It Starts and Ends With This Bear

In true travel tradition, I am not prepared or nourished or rested enough to properly post about my visit to New York CitaY. In less than a week there I encountered (and involuntarily rubbed up against or held hands with on the subway) more human beings than the entire population south of the Mason-Dixon line. I had trouble sleeping at night because as soon as my head hit the pillow I kept thinking this city isn’t sleeping, why are you sleeping?  Or I would just obsessively, mentally replay the sites of Coney Island (like blubberly bodies in swimsuits, freakshows, naked toddlers grabbing live crabs out of white paint buckets while their parents ate rice-a-roni out of a giant tupperware popcorn bowl, the Wonder Wheel, and the pier dance party for starters).

I can bookend the trip with this, the unnamed bear I won with my dart skills (and five dollars) at Coney Island:

He came back to Manhattan with us and later ended up as a distractor element for my lack of cash to tip housekeeping when I left the hotel:

He looks blue because Sportscenter is playing up above.

Now, I know he ended up somewhere because I had to return to my room only five minutes after I thought I was leaving for good (I forgot something very important – I had forgotten to indulge my fear of leaving something behind) and when I came back – the lock was fixed out like housekeeping does when they are getting ready to clean the room and the cash and the bear were gone!

I wonder where he is now, I wonder where he will go next.  Like many other things this week, he was released from the plastic bag of carnie oppression and sent out on an endless, or at least, unpredicatable New York adventure.