The entire reason for being on the Deegan was ridiculous - a Brooklyn preschool daytrip all the way to Storm King upstate. Sure, the first time was a charm - ethereal and adventurous (and, yes, Storm King is miraculous) - but why go again? It's over 2 hours away and the class hadn't even exhausted Brooklyn yet. And they're preschoolers. You get up there, eat lunch, run around for a few minutes, get back in the car and drive home, listening to the once-fine-then-tiresome-now-fucking-evil sound of Dan Zane's stoner uncle voice - the stoner uncle who, at this point, you wish would just leave you alone.
And so the traffic, unsurprisingly, got to me. As it often does, it took over an hour and a half just to get to the Bronx - it was one of those days. I began to get frustrated. I started mumbling to myself. Then I started biting my hand to re-route the emotional pain, to make it physical to avoid blowing up. Then I lost it, yelling out, "THAT'S how it IS in this god-for-saken place! You can't GET anywhere. You can't MOVE! THIS is how it is here. THIS is how it WORKS!
My poor son (one wonders why he has a slight fear of traffic) said, "Dad, maybe we should just go home." 4 years old, supposed to be on a 'special' day out with his class and his father. The excitement had long turned into aggravation and now he was probably scared to death of the insane man that once was his relatively normal father.
I churned the steering wheel and veered off onto an exit just to relieve the enormous stress. And, only in New York, found an incredibly pleasurable compromise - The Bronx Zoo (where we should have gone in the first place) and lunch on Arthur Avenue (meatballs) - and ended up having a sweet and memorable day, me playing the role of something of a hero.
The moral of this story is not that I have a tension issue.
It is that Robert Moses directly affects your life every time you even think about this city.
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