Day One: New York City

Welcome, gentle reader, to July 1, 2013: day one.

Ironically, day one actually started the evening of June 30th. This was my final day in Utah. I had moved back home to Orem at the beginning of the week when my replacement contract-holder gently woke me up on Sunday morning and said she was moving in right then. My bad. Fortunately there were three very sweet girls in my ward who saw my negligent-based plight and helped me to dump all my belongings into my car for me to deposit in Orem. I would say that I had lived with my family since then, but I actually kind of lived in Provo most of the week, and just slept from about midnight to 7am in Orem, but those adventures are documented in a better place than here. So when Sunday came around, Ethan came by for my final family dinner (the first peaceful one in some time, thanks to my packing at last being finished) and my dad conveyed a message to me from my Heavenly Father. After roast and potatoes were sufficiently consumed, travel pictures were over with, and the car was loaded, I was on my way to the airport. Once I got my tickets squared away, goodbyes were said, and my family departed (as is only right and proper), some looking back while others did not. 

After I graciously decided to help JetBlue airlines increase their efficiency in security procedures (everyone needs a refresher practice-course now and then, it helps with morale), I put my pride and belt back on together, taking great comfort that my act of service was known only by the female security guards and The Lord (bragging really isn't my thing. Bad karma).

Totally unrelated side note: I've heard that wearing pants with sequins on the back pockets through a security check can make all sorts of uniformed individuals really excited.
Also, if you want a white-gloved professional to help you organize something like a backpack, just leave a iPad in it and have it X-rayed.

Fast forward: sitting at a terminal with my travel partner Lydia Nielsen, an easy-going, darling girl with great taste in music and even better taste in travel locations. Our flight came in an hour late, so we boarded at about 12:30am. Booyah. 

Once we were in the air, we decided that the best thing to do would be to crash for the four brief hours we would be just sitting there, adrift in a beautifully vast expanse of air and clouds. 

Now gentle reader, because we had a full day of trekking and touring ahead of us, I'm sure you know that this sounds like a good idea, and we thought it sounded like a good idea too. The only slight hiccup is that it is RUDDY IMPOSSIBLE to sleep on a plane. I'm sure the poor man who sat next to me must have thought I was some escaped circus contortionist, specializing in rare neck bends and knots. Since I really wasn't feeling up to discussing that part of my résumé with him, I decided to just keep to myself. 

Less than four hours of pretending to be a giraffe without neck bones later, the pilot announced that we were nearly at our destination. Now that everyone who was pretending to be asleep decided they didn't have to succumb to peer pressure any more, we all opened our windows.

The thin atmosphere could be seen above us, in its ethereal glory, while below us was a soft and bubbly blanket of white and silver clouds. I watches as we slowly descended into the blanket, kind of like descending into a creamy sort of whipped topping. All that could be seen out of the window was just the white clouds pressing up against my window. As the minutes passed, I waited for us to emerge from the bottom of the froth so I could at last see us dodge the Statue of Liberty and present a perfect view of the manhattan skyline (because that's just how flying into NYC works). I waited, and waited, and then as my claustrophobics-nightmare view remained unchanged, we touched ground and rolled to a halt.

Yes, gentle reader, New York was socked in.

Which was so dang cool! I could just barely make out people and airplanes out my window, seeming to swim through an ocean of white mist that tied everyone together. It somehow made this gigantic unknown city feel a little closer and smaller. 

When we were crossing into the airport, I could almost drink the air for how full of water it was! 

So, double time: we took two trains to get to another terminal of the airport to drop off our backpacks and Leo, my violin, in the storage lockers (where the kind worker marked all of our bags as fragile so they would be stored in a better place), talked with a happy police officer on our way back to the train, chatted with a local woman from queens on the train all the way to the Jamaica station, stopped to get our metro passes where the lady who we were working with suddenly stopped what she was printing for us and decided to let us use two employee-only passes (which give you unlimited train rides for the same price as four train rides), I chatted with a darling Hispanic janitor lady for five-ish minutes while Lydia was in the bathroom, and then we were off to see the city. 

We never took anything but the subway during our stay in New York.  I have to admit, it was a lot more dirty, a bit more spooky, and a lot more complicated than I expected. 

Which made it so much more rad than I ever imagined! Here was a place that was so pungent with both great want and great purpose, a place filled with the dirt of a people that never sleep or stop in their decided role in the world, a place where you almost can't give something so dirty a bath that would qualify as a feat of the gods because you would be washing valuable etchings of a culture away in the process. It was like, an enlightening sort of dirty...Stravinsky-esque perhaps?

The subway ride from Jamaica to our first stop, the World Trade Center, was fifty minutes long. When we headed up the many flights of stairs from the subway up to the streets, we found a large group of people from the train all standing closely together, just looking out into the final ascending staircase, but not moving out at all. The few people coming into the subway entrance met us with wet shoulders and hair: it was raining. All the people leaving the trains kept growing in number, the mass of underground travelers had been caught by surprise by the heavy rain and were hesitant to meet it.

I was not. 

I responded to the passing damp on comers by neatly pulling my hair up into a ponytail, looking back at Lydia with a smile, and running past the large group of my dismayed fellow travelers up the final staircase onto the sidewalk...

