IN THE SUMMER OF 1992, I began planning a trip to the USA. It was going to be the first trip that I had made to that country since 1963, when our family lived in Chicago for the last three months of that year. While we were in Chicago, President JF Kennedy was assassinated. Most of my 1992 trip was to stay with friends who lived in Manhattan. I was also going to stay in Boston with some other friends. When my cousin Anthea heard that I was going to be in New England, she suggested that I looked up some cousins of my father, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island.

I was keen not to waste a moment in Manhattan. So, unusually for me, I spent many hours of my spare time at home reading numerous guidebooks to New York. Each of these detailed tomes contained a section on keeping safe in New York. Each one of these explained what to do WHEN you get mugged rather than IF you get mugged. It seemed to me that getting mugged in New York was an inevitable experience for tourists in the city. The more I read, the more anxious I became. As the date of departure drew closer, my inclination to cancel my trip increased steadily. However, my desire to visit New York was greater than my fear of the dangers described in my guidebooks. I decided that should I get mugged, as seemed inevitable, I did not want all my money to be taken. I wanted to be left with some so that I could make my way back to where I was staying after the robbery had taken place. I decided that a safe place to hide my ‘emergency’ cash would be inside my sock beneath the sole of a foot. This is what I did every day in Manhattan, but, fortunately, the guidebooks were not entirely accurate: I was not mugged.

Plenty of beggars tried to entice me to put money into the paper cups they held out hopefully. Once, I succumbed and threw a coin into one of these cups, and its owner shouted:

“Is that all? I was hoping for a hundred Dollars,” adding a few seconds later, “well, it’s a start.”

I loved Manhattan. I loved the quick wittedness of almost everyone I met. I felt as if I was taking part in a Woody Allen comedy, but the things said by New Yorkers were often far cleverer and funnier than any of Woody’s lines.

One purchase I wanted to make in New York was a padded winter jacket. When I entered one shop, I explained what I wanted. When I told the salesman that I wanted both outside and inside pockets, he exclaimed:

“Hey, what are ya? Some kind of secret agent?”

He sold me a superb jacket, which I used until a couple of years ago.

My father had told me to look up one of his first cousins, who lived in Manhattan. She lived high up in an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Its windows overlooked The Metropolitan Museum and Central Park. After dinner, I announced that I would walk the few blocks to where I was staying. She was dead against this and insisted I went by taxi. As she and her husband were seeing me off, she said:

“Press the elevator button marked ‘taxi’.”

I boarded the lift, found the button, and pressed it. The lift descended and when the doors opened on the ground floor, I could see a taxi waiting just outside the doors to the apartment block. I was amazed. I had never encountered such a thing before. I felt like a country bumpkin marvelling over the wonders of the big city. This button that summoned taxis seemed to me an example of what made ‘America great’.

It was fun visiting my friends in Boston back in 1992. However, after the excitement and uniqueness of Manhattan, I was not as trilled by the city as many other visitors are.

I took a train from Boston to Providence. It was the time of the famous ‘Fall’ colours. The journey afforded me with a great opportunity to view the outstanding display of autumn leaf colours, which far exceeded my expectations. I had no idea about what sort of time I would be spending with my newly discovered cousins in Providence. My main worry was that they would not take me sightseeing. So, I told them that I would be arriving on a train that reached Providence in the late afternoon but boarded one which arrived in the middle of the day. That allowed me a few hours to look around before I met them.

After spending a few hours on my own in Providence, I returned to the station platform, and then walked up the stairs to the waiting area where I had planned to meet my relatives. I had no idea what any of them looked like. They had no idea about my appearance. I entered the waiting area and found that a lot of people were seated there. I scanned the faces and spotted an elderly lady sitting with two young boys. I fancied that the face of one of these looked like I did when I was only a few years old. Then, I thought that I was being silly, but I was right. I approached the elderly lady, the grandmother of the two boys and introduced myself. Greta, widow of one of my father’s cousins, said she had noticed me and thought that I had a family resemblance to her late husband. She drove us to her daughter’s home in a large American saloon car, swinging the steering wheel with gusto whenever a change of direction was required. My cousin’s family did take me sightseeing. I particularly remember the roads in an Italian neighbourhood. The median road markings were in the three colours of the Italian flag.

I enjoyed my trip to the USA in 1992. My next visit to Manhattan was in 2007. Things had changed a lot since 1992. The city seemed to have lost its edgy, almost electric feel. Gone were the men on the pavements with their paper cups and witty comments. Also missing, were the endless stream of dubious characters walking, often menacingly, along the corridors of the Subway trains. Although Manhattan had probably become a safer place for its inhabitants, I felt that it had become almost twee in comparison to what I had found so exciting in 1992.

Sadly, now in April 2020 as I write this piece, New York City is facing one of its greatest, if not greatest, crises: a viral epidemic that is trying to outdo the Spanish Flu that occurred at the end of WW1. May it return to normal as soon as possible.