Yesterday was my monthly outing to New York City. Because of the cold, and because of the lingering snow banks in both my cities, I decided I wouldn’t be outside walking all day (my usual manner of visiting Manhattan). That meant I spent much of the day on public transportation: SEPTA (49 bus) to 30th Street Station, to Moynihan, to C subway, to M4 bus, to 1 subway, to C subway to 14th Street, C back up to Moynihan, 30th Street, 49 bus home.

Another version of my day is: Metropolitan Museum of Art (where I am a member so I often visit when I’m in town, what the heck), Book Culture on 112th Street (near Barnard, where I spent two incoherent and confused years from 1968 to 1970), Chelsea Market (a picturesque mall in a former factory), and the High Line (a former elevated train track; I didn’t walk the whole thing, just went to visit my favorite sculpture, an immense and judgmental pigeon).

Neither SEPTA nor Amtrak was having a good day. The 49 bus I planned to take in the morning was grayed out in the app, meaning it had been cancelled, so I had to bolt out of the house early and catch the earlier one by the skin of my teeth. The Amtrak train I was taking to New York sat on the tracks in the station for over half an hour. Then the one I was taking home was delayed for more than an hour and a half. When the train did finally arrive in Philadelphia, it took about ten minutes to crawl into the station, so I barely caught the 49 again.

I, however, was having a good day. I finished a book I was reading on burglary as it relates to architecture (A Burglar’s Guide to the City) and left it on top of a trash receptacle for someone else to find. I watched people on the buses, trains, and subways. The Japanese ceramics exhibit at the Metropolitan was just okay, but I could see why my friend Rebecca (a potter) liked it so much. I found a couple of poetry books I will enjoy reading at Book Culture, bought a pretty blue cardigan on sale at Muji, and ate an oily but tasty lamb-and-noodle soup at a greasy counter in Chelsea Market. The side trip to the pigeon, sitting in a blue dusk against glowing high rise buildings, was pleasant and eerie, and I walked back to the station among trees wrapped with white lights. On the train home, on my phone, I watched half of a movie I had seen before.

Best of all, though the sidewalks of Manhattan, like the sidewalks of Philadelphia, were bordered by mountains of crusted snow-plow ice, there were nice clear paths. I walked slowly, and didn’t trip. And even if going up and down subway stairs is always hard for me, at least this time my hips and knees didn’t hurt.

Nothing unusual to report, in other words, just a silent day going from here to there and doing things, as if I had all the time in the world and was richer than Crœsus.