Jack left the apartment early, probably for a rehearsal or audition somewhere. My plane left in the evening, so I had time to roam the city a bit. If I have only one place to visit when in New York, my first choice is the Metropolitan Museum. I am mostly drawn to their medieval relics. As I was to discover en tour, my Met visit would be the first of a summer of museums. There is this thing I have for museums as others have for sportsfields and rock concerts. Perhaps it's standing in the middle of a trash heap of history... perhaps it's the quiet cool silence... Do not remember if I also visited MoMA, my second choice.

museums


Sometime in the afternoon, I took the A train to the JFK airport on the Far Rockaway subway line. In those days it was 35 cents. Probably exited train at Howard Beach and took a bus and/or walked a mile or two. My plane ticket was with an unpronounceable airline soon to be rechristened as IcelandAir. IcelandAir was known back then as the "Hippie Airline" because it carried so many of us back and forth across the Atlantic. Its tickets were the cheapest at $700 per round trip. Checking www.IcelandAir.us today, I notice that the prices are still about the same.

Do not remember if my plane had propellers; airlines then were still converting to jets. Did not see any gremlins on the wings or any wind-up keys on the flappers; so feeling somewhat secure, I nodded off somewhere over Newfoundland. We stopped for a while in Reykjavik around somebody's midnight and had time to browse the airline sponsored gift shops for tax exempt goodies (i.e. cigarettes and booze). A few hours later back on the plane, or maybe it was another plane, I blinked over Ireland, but returned to dozing all the way to Luxembourg, which at that time was IcelandAir's only destination.