When the family invaded the biggest city on a junket to see one of the girls and threw in Swarthmore to see another . . .

April of '97, my friends, when the city probably never looked better . . .

Neither seashore nor mountains . . . What a piece of work is man! And what a trip to Brooklyn and Swarthmore! Normally shrinking from crass memorializing of daily activities, I am moved nonetheless to tell that most elementary of tales: what I did on my vacation. Listen up.

Round one, Brooklyn . . . First, we got a cab, then we got a plane, then a "car." A "car" is a reasonably priced cab-like vehicle you call and tell to come and get you at La Guardia from Brooklyn Heights. It's a "car service" named after that neighborhood's main street or near-main street, Montague. He dropped us at 37 Schermerhorn -- say "Sch" as in skirmish. Time for tired old joke about fighting your way around New York? Sorry, I am in the market for an "I love NY" sticker.

At #37 lives #3 Daughter with four other young women. Our #3 works for the city, helping it develop economically. Later we visited her work place and met others who help that cause, hearing about the price of fish as affected or not by a crackdown on mob involvement at the Fulton market. History!

In short order we were strolling the B. Hts. Promenade overlooking the river. This is old country, remember. There's something always on the edge of musty and littered about NY, kept in control and giving a weathered look. Lots of bricks in place for a hundred years, etc. From heights is s a view of Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge, which our #3 can take on foot on her way to work downtown.

The fun of getting around . . . Our three days were full of subways, as were some of us by half week's end, but not me. They are frequent, fast, and full or half full, even at off hours. You can't get nowhere fast on four wheels in that teeming metropolis. So subway's the way, at $1.50 a token. As keeper of the petty cash, I was doling out the 15-spots right and left, for the ten-token package.

Subways are clean too. Some graffiti but not much. Nearest we saw to skirting legality was Korean peddlers, young man or woman moving briskly through the cars snapping a sort of cricket to (barely) announce her presence. The natives know who they are. Their wares are knick-knacks.

This is Babylon? . . . Saturday night to Union Square, downtown Manhattan, for a tap-dance show out of which I walked after five minutes. Eight or ten Australian men banging away on a wired stage in work shoes, with no music. Ears protesting and mind wondering what a piece of work this stuff was -- and with only 50 years to live and not ready to spend 75 minutes of it to find out -- your correspondent walked out onto the busy street.

In not too long, he found what could pass for a five-story public library and reading room, high-ceilinged and with a coffee bar, where a paperback "Henry IV, Part 2" and "Henry V" went for $3 each, plus (splurge time) a Loeb Library volume of Horace for $18.95. The first Henry neatly supplemented the Part 1 I had bought off a Waterstone's shelf at O'Hare. (What a piece of work that Waterstone's is.)

This Union Square (14th Street) public reading room, by the way, is the Barnes & Noble Temple of Literacy, another nice piece of work. It had people in it reading. True, there was some chatter in the coffee shop and elsewhere. But throughout this store were people wholly absorbed in books. I conceived an image of Union Square as one big campus.

Easter Day in the morning . . . On Sunday at St. Francis Xavier church, in the same general neighborhood, on 16th Street, however, the expected Jesuit influence showed itself mostly in liturgical tone (relaxed and enthusiastic) and music (damn good choir if I do say), not in the sermon. The Jesuit pastor was more Johnny Carson (or J. Leno) than John Courtney Murray (eminent theologian, Vatican II expert on religious liberty), which is I suppose as it should be. It's a media-driven society, and people eat it up.

However, if those people I'd seen at the Barnes & Noble temple had been there and had been polled about the sermon, they would have coughed and changed the subject, I feel. Anyhow, it was better than Cardinal O'Connor delivering a political speech, as I heard a few years ago at the Cathedral. O'Connor's OK, and he may have been 99% right in what he said, but I like my sermons reasonably pious. The St. FX preacher was pious enough but dealt too much in slogans. It was one bumper sticker after another, with a lot about "life" and "spirit" and "risen" -- all pretty much a blur.

Our kids liked it, however. So I'm through complaining.

Watching your language . . . Each Brooklyn Heights morning, I went out for coffee and muffins. #1 Daughter was with me one day. Her order took a little longer. The fellow called it a "crim chizz" bagel. In the constant talking over and around people that is New York, I told her, puzzled, that her "crim chizz bagel" would be ready in a flash. "Cream cheese," she explained to me. Of course. I felt sheepish, intending no slight.

Later at an Irish restaurant, the FBI (foreign-born Irish) waitress listed what was on tap, including Bass Ale, which she pronounced "Bahss" but I always say so as to rhyme with "crass." Quick as wink, I said I'd have a "Bahss," again intending no mockery. I swear, it just came out.

Immigrants all . . . On Sunday we picnicked at the marvelous park next to the Cloisters, a reinstalled monastery full of medieval art, way up on Manhattan, about 200th Street, again over a broad expanse of river. That was a mere subway ride into never-never land.

Next day we ferried to the Statue of Liberty (great ride, standing on the deck in wind and driving rain) and Ellis Island, which has a top-of-the-line exhibit about the 1890-1922 immigration screening.

A day or so later in Philadelphia, the papers were telling of the court-appointed "master" who ruled that Ellis Island belongs in large part to New Jersey. A revoltin' development, Jimmy Durante would have said.

Getting to Philly called for a subway ride to Penn Station, where we bought a ticket for (a) a New Jersey line (trains festooned over the Ellis Island victory) and the Southeastern Pa. commuter system known as SEPTA, which I say is too close to septic for comfort.

Falling trees . . . From Philly we entrained to Swarthmore, where spring greeted us foursquare and we might have asked what is so rare as a day in April but didn't, as far as I recall.

Here we were to visit #2 Daughter, who helps the college stay on good terms with its alumni and alumnae, of which she is herself one.

This was bucolic territory, where a major happening was the falling of a huge tree on two parked cars, which were taken away in briefcases, I believe. (No one was hurt. We returned to Oak Park on time for an empty River Forest house to blow up because of leaked gas. No one hurt there either. Phew.)

Another happening at Swarthmore was a men's lacrosse game (sock-'em, bust-'em) vs. Western Maryland, clearly the better team. Lots of passing of that little ball, net to net, like the Bulls when they're on, and open-field running, ball in net, like in football. On a sunny, crisp day.