City boy on a train ride through the country

A week in New York, city and upstate. Exhausting. I returned home sick as always -- either from planes, handshakes, air quality, activity, or all of the above. Remarks:

*The Louis Armstrong house in Corona, Queens, was very much worth an afternoon. Tacky furniture notwithstanding, the home was a very humble, low-ceilinged place for the man who created (perfected) the jazz solo to live out his years. They said his next-door neighbor never knew he was famous. He did have flashy taste in wallpaper, though, or maybe that was his wife. Impressive gold-plated swan heads for toilet fixtures as well.

I touched his piano. It reminded me of touching Allen Ginsberg's typewriter, in 1991.

Louis' study presents him as a compulsive documentarian, who would record himself to reel-to-reel tape playing along with a popular record of the day. There's also a portrait of him, painted by Tony Bennett, hanging across from the desk.

They said he was approachable enough that he would hang out on the steps with the neighborhood kids, maybe playing with his horn, on summer evenings.

*Great Lakes on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn has a nice jukebox. Really nice.

*The train ride up along the Hudson was awesome. Much of it was through wetlands. Few people take Amtrak trains on the West Coast. I missed this feeling -- gazing out the window at the river, the houses, the little towns, the birds and islands and stuff. I used to take them up and down the mid-Atlantic region all the time.

*The sky is brown and your snot is black in New York City. I'm happy to be back here, close to good burritos, India Clay Oven, fog and ocean. And my fireplace.

*Yeah. But they have Sarge's deli. And pizza with ziti all over it.


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