So long, Cheyenne

So I had no idea that the Cheyenne Diner was shipped off to Alabama. To be more accurate -- I had no idea that it had been bought with plans to move it down south. Somehow that all managed to happen without me catching word of it or someone mentioning it in conversation. I'd never been there, and I'm not a diner aficionado by any means, but I always appreciated the classic look of it. I just wish I'd gotten a shot of that neon at night.

And now the Empire Diner on 10th Ave. in Chelsea is changing hands and, inevitably, names. I see that one every time I head home that way, which is three or four nights out of five a week. (Incidentally, I am now addicted to Google Reader. Casey was right about how invaluable it is. I never would've seen these things if I didn't have these New York blogs among my growing list of things to read -- or at least scan -- each day.)

So in a weird coincidence, part of the reason I'd taken this picture of the Cheyenne Diner a couple of years ago was because I had seen a photo challenge that sought contemporary images of the places in the opening scene of Woody Allen's Manhattan. There's a diner in that montage, and my first thought was that it was the Cheyenne, because I didn't recall seeing the name on it. As you watch the intro to the movie, you'll see why that little recall would've helped me -- it's the Empire Diner that's among the images of Woody's Manhattan. Those scenes are a scrapbook of late-70s New York, from the old yellow cabs to the seedy Times Square to another now-lost sliver, Washington Square Park with the old fountain at its off-center alignment with the arch.

Upon rewatching that clip, it also occurred to me that he goes off the island to show Yankee Stadium for nearly 10 seconds, beginning at the 2:51 mark. The ballpark, of course, is not in Manhattan. They're the Bronx Bombers, not the Manhattan Maulers. And that now, too, is disappearing.

New tags in New York

New York is getting new license plates.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with cars and, by extension, license plates. I'm nothing close to the collector and historian my mom's cousin (I think that makes him my first cousin once removed) in California is, but I'm still drawn to them, both for the design of the clever or unique and for the amusement of reading an owner's choice for personalization.

But after a visit to Geddy's in Bar Harbor, Maine, last year, the bug bit me again. The store beneath the restaurant sold used plates and with a whole basement (well, a half-finished basement) to myself in our house, I flipped through the offerings and bought a few that I had always enjoyed, like Utah's Delicate Arch and Arizona's desert colors. We dug up Casey's various Pennsylvania plates, a few random ones I'd had in my bedroom as a kid (the old orange-and-blue New York, Vermont, various Maine tags) and I started planning how they'd hang in the basement.

I also started a new quest to collect as many license plates from states that feature lighthouses as an option. Most of those direct a portion of the cost to beach or seashore preservation, like New Jersey's -- which I've had on my car, in three letter/number combinations, since I got my first set of wheels in college.

So the news of New York's new tags piqued my curiosity. But the funny thing about the change New York is making next year is that my first thought -- after noticing their resemblance to the old plates -- was how would people react to the shift away from the red, white and blue of the Statue of Liberty plates. And then I remembered that those were nearly a decade ago, and they've had the blue and white -- from Niagra Falls to the City -- since 2001.

Guess those didn't make much of an impression on me.

Something in the night

One night only. Giants Stadium. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Darkness on the Edge of Town, start to finish.

I didn't get chills at the announcement that the band would be playing the album in its entirety, but I did get the feeling that it would be something special. It was never one of my favorite albums – not that there’s anything I hate about it (though I’m not a fan of “Adam Raised a Cain”) – but it does have some of our favorite songs, particularly “Badlands” and “Promised Land,” which we tend to get at most shows anyway. But to hear it from start to finish, with the slower songs – and Darkness has several – mixed in put them in a new light. “Racing in the Street” and “Factory” are particularly moving in the way they seem to be lifted out of the pages of a diary – “Racing” as a recollection of one summer as a teen and “Factory” of the sepia-toned memories of a boy looking up to his hard-working father.

But back to the beginning. We got the penned-for-the-Meadowlands song “Wrecking Ball” to open, and though we’ll probably only ever get it on our iPods as a bootleg or potential live album out of this run, I’m a sucker for Jersey-specific songs. “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” grew slightly stale on me for no good reason after seeing it at so many shows, but it made a comeback after the Super Bowl halftime show. From that, he went into one of my all-time favs in “No Surrender,” which contains one of the lyrics that will make it to my list of Top 10 Springsteen Lyrics That Send Chills Through me whenever I get around to creating it:

I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover's bed
with a wide open country in my eyes
and these romantic dreams in my head

This is ostensibly the last leg of the Working on a Dream tour, but he’s down to just two songs from the album in regular rotation: “Outlaw Pete” and the title track, which is fine with me. (They bookended “Hungry Heart,” with the crowd-supplied first verse.) There are a couple other individual songs I like on the album, but I’m not dying to see any done live. I was happy, though, that my hunch that “Outlaw Pete,” which I pegged as OK on the album, would be a great live tune was confirmed. The huge screens displaying grainy black-and-white desert imagery and the breeze coming through the stadium heightened the experience.

