, and am not, immune to the pleasure of bringing food to people you love, and even people you do not. It can be warm, genuine, and personal. It can be loving and a source of some pride. IMHO, it just shouldn’t be a test.

My defense was the bundt cake. And my secret weapon was, and is, a fancy pan. Yes, these are military and strategic terms, a touch hawkish, even a trifle martial. Note the accompanying image which shows a portion of my arsenal, deployed in good service - and in good humor - over a period of years, accompanied by my secret weapon, a special shaker for dusting powdered sugar over the top.

In a fancy bundt pan, the most pedestrian of cakes shines…absolutely presides…over the buffet table. After all, as Julia Child said, “A party without cake is really just a meeting.” Thousands of recipe options range from the very simple (a tricked-out cake mix) to the very elaborate (studded with treats, festooned, elaborately layered and frosted on the horizontal, flowers peeking from the center hole.)

On the flavor, well, suit yourself. Phyllis Diller noted “I like to serve chocolate cake, because it doesn’t show the dirt.”

November 15 is National Bundt Day. Fun facts: The idea of the bundt started in Minnesota through a small family company that later became Nordic Ware. In 1950, the company was asked to develop a pan reminiscent of Old World gugelhopf pans, which were cast iron, heavy and largely for fruitcake. The pans were sold for a Hadassah fundraiser, which was a success, but afterward, the pan didn’t sell much; production was nearly discontinued. Then in 1966, a woman named Ella Helfrich took second prize in the extremely famous and popular Pillsbury Bake-Off, with a cake called Tunnel of Fudge, baked in a Nordic Ware Bundt pan. The resulting publicity led 200,000 people to write Pillsbury and ask where they could find a bundt pan. Nordic Ware eventually made 30,000 pans a day, and the bundt surpassed the tin Jell-O mold as the most-sold pan in the U.S. As of 2016, more than 70 million bundt pans had been sold by Nordic Ware across North America. A number of the originals are in the collection at the Smithsonian.

Fun fact to act on: Nordic Ware has a factory outlet store in St. Louis Park, near Minneapolis. Highly recommended by the essayist. They sell fancy pans in many shapes, including autumn and the holidays. Tell them Peg sent you.

We learn about National Bundt Day from an abundance of websites that identify every day in the year as an opportunity for promotion of one thing or another. No day is untouched! Some of these websites appear to be substantive. Some appear to be translated from an alien language. Or…are they written by (distinct shudder)…artificial intelligence?

“National Bundt Day is celebrated every year all over the country with a view to spreading the joy of bundt cake that is one of the favorite foods for citizens of all ages in the United States.” (Okay.) “National Bundt Day brings happiness to all to have the bundt cake surely on the list of the food menu.” (Starting to wander.) “Every year in the month of November, this day is celebrated with a great enthusiast.” (Does one advertise for this person?)

“National Bundt Day is observed not only in some of the popular cities but also in all of the places in the United States.” (So, unpopular ones, too.) “Many of you search for the best National Bundt Day wishes.” (We do?) “By wishing them using these, you can make them surprised.” (Uh…)

So, in the spirit of surprise, I wish you a happy National Bundt Day with this sentiment from me via, apparently, AI: “When it’s National Bundt Day, look nowhere and enjoy the day very much!” And this inspiring idea, from someone named Unknown, “I love to have a bundt cake, not a bread cake. Bread cakes are too mainstream and monotonous.” All right. A more solid piece of advice: bake a bundt and don’t share it with anyone else.

One more, from a person named, well, let’s say, “so-and-so.” When I googled “so-and-so,” the name came up as a writer, but I’m not so sure. His stirring observation: “Snake people know how to make a bundt cake.” Let’s just leave it there.

Happy National Bundt Day to all!

Motley Peg, a series of free short essays of wide variety, about twice a month. Read the ‘why’, and other Motleys, at www.pegguilfoyle.com with option to receive them direct to your inbox.

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Photo by the author.

