George Will and New York – Part One
The next morning I said to
George, “Let’s go to Greenwich Village and preach on the street.” So off we
went from Brooklyn to Manhattan. We didn’t make it to the Village, at least not
that day. Entering Manhattan we found ourselves on Houston Street, a fairly
broad street around, if memory serves me correctly, the Williamsburg Bridge.
We noticed a library and decided
to go inside and look in the newspapers for a place to stay. Naturally we had
no frame of reference for anything we read, we didn’t know the city; I guess we
were like the guy calling for directions and when asked his location replied,
“I’m at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk.”
Leaving the library with not a
clue to what we were doing – at least I didn’t have a clue – we saw a laundry
mat across the street. Since laundry mats often have bulletin boards in which
people post advertisements, George said that he’d go over and see whether there
might be advertisements for apartments posted.
In my first post about George I
mentioned that he was from south Florida and that he had quite the drawl; and
that said drawl was especially pronounced when he sang. As a matter of fact,
it’s been 43 years [this was written in 2010] since that day in January and I
can still catch the words George was singing re-crossing Houston Street from
the laundry mat to the Ford station wagon where I was waiting. I imagine that
100 years from now sensitive microphones will be able to pick up George’s
drawn-out drawl of songs sung in the 20th century, those words just seem to
hang in the air.
George got in the car to report
that there were no apartment postings in the laundry mat. What to do?
We bowed our heads to pray…and
just as our prayer commenced there was a knock on driver’s window where George
was sitting.
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