IMPRESSIONS: ON A TRIP TO NEW YORK

Picked up at LaGuardia, traveling out to the "Island,"wondering how anyone can find their way around; viewing the New York skyline across the bay from a new city-like community; spending a day in the lower East Side, pushing aside people to get a theater ticket to wait in line for a corn beef, cole slaw, Russian dressing sandwich on rye; marveling at the make over of Orchard Street where once immigrants sold their wares on push carts now an upscale neighborhood of shops and apartments; listening to an articulate Brandeis graduate as she spoke of the realities of immigrant life as we toured a turn-of-the-20th century small, cramped, dark three room apartment in which a family lived and worked; to extremes in 2011, a small, intimate Italian restaurant in which we sat at a small table for eight regaling each other with good conversation, wine and hilarious memories.

On streets, where buses' heavy exhaust pushed aside the intense heat and their front ends kneeled leaving off passengers in wheelchairs and senior citizens pushing shopping carts with groceries; marveling at dog walkers with six to 12 dogs, some pedigreed, some not, all coming at me on the sidewalk; sirens wailing; horns honking; people walking, running, some half naked, others dressed and holding umbrellas protectively against the sun; restaurants with big alphabet letters on their windows to designate they had passed the Health Department's test for cleanliness, while others shut tight because they had not.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art with lines one usually sees at stadium-sized events waiting hours to see the Alexander McQueen extraordinary exhibit of clothes, accessories, using feathers, sea shells, metals, chiffon, materials earthy and voluptuous, costumes of all kinds mimicking cultures from the world over along with our own, some galleries entitled "Savage Beauty," all of it in an erotically pulsating setting at times three dimensional and digital as people strained to get close enough to the displays, creative and theater-like.

Leaving the hustle and bustle behind, traveling about seventy miles out to a serene area in the country to a small cottage by a lake; refreshed by cooling breezes and a full, beautiful moon; Caramoor a 90 acre Mediterranean estate built in 1930s as a private home, now a center for music and arts, listening to a concert of Beethoven and Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No.1, played thrillingly by Sarah Chang and the Orchestra of St. Luke's.

Coming back over the TriBorough Bridge the heat had obliterated the city's skyline with a veil of haze, smoke and fumes; on my way home to St. Louis, sharing with much of the rest of the country unbearable heat and savoring a good time.