...And into the warmest, heaviest, most drenching rainstorm I have honestly ever been in. At first I worried that in my haste I would now be a cold wet mess the rest of the day, as it doesn't take a lot to make me cold, but within seconds, I gleefully realized that the rain and the air and the wind were all pleasantly warm. So I jogged along the sidewalk and across the street alongside the natives, grinning like a total idiot at the beauty and the serendipity of the moment. There I was, taking my first steps ever into New York City, drenched by a beautifully warm rain, soaked to the skin while I ran by the tallest buildings I had ever seen in my life. The mist was still everywhere, playing with the tops of the skyscrapers like they were optical illusions and making some pretty incredible reflections against the ones made of mirrors. That feeling of closeness was magnified when everyone was not only swimming in the same mist, but now in the same pouring rain. It was a really cool feeling.

Now, I know I probably sound like a laughing academy valedictorian (aka, crazy) but I don't care, because this is my blog, so I get to write it the way I really felt. If you want to read a piece of literature with the intent of doubling your cognitive processing skills in order to find something truly meaningful, pick up any Stephanie Meyer story. While I may sound like I was a total doofus, I'm glad to say that I absolutely was, but I wasn't an idiot. Our first stop though our trek in the rain was to the nearest store, century 21, where I bought a very nice umbrella for less then ten bucks (with my dry debit card, thanks). The other really amazing blessing was that i was still wearing my boss Chris's magical 17-secret-pocket vest, which also just happened to be pretty waterproof to boot. Now armed for the weather in a more socially accepted way, we went out to face the warm downpour as we walked a few blocks to the entrance of the 9/11 memorial.

That was a truly sacred place. I was privileged to hear a rare recording that had not been destroyed out of shame of a 911 phone call made by a man on the 76th floor of the second tower. They were his last words, and to this day, I can still hear that final scream as the building was heard collapsing around him. His was the second of such recordings I got to hear. As a future psychologist yearning to aid in traumatic stress disorder from disasters such as this, this holds a unique place in my heart. So to be there, to see the names around the place where they all laid, where the rubble was massed, where the planes had hit, where so many lives had changed forever, meant a lot to me; more than I thought it would honestly. The rain seemed to fall like tears upon the names I carefully and reverently touched. I kept wondering if the name that I moved my hand across could belong to that mans whose final words and sounds I will remember forever. 

Mom called me about then. I know it had been less than a day since I had left, but having that familiar tie from home reach out to me in such a place and time as that was very special to me. 

After the memorial, Lydia and I walked over to Trinity Church, and then later to St. Paul's church to consider the ancient tombstones upon which time had rubbed off the names of their owners. Inside the church were some incredible monuments to these unknown dead, as well as more monuments for those who died in 9/11.

Over the course of the day, we rode the subway many many times, transferring and backtracking often to see all we had planned on and more. We ate vendor hot dogs while strolling Central Park, got pictures of Teddy Roosevelt outside the natural history museum, walked into the Chrystler building, stood in the center of grand central station, walked across Times Square, dropped some coins into a violinists case in the subway tunnel after complimenting him on his masterful rendition of Vivaldi, picked up a postcard of the pre-2001 skyline, walked along Lexington avenue and Broadway street, and became incredibly subway-savvy within seven short hours.

When we started feeling the miles we had walked conflicting with our limited amount of sleep, we decided to head back to the airport early to begin the drying process. After taking six or seven more connecting trains to collect our luggage and then train back to our new terminal, we crossed international security without a single paused step, and gratefully sat down for a few hours at our terminal while we waited for the plane to be made ready. 

During that time, I called my parents, sent out a few texts, and grabbed some dinner at the airport for a grand total of four dollars (there should be some sort of an award for pulling together a full meal for a price like that, especially at an airport!). I also met with a few ladies on our same flight who were excited to return to their home of Ireland. It honestly threw me a little at first to hear that beautiful Irish accent, as I realized that I had never actually met a real Irish man or woman. We had a delightful time talking, and I really loved hearing what they had to say about the beauty of their homeland and what they were looking forward to doing when they returned. Most everything was about meeting up with their family members there, which made me think of how I feel when I go down to Enoch. 

When my boarding number was called, I mustered every bit of courage I had (honestly, probably 75% of it was the people upstairs grabbing me by the ear) and I gave the woman I had enjoyed talking to most one of my three copies of the Book of Mormon that I had put my testimony at the front of. Do I think she'll actually read it? I have no freaking clue. But I walked away knowing that I had tried my best to do something that I really didn't feel like I wanted to do, but did it because it was something my Father really wanted me to do. And because I love him, I went for it, because I know he's got my back, especially when I do the hard things for him, rather than the easy things for me. And I know that he really did keep his end of the deal because I'm sitting on the plane now with Leo in the overhead compartment above me and my backpack serving as my footstool, despite the one parcel per person rule this airline upholds. I could have sweat bullets when I walked past the two guards in the tunnel between the terminal and the plane, standing by a large pile of freshly tagged guitar cases that were about to be put in the literally freezing belly of the plane down below. That equals no bueno for a super moody violin. And I really wasn't excited about turning my backpack in for the duration of this long flight. 

But it's no worries, because, as I said before, my People Upstairs once again totally had my back. O how I really do love those people.

Okay, so it's crazy late now, and I should try to sleep on this plane again, as we land in Ireland in a few hours.

Though it must be said that this whole plane is FULL of adorable people, almost all of them ironically wearing GREEN no less, with absolutely gorgeous Irish accents. And guess who else just happens to be wearing a super shamrock-green t-shirt today as well? That would be yours truly, on day one of this grand adventure of mine.

This is Rachel, over and out.