is completed in 1904 but will not open until 1908.  Begun in Hoboken in 1874, work had been abandoned in 1892, then resumed in 1902 by the New York and New Jersey Railroad.  

Time and history involve travel, don't they, which is why the past often seems like another country you've either left behind or are somehow trying to get back to.

 

 

The Hudson River, Chelsea, summer 1978.

 

Great Uncle Fred traveled a lot for his job in the furniture business.  From Grand Rapids to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York.  A bachelor until late in life, he would occasionally take my mother and her sister, my aunt Frances, with him on these trips.  "Christopher Street," my mother said, reminded by a news report Frances was watching in the background on TV, about some kind of festival, some parade going on in New York where I was living at the time.  "That's where we caught the boat."  She was calling to find out when I planned on coming to visit that summer.

 

I was probably very high at the time.  I'm pretty certain I was.  "She beat me here," I said to M as we joined the Gay Pride throng, as though I'd been in a competition and didn't even know it.  Incredulous.  "My mother beat me to Christopher Street."

If, however, W. G. Sebald is right, and all time is happening simultaneously, then somewhere in this picture, or nearby, getting out of a cab perhaps, there are two little girls being chaperoned by a handsome young man from Grand Rapids.  He's in the furniture business.  And at the same time there is also a child on the shoulders of a man in torn jeans and a t-shirt, the child holding on to the man's baseball cap and singing a disco song.  "Push push in the bush," she sings, "Life is but a Dream."



And also, across the street and sitting right on the edge of the sidewalk where we would walk at night and take our lives in our hands and buy drugs and meet hookers meeting the truckers coming from the Holland Tunnel, right there reflecting us there are waves of glass.  The waves look frosted but really it's an illusion made by all these white dots in the glass.  



There are art galleries and new construction where there used to be old warehouses and trucks and young men loitering. 



We are still loitering.  We are still looking around, traveling back and forth in time.  We are still those young men that summer in 1978.  It is all happening in the same moment.  That is how time and memory and history and travel work.



"We have lived," as my mother used to say after any adventure, or simply at the end of a long day raising five kids, including us in her assessment.  "We have lived to Tell the Tale."

See also: Rabbit Meets Hat.