I have some additional data to support this theory: that every human interchange, however random or brief, enriches the spirit and improves the world. I’m a proponent, and further speculate that the duration of the interchange might be less important than their frequency, with their little flavors of connection, chatting, and a dollop of serotonin. Luckily for us and for the future, the idea still works over technologies. An example.

I was on the phone making some travel arrangements and by luck of the draw, ended up talking to “Andrew in New Hampshire.” Very helpful, a credit to his profession, and additionally, a storyteller with a fine engaging voice. I was considering a stay at the Hotel New Yorker, a midtown Manhattan location whose enormous red over-street sign serves as a navigation guide at the end of a long day. Built in 1930 with a private power plant, an underground tunnel direct to Penn Station, and even an ice rink, it’s an Art Deco beauty that claims it was once the most technologically advanced hotel in the country. NBC broadcast live from the Terrace Room. Nikola Tesla occupied adjoining rooms. In 1948, the hotel boasted the greatest number of television sets under one roof. In 1971, Muhammad Ali recuperated there after his famous fight with Joe Frazier, just down the street at Madison Square Garden. In 2001, the hotel donated ten thousand free nights of lodging to volunteers in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. So, a place of public history; I could hardly wait.

And yet, history is both public and private. We need stories to help bring it into tight focus. Andrew-from-New-Hampshire had one to tell.

He thought that I’d like the hotel. “In 1942, my grandparents stayed at the Hotel New Yorker on their honeymoon; my grandmother took everything that wasn’t nailed down. I have a Hotel New Yorker hanger in my closet. I have envelopes and letterhead and a tabletop ad for Benny Goodman, who was playing in the Terrace Room. I have an invitation to stop by the restaurant, signed by Jack Dempsey, who was the owner.”

1942. The history timeline on the hotel’s website says of that year, “Due to its proximity to Penn Station, the New Yorker hosts numerous GIs during World War II en route to the European Theater. Being a big-city, state-of-the-art hotel, The New Yorker developed its own renown among GIs, many of which (sic) had never lived in such luxury, much less visited New York City.”

So, newlyweds Lieutenant and Mrs. Burke, Myles and Mary, traveled down from Springfield, Massachusetts to stay in luxury for their honeymoon, amid soldiers headed overseas in the fraught months just following Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war. Did they hear Benny Goodman? Dine with Jack Dempsey? Go arm-in-arm to Times Square? Unknown.

New York City was gearing up in 1942. The hotel is close to the Empire State Building, which was considered to be a possible prime target for a German air raid; on the 86th floor observatory American Legion volunteers were looking for enemy bombers. Out on Staten Island, a spy wrote in a letter to Germany: “Still no air-raid shelters. Protection against raids completely inadequate. Complete confusion.” One evening, all the air-raid wardens in one Manhattan zone - 1,790 of them - were summoned to a police stationhouse for a lecture on how to use a screwdriver to turn off street lights during an air raid drill. U-boats were prowling America’s East Coast unmolested, sinking scores of oil tankers and freighters bound for Britain; the glow from New York City’s lights was silhouetting ships offshore, leaving them easy marks for those submarines. (Only two months after the Burkes’ honeymoon, the city-wide dimout began, with all exterior lighting turned down, automobile headlights hooded. Buildings more than fifteen stories were required to veil their windows.) The city was full of servicemen.

After enlistment, Myles was stationed stateside. When he shipped out in 1945, a photo was taken in his uniform and colorized for the baby, so she would know what her father looked like. It was near the end of the war by then, and he was sent to Germany, where concentration camps were being liberated, and hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were surrendering. Lieutenant Myles Burke was killed in action there in 1945; back in Springfield, his child, Andrew’s mother, was two years old. Eventually, her child Andrew-from-New-Hampshire would carry the middle name Myles. “We were cheated,” he would say to his mother as an adult. “You never got to know your father. We never got to know him.”

