OK, so I can't belt out the line as Whitney Houston did, but the feeling is all there. After a seven-year hiatus since my last visit, and three years of preparation and regular visits to forgotten-ny.com,Queens Crap and most notably the Street View feature on Google Maps, I picked up where I left off November 15-24.
The trip itself was delayed three times since it was originally slated for September '07. Before that, additional family matters (good and bad) challenged my ability to make the trip, but too many things were tugging at us on the home front. Little did I know, it was a blessing in disguise.
The major motive for this trip, besides that seven years is too long a gap between visits to your hometown, was to introduce/re-introduce Lisa and Nic to the family and for me to reconnect with as many relatives who don't live in the immediate vicinity of Grandma's house. (In past visits, I only took public transit; this time we had a car for the duration.)
I had ambitious plans for urban exploration, thanks to three years of living vicariously through forgotten-ny, Queens Crap, I had big plans to see things I never knew existed or had only heard about. Plus, Google Maps Street View, perusing old photos, and joining the Hyper Nostalgia Club in more recent months (we'll add my turning 40 for added measure) justified my pressing need to go places or visit people I hadn't seen in years, and to see how things have changed in comparison. One such place is Forest Park and "The Three Bears House" (shown), that which was the club house for the Forest Park Golf Course we used to pass as we did the in-city version of "over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go..." when I was a little boy.
I had equally ambitious plans to help Grandma out with some home improvement projects, since I've got the time, energy and insight (OK, obsession), and I was told by other family members that some things needed attention.
OK, so that was the general plan. And it could have been executed well if I had, say 19 days instead of nine. Moreover, Lisa and Nic only had five days to get family/friend visits and introductions and to see the sights on the short list that had nothing to do with my original agenda such as Central Park, 5th Avenue and Rockefeller Plaza. On that note, Nic was quite the trooper, having covered all this ground with us and with none of his trademark 1 - 3 pm meltdowns. He also had a couple of memorable lines such as his response to our asking if he was ready to go on the NY subway: "Subway...Eat Fresh!"
Anyhoozle, the agenda filled up quickly, leaving me with about 18 scattered hours of open time slots including breakfast, lunch or dinner time. I also had to trade a day of urban exploration with caulking and tile repair in Grandma's bathroom, which included -- and no surprise here -- multiple trips to Home Depot. (Same sh!t, different day.) So, provided certain areas and architecture aren't met with a wrecking ball or a developer's hidden agenda, places such as Ridgewood Reservoir, the Onderdonk House, Fort Tilden... will have to wait until next time.
No NY trip for me goes without a visit to my Mother (Nature), the Atlantic Ocean, and my place of worship, Shea Stadium (shown). Sadly, the time of year couldn't afford a trip to the beach (Rockaway or Coney Island) or a Mets game, but I settled for a drive-by to Shea before it is completely dismantled, and I got to dip my tootsies in the Long Island Sound after a marathon catch-up conversation with my cousin in Stratford, CT.
I <heart>NY, but I don't <heart> big city driving
Another thing I wasn't completely prepared for was the amount of driving I had to do. Prior to our family moving from NY to Lake Tahoe in 1984, I either took public transit or was driven around. Some exceptions included borrowing someone's car on trips to NY since '84. This time it was more-or-less required, starting with our arrival to and Lisa/Nic's departure from MacArthur Airport in Long Island. (I considered taking the Long Island Railroad to the airport on my return.) And my vision of reducing my carbon footprint on the NY/tri-state area were reduced to subway travel to Manhattan, as family/friend visits to Staten Island, upstate NY, or eastern CT by train required about eight hours of travel logistics.
Speaking of driving, I find it a necessary evil (case in point, Reno's paltry public transit system). Same goes for NY. And what's up with virtually every car's back bumper being scraped or dented? I guess this was always an issue (poor parallel parking), but when I lived there the damage was less noticeable because most cars has chrome bumpers that either withstood the dings or concealed them better.
And I didn't have much of an on-board GPS, unless GPS stands for "Grandma Pikul's System". Grandma is also not much of a co-pilot, what with her use of here/there, no not here/there, what are you doing, etc. instead of providing street names or the courtesy of providing a three-block or two-exit buffer on what to do next. In her defense, she's been driving the same streets for a good 50 years that her navigation scheme is more visual than technical.
I didn't fare a whole lot better without Grandma. Detailed directions were provided to me to get from Grandma's house to my cousin's house in Stratford, CT as well as from her house to my aunt/uncle in Pougheepsie, but somewhere along the way I drifted off course. (Not unlike the time I drifted off I-80 on one of our cross-country trips to/from NY and wound up in rush-hour traffic on I-90 in Chicago.) On the upside, my off-course provided some picturesque country views:
Driving at night (OK, late night) was the closest I could get to urban exploration outside the two-mile radius of Grandma's house. After an evening of reconnecting with my BFFs one night, I figured I'd take the scenic route from Glendale to Kew Gardens via Ridgewood. Simply put, it would be backstreets from BFF's house, do a drive-by past Ridgewood Reservoir (just to say I was there), then drive past the old Victorian house in Brooklyn just South of the Reservoir where I went to gymnastics on Friday nights from the second through fourth grades, then finally get back onto a main street (Myrtle Ave. or Jamaica Ave.) where I would head East, sync up with numbered streets and take the ascending numbers back to Grandma's neighborhood. Now I took a wrong turn somewhere on the named streets as I approached Myrtle Ave., then chose to go left (West) on Myrtle rather than right. This didn't occur to me, much like it didn't the time I did a late-night drive to Rockaway Beach in '00 to get my "Mother" visit out of the way and found myself in East New York after a wrong turn onto Linden Blvd. (Made it to Rockaway, eventually, during that episode.) So, it wasn't until the scaffolding of the Myrtle Ave. elevated tracks had disappeared and the lights of a Manhattan Skyscraper appeared that it was clear I was nowhere near Kew Gardens. And the Fulton Street Mall was long closed, so it was time to correct the course. 
After circling the one-way streets in this uncharted territory (for me) for about 15 or so minutes in search of Myrtle Ave. (which included finding a White Castle in Bushwick to get my NY version of Fourth Meal), I had to make alternate arrangements. Long story short, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway magically appeared, and since the skyscraper (and East River) allowed me to restore a sense of direction, I made it onto the correct entrance ramp, toyed for a moment with the notion of crossing the famed Brooklyn Bridge (then reminded myself of the time stamped on the White Castle receipt), and pretty much headed straight home.
Pleasant surprises
In hindsight, there was a reason the trip was delayed until November '08. And I attribute it to serendipity (with hyper nostalgia on top). Had we visited in May '08, I would likely have missed getting re-connected with an elementary school classmate (thanks, classmates.com), and the whirl-wind effort to find anyone/everyone we knew back in the day (including faculty) to descend upon NYC/Glendale for a long-awaited (27 years, actually) class reunion (shown). 
And the preparation for the reunion, which included members from the year prior and year after, prompted me to ask one of the fellow alums who works for The Metropolitan Opera whether he could help get the wife and me in to see a sold-out performance. Not only could he get us in, but he arranges to get us the treatment that is reserved for what I could only surmise is the Platinum Elite version of membership to The Met: choice seats, a meal during intermission and preferred parking. (Thanks, Chuck! Guy in photo, lower right, in the Jets pullover) And an extraordinary,epic theatrical/musical experience. So I couldn't get to see the Mets, but I got to see the Met.
So there it is, all wrapped up in time for the holiday season (albeit a day/week past deadline). But another trip to my beloved hometown for the books.
[Photos of family and friends encountered during the trip are on my Facebook page in the "NYC trip '08" photo album]
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