City to Grandma: Drop Dead

On Sunday morning, I received a frantic call from my almost-80-year-old mother.  She was breathless: “They blocked the streets. I can’t get to church. There’s some kind of marathon. There’s no parking.  We can’t get close.  Don’t come.”  The context: it was Palm Sunday, and my family was planning to go to my mother’s church that day.  Grandma’s church is a Russian Orthodox cathedral located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a neighborhood on the other side of the borough from Bay Ridge, where we live. 

As we learned too late that morning, Sunday was apparently the Brooklyn Half Marathon, another of the city’s multiple devised and diabolical efforts to make life more difficult for its residents. It seems as if the kindly fellow parishioner who drives my mother to church every Sunday was unable to get close enough to the church to park, and certainly not close enough to assist my mother, who walks unsteadily even with a cane, and had to abandon all hope of entering church on one of its most important holidays.

Although the purpose of her phone call was to make sure we didn’t travel across Brooklyn if she wasn’t going to be there, I saw it as a challenge. I told her to return home and I would drive to pick her up in Queens and take her to our local church in Brooklyn.  I’ll be damned if I’m going to let those godless runners ruin my mother’s Palm Sunday. Not on my watch. This was the Last Crusade.

I told my family we were going with Plan B.  We we’re going to our church, the Greek church up the block. Save two seats.  Grandma and I will be there before the Gospel reading.  I hopped in the car.     

When people start to get up there in age—I mean really up there—their world starts to shrink, sometimes drastically.  They tend to focus on a core set of limited priorities, and it’s these things that comprise their lives and get them out of bed in the morning.  Those things might be grandchildren, or a core group of friends, or a hobby.  For my mother, going to church is one of the things on that list (along with any show on TV featuring Tom Selleck).  This being the beginning of Holy Week, the week that culminates in Easter Sunday, I didn’t want this important week to start off on the wrong foot, for her or for me. 

My mother’s house is approximately 15.5 miles from my house by car, assuming one travels via the most direct route, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, also known as the BQE.  As some of you may know, the BQE is to highways what Hitler is to humans – the shittiest of them all.  But on this day, if I was going to make it to the church on time, we were going to have to rely on the BQE.  It was Sunday morning.  How bad could it be?

Note to self: don’t ever ask that question.

People who live in the outer boroughs need not be reminded that the BQE currently—and for the last several years—suffers from an intentional bottleneck intended to prolong the life of the crumbling roadway.  My family refers to this built-in traffic, which reliably costs motorists 15 minutes on average each way, as the Gounardes Traffic Jam, named after a local State Senator who has lobbied along with other “public servants” to ensure that the intentional bottleneck stays in place forever.  He seems to believe this will reduce traffic and cure racism. 

Anyway, I gutted through the extra 15 minutes on the way there, along with additional delays caused by ramp closures to accommodate the half-ass marathon, picked up my mother, gutted through the extra 15 minutes on the way back, and, though it took me well over an hour, eventually double-parked outside the church, helped my mother inside and into her seat, got out, found a spot, walked back into the church, and was standing there right in time for the Gospel reading.   

I was just starting to catch my breath, even allowing myself to feel pretty good about the whole situation, when it was time to line up for holy communion. It was then that we saw him on line.  Look, he’s a perfectly nice guy. A smart guy. I genuinely like him. We know his parents and siblings. He now has a wife and kids, who all seem lovely. He received communion while we were making our way towards the line.  Our paths were about to cross.  My wife, who intuitively sees everything long before anyone else, especially me, delicately jabbed me between the third and fourth rib, whispering, “Don’t.” 

I heeded the warning and elected to be nice. I shook Senator Gournardes’s hand.  “Kali Anastasi.”  “Kali Anastasi,” he smiled back.  This is the nice thing that people say to one another on Palm Sunday. 

When we got back to the house, we sat with Grandma and sipped our coffee.  We talked about getting together the following Sunday for Easter, when we would be hosting the extended family, as usual.  My mother mentioned that Easter was happening late this year, already into the month of May.  For some reason, this made me start to feel uneasy, like there was something I was forgetting.

What I had forgotten, but was slowly starting to remember in real time, was the calendar.  Easter in the Orthodox Church falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox after Passover.  This year, that date lands on May 5th, the first Sunday in May.

The first Sunday in May . . . Now why does that ring a bell . . .

It then hit me.  The first Sunday in May is the day reserved for the “Five Boro Bike Tour,” also known as the Purge.   

In short, it is this day each year that New York City closes most major highways and bridges so that bicycles can ride on them instead, leaving the residents of the city to fend for themselves.  It’s an annual debacle.  You can read about it here and consider this a public service announcement. If you live in New York City, stay home Sunday.

Cutting to the chase, on that day there is no reasonable way for an elderly grandmother to travel 15.5 miles across a city that will be in the throes of vehicular chaos.  It was easier to get across to West Berlin during the Cold War.  Maybe next year, Grandma. 

This Sunday, we will go forward and roast lamb and celebrate the most important religious holiday of the year.  We will do this without the company of my mother and my brother, who will sensibly remain in Queens.  At that moment, thousands of godless losers will climb aboard their bicycles and ride around the city like complete douchebags, like they do every year. 

But I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy.  If you squint, you can see the silver lining.  I checked the weather forecast: it’s going to be cold and rainy all day.