Andrew knows the importance of history; Lieutenant Burke’s many letters are being digitized at the Springfield History Museum. His grandfather’s gold star is framed and hanging in his home, and he can pick out Myles in a photo with one hundred soldiers. “It’s a matter of loss,” he says. “If they are forgotten, they die a second time.”

I thought about the lieutenant and his lady when I stayed at the Hotel New Yorker, passing through the lobby, walking up 8th Avenue toward the theater district, descending to the subway. It is an American story, and a family story, and a wartime story. One surviving detail paints Lieutenant Burke as a decent officer who was kind to a trainee bullied in camp as a “sissy”.

“We know what that means,” says Andrew.

“If they want to give him a hard time, Mary,” Myles told his wife, “they’ll have to go through me.” The trainee finished the long march in full gear, with his encouragement. A deeply honorable legacy.

I would add that this is a love story, too. After Myles was killed, Andrew says, Mary never re-married. She never took off her wedding ring. She saved the paper ephemera, and his letters, and then her daughter saved them, and Andrew in turn. The letters will go into the museum archive. It is nice to know that some beloved things survive as home artifacts, along with the echo of a wartime honeymoon in a New York hotel in a time that seems nearly vanished, except for memory, carried by their child, and then grandchild. Andrew told me about it in a phone encounter. And now I’m telling you. You’re welcome.

Decent Myles in the colorized photo. Mary who saved souvenirs from her honeymoon. History is a crowded place, isn’t it?

Thank you, Andrew, for letting me share the story of your grandparents. Photo by Jim.henderson. Some material drawn from “Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II” by Richard Goldstein.

Motley Peg, a series of free short essays of wide variety, about twice a month. Read the ‘why’, and other Motleys, at www.pegguilfoyle.com with option to receive them direct to your inbox.

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The proximate cause of my Civil War thinking is a carte de visite that emerged some years ago from a cardboard box in my grandparent’s home. The upright young man in Union army uniform is resolute and bewhiskered. Three separate inscriptions are on the back of the old cardboard. Faint pencil reads “Grandpa VW”, which would place the scribe somewhere in my grandmother’s time. One generation later, my aunt’s back-slanting script notes “Great, great, great grandpa Van Wagner to Peg.” And then one I wrote myself some decades later: “George Herbert Van Wagner b. 1838.” I can’t believe I used ink.

I’ve long had an inclination toward and a weakness for Civil War history, a rich period for generalized field research. Looking at “Civil War George” – so called to distinguish him from three succeeding generations of Georges – led way onto way, both back and down through time and history. Reading histories sweeping and specific, examining family artifacts, consulting genealogy sources, led eventually to a research trip to his home territory in upstate New York. His life began to be revealed.

George was a cavalryman in the Third New York Volunteers. The photo was taken in Rochester, shortly after he mustered in in August of 1861; the one I have was probably sent to his mother Catherine or sweetheart Mary Susan, and has survived 162 years in some box or another to come to me. The farm boy must have been a horseman; he was assigned to carry regimental mail from Washington DC to camp and back. From an obituary, “This was constantly on the move and each morning when he left the camp he was told where to find it on his return…he slept alternately in a bed in the city and on the ground in camp.”

According to another soldier, “many times when he arrived in camp it was late and when it was rainy he was exposed and on one of these occasions he arrived late cold wet and there being no fire and having no change of clothing took a severe cold which settled on his lungs.”

In October of 1861, the 3rd New York Cavalry was at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff on the Potomac River, outside present-day Leesburg, Virginia. The battle was ferocious, with George on its fringes, perhaps sleeping on the ground in the rain. Within a month, he was sent to hospital and later discharged with terrible lung problems which would never clear. They called it phthisis then; now we would call it pulmonary tuberculosis, progressive and systemic. He drew health-related pension for the rest of his life.

