Back to work today after four wonderful weeks of vacation, and it wasn’t as tough as I had expected. But of course that’s because I know that on Friday I will be on vacation again for another week, this time in New York. ‘A New Yorker in Oslo’ will be ‘A New Yorker in New York’ again for a week, visiting friends and family. I look forward to my annual trips to NY each year, and usually plan them for the middle to end of August so that I can experience a bit of the NY summer—hot, humid, and sometimes tough to take. But it’s a real long summer and it’s what I remember from growing up there. Once I land at Newark airport and step outside, it’s like being hit by a blast of hot air. But I like feeling the heat outdoors and then walking into an air-conditioned supermarket or clothing store and nearly freezing, or lying in bed and feeling the air from the ceiling fan at my friend Jean’s house blowing down on me. I like opening the door to a car that has been baking in the heat and having to air out the car to cool it down. I like the smell of sun-baked asphalt and tar—it reminds me of the boardwalk smell at Rye Beach at Playland from our childhood days. I need my dose of warmth but I also like that feeling of needing some relief from the heat. It doesn’t feel like summer if you cannot complain at least once that it’s too hot. My mother would sometimes complain, and then she would bring out watermelon, sherbet, lemonade or her homemade iced tea (nothing beat it) and we would relax and forget about the heat, at least for a while. The heat would often make us seek relief at the beaches. I can still remember long summer days together with Jean at Jones Beach or Sherwood Island when we were younger, working on our tans, listening to the radio and reading our fashion magazines. When it got to be too warm on the beach, we ran into the ocean—the water was warm but still refreshing. When we were children we often made our way to Kingsland Point Park on the Hudson River, or joined neighbors for trips to Lake Welch or Sherwood Island or Rye Beach. Now I often visit Gisele whose apartment terrace overlooks the beach, and we sit out there watching the people on the beach, sipping cold drinks and enjoying good conversation.
Now that I no longer work in NYC and no longer have to use subways or buses to get to work, I enjoy being a tourist and walking around the city in the summertime. I prefer to walk rather than take the subways or buses. The subways in NYC always seemed to smell worse in the summertime than during the rest of the year as I remember. It’s been a few years since I’ve ridden a subway during the summer, so I don’t know if that has changed or not. I do remember a few times being on a subway train where the windows were shut tight and the air conditioning was supposed to be on but it wasn’t, and it didn’t take long for the cars to heat up and tempers to flare. Someone always ended up opening the doors between the cars and standing in them to hold them open. The stream of cool subway tunnel air that flowed through the cars then was like a gift from heaven even though the screeching of the train wheels and the iron smell accompanied it. It was a trying experience to deal with claustrophobic subway cars and buses where the windows were tightly shut. I never managed that too well and would get off (fight my way off) a subway train or bus at the next stop if it was too unbearable. Asking the bus driver to put the air conditioning on always elicited the same response—it was on and please do not open the windows. We opened them anyway if we could, just to get real air. I don’t miss this aspect of NYC summers at all.
Summer storms in Tarrytown where I grew up were always intense but short-lived as I remember, with a lot of lightning and thunder and torrential rains. Sometimes there was flooding. Afterwards the storms had seldom cooled everything down, but they were fascinating and scary to experience, especially at night with all the lightning flashing about. We always took care to get indoors so as not to be struck by lightning. That was always impressed upon us by parents and teachers—how to deal with lightning storms and what to do in different situations. Oslo has not had many intense lightning storms in the twenty years I’ve lived here, but the past few years have seen an increase in their frequency. Experiencing such storms when we have been out on our boat on the Oslo fjord—with torrential rain, strong winds and high waves—is a scary experience and one I prefer to avoid. We have been lucky the two times it has happened—getting back to port or finding shelter just in time before the storm hit. That is the best way to describe it—it just hits and lashes everything in its path.
I am looking forward to my dose of New York summer—the warmth of being together with family and friends, the summer weather--all the experiences that contribute to the making of memories that keep one warm during the winter months.