In 2022, I visited the Ball’s Bluff Battlefield Regional Park for a day of events commemorating the 161st anniversary of the battle. There were interpreters, tours, a Civil War band, cannon, and a skirmish. Re-enactors marched roughly about in period uniform, learned how to stack their arms, camping in the chilly autumn woods in period tents behind a hand made canvas sign that said “Sons of Maryland! To Arms! Our borders are overrun by the Yankee horde. Rise up and defend your sacred rights, your homes, your mothers, wives, and sweethearts…”

My Civil War George served for the Union, but this battle took place in the South. He was a small-town farmer who’d likely had ridden his own horse 13 miles to little Medina, New York to enlist in response to a call from the New York governor for 25,000 volunteers. He was part of “the Yankee horde.”

The woods were in autumn dress and the ground covered in leaves that crunched as the re-enactors marched, sticking largely to the lanes, although their forebears had fought their way through rough terrain and up and down a bluff, and across the Potomac. One soldier in blue, with authentically long hair, practiced his fife alone in a field before being joined by a drummer. It was a day worth thinking about, not least because of the deep commitment and memory of the people attending. It was a solemn matter.

I looked through the woods in the direction of Washington, and thought about George somewhere in transit with his mail pouch, and soldiers from both sides facing murderous fire, to lie where they fell, to await the rough medicine of the day; almost 500 were wounded.

At night, perhaps forty of us returned for a cemetery ceremony. It was late and dark, and the approach was lit only by 259 luminaria, one for each soldier who died at Ball’s Bluff. We sat in rough chairs facing a ceremonial cannon, each of us provided with a sheet of paper with names of the dead. Name, home town, age. I was given part of the 15th Massachusetts Infantry roster, almost all privates, the youngest of them just nineteen.

My list included two brothers, John and William Kidder, ages 25 and 27, from Walker, Massachusetts, outside Boston. With their company, they had splashed across the Potomac in the night toward a camp that turned out to be a row of trees; the Battle of Ball’s Bluff was the result of a mistake, but fighting began anyway, and lives were lost. Perhaps their mother, or sweethearts, also had an image to cherish and save; perhaps their descendants still have them. I’d like to think so.

Each person took their paper and read in turn into the quiet dark. And then each person took a last look around at the dark battlefield, and walked out past the guttering luminaria to their lives, leaving the dead behind.

Poet Theodore O’Hara was a lieutenant colonel in the Twelfth Alabama of the Confederacy. His best-known excerpt:

On Fame’s eternal camping-ground,
Their silent tents are spread.
And Glory guards, with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.

Photo by the author.

Motley Peg, a series of short essays of wide variety, about twice a month. Read the ‘why’, and other Motleys, at www.pegguilfoyle.com with option to receive them direct to your inbox.

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I was head over heels happy in New York City earlier this year, happy to a ridiculous degree. The city always feels right to me, proper, more alive than anywhere else, with its avenues and languages and crowds and glimpses of sky and constant changes, and its trees planted on rooftops and periodic and precious green spaces (thank you, Jane Jacobs). Even in Manhattan proper, everything you need is within fifteen minutes. New York City is young, always young. It vibrates. Sassy seems like a diminutive word, brash is overused, bustle is too small-scale, cocky too full of subtext. Language, in this case, might be insufficient.

Although it is prudent to be prudent in the city, it never seems hostile. Coming out of The Edge, the 101-story super-tall, dizzy from the height, I asked a sharp-looking young man to interpret his tee-shirt which carried this graphic: F$Sheart. “The first word,” he said slowly, “is the vulgar one. Then money, then S for ‘spread’, then heart for love”. “Then it means,” said I, “f*** money, spread love?” He looked a little shocked to hear me say that, and then smiled a yes. We parted friendly strangers.

(Another favorite tee-shirt, in a very different key, spotted on a paunchy gentleman: Sorry, Girls, I Only Date Models. Close second: You Don’t Win Friends With Salad.)

I was on an urban geography adventure whose name says it all…Five Days, Five Boroughs. (“I’ve never been in the Bronx!” I’d said to my husband. “I’ve never been to Queens! Or Brooklyn!”) It was all walking and public transportation, led by a NYC historian named John Kriskiewicz. True enthusiasm is a fiery and contagious engine, and John is deephearted and enthralled by his city. He threw off facts, opinions, and bon mots in a continuous enchanting stream. “In NY,” he said repeatedly, “everyone is a critic.” So we all became critics, and became enchanted.

Things I learned:
*There are 24 million people within 100 miles of the Statue of Liberty.
*About the loss of old Penn Station and his dissatisfaction with its replacement, the architectural historian Vincent Scully said “through Pennsylvania Station, one entered the city like a god. Now one scuttles in like a rat.”
*When the new Moynihan Train Hall was a post office distribution center, that’s where volunteers came to answer all letters addressed to Santa Claus.
*Of The Vessel, a massive walkable artwork closed because it was too easy to su***de from, John said “It’s a folly. You might as well take $200 million and light it on fire.”
*Languages and slang overlap in New York. One can, and does, “schlep to the bodega.” And an idiot, whether barreling heedless down the sidewalk, or driving through a crosswalk full of pedestrians, is called a “chooch” from ciuccio. In southern Italian slang, that’s a donkey.
*A random group of American adults will quickly deploy the new word with impunity throughout the city, exclaiming “What a chooch!” with regularity, and disdain, and laughter.
*On Staten Island, a different guide, highly opinionated and very verbal, and married to an Italian cop, remarked that SI has less crime because, in order to escape, the criminals would have to stand in line and wait for the ferry.
*There is a secret, unmarked bar frequented by actors and theater folk in the district, up a flight of stairs right next to a really famous place. It has a name, but no signage and no street number. No, I will not tell you where it is.
*There is a place in the Bronx called the Andrew Freedman House for Indigent Millionaires, endowed as an old age home for millionaires who have lost their money. It is a NYC designated landmark.
* On Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx’s Little Italy, you can wander along a street of delis with a dizzying array of olive oils and restaurants owned by five generations of Italians. You can also visit a bakery called Madonia, to buy a box of cannoli and watch them filled to order behind the counter. Just go on in.
*There is also a deli, bewildering, crowded, and wonderful, where it’s best to just say “give me something good for lunch.” It is right next to a place giving samples of their own wine in plastic cups. Recommending!
*When I texted my Midwest husband “I’m moving to the Bronx”, he promptly replied “I’m really going to miss you.”

From 1937 to 1954, a radio program called Grand Central Station ran on the major networks. The series had a wonderful opening narrative with a dramatic voice, and a decided echo sound effect. “As a bullet seeks its target, shining rails in every part of our great country are aimed at Grand Central Station, heart of the nation's greatest city. Drawn by the magnetic force of the fantastic metropolis, day and night great trains rush toward the Hudson River, sweep down its eastern bank for 140 miles, flash briefly by the long red row of tenement houses south of 125th Street, dive with a roar into the two-and-one-half-mile tunnel which burrows beneath the glitter and swank of Park Avenue, and then ... (sound effect: a train pulling into the station) ... Grand Central Station! Crossroads of a million private lives! Gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily!"

This is exactly the way I feel about New York City.

And one last thought. It is best to simply embrace a certain amount of disorientation in New York City. Everybody does.

From the top of the Edge, 1100 feet above the street, the wind howls around the plexiglass walls, and the full spread of archipelago Manhattan far below is framed by salt water. John K attempted to orient our small crowd by pointing out landmarks: the Empire State Building, a good navigation aide, and the Chrysler Building with its distinctive and stunning art deco tower. I nodded and then looked away and then looked back, and I couldn’t find it. Yes, readers, I lost the Chrysler Building in the canyons of Manhattan.

New York State of Mind.

(Five Days, Five Boroughs, from Road Scholar. Photo by a fellow scholar.)

Motley Peg, a series of short essays of wide variety, about twice a month. Read the ‘why’, and other Motleys, at www.pegguilfoyle.com. with option to receive them direct to your inbox