I was curious to see what we’d get during the request segment, because when he first started doing this during the summer ’08 tour, I didn’t favor it. I think I preferred to be surprised by seeing what Bruce chose to play for us and getting the on-stage audibles that were made when he felt a different tune would fit in place of a pre-planned one. I wanted him to decide whether we were worthy of being treated to “Rosalita” or “Trapped” or “Jersey Girl.” (Yeah, it’s not one of his, but it would sort of complete the experience to see it once.) I’ve seen him add “Ramrod” because Max wanted it and watched from above and behind the stage in Austin nine years ago when Bruce and Stevie kept looking back and forth at one another nodding in a Mafioso kind of way as if deciding between themselves whether or not we deserved just one more. Then they gave us “Cadillac Ranch.” And I’ve looked over setlists and gone to shows hoping to finally hear “Rosalita” only to be disappointed in my luck – I didn’t get to see it, but it was played the night before, or the night after. On this night, however, the requests worked for me. We got “I’m Goin’ Down,” “Be True” (big fan fav and one of the great Tracks gems) and “Jailhouse Rock” – which he claimed the band had never played before. They should consider adding it because, to borrow another phrase from that era, they had the joint jumpin’.

“Jailhouse Rock” launched the band into a charged four-song finale of the main set. On the screens, we saw Bruce calling the audible to Nils and Stevie, but someone near us thought he read “Born in the USA” on Bruce’s lips. Even better, we got “Thunder Road.” Giants Stadium had an arena feel to it when the crowd could be heard singing, “You ain’t a beauty, but hey you’re alright” above the band. In a fortunate quirk, during one of the later choruses, a smoky scent not unlike a campfire reached us. We were two rows from the concourse, and I’m sure the hot dogs and cheesesteaks weren’t cooked over an open flame, but for a few bars, it sure seemed like it. On an October night in northern New Jersey, we could almost smell those skeleton frames of burned-out Cheverolets.

“Thunder Road” led to “Long Walk Home,” my favorite track on Magic and another of my Top 10 “chilling” lines:

You know that flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't

From there, “The Rising” then took us to “Born To Run.” But rather than leave the stage, the band came to the front for bows, then went back to their stations to play. The sad thing is, I suspect this absence of a traditional departure and return for an encore is the result of Clarence’s repaired/replaced knees and hips and I couldn’t shake the thought that these shows may be his last, that when the band wraps the tour and takes the announced 18 months to two years off, Clarence might not be up for three hours on stage anymore. I’ve seen no reporting to lead me to this fear, and I hope I’m wrong about this hunch.

So then “Cadillac Ranch” opened the encore, followed by “Bobby Jean” and the great jig “American Land.” I love that song, the joyous fiddle of Soozie Tyrell, the jaunty celebration of America as melting pot and the imagery of, “Dear I hear that beer flows through the faucets all night long.” (Not to mention that when he sings, “The McNicholas, the Posalski's, the Smiths, Zerillis, too,” so quickly, it kind of sounds like my last name instead of “Posalski’s.”) And then “Dancing in the Dark” and “Rosalita” – which I’ve now seen at least four times, at each of the three Giants Stadium shows and one Shea Stadium night I’ve attended – closed the night.

Friday night ranks up there with the best of the 13 or 14 shows I’ve seen, and after a bad experience at our first Giants Stadium show back in 2004 (way far away in the upper level, with annoying college kids around us), I vowed I’d only go again if I got lower-level seats. We’ve done that for the last two shows there (July ’08 and this recent one) and both have been high-energy, arena-worthy performances. And while I love the fact that I was part of the only crowd that got Darkness on the Edge of Town from start to finish, after looking at last night’s Born in the USA setlist, I would love to see “I’m On Fire” and “My Hometown” done on an autumn night in the swamp.

But I’ll leave those selections to chance and hope that when I finally do hear them, they’re as much of a treat as I’d expect.

These autumn days

High school band practice
reaches my house from the field
It's football season

- - -

Al fresco dining
no longer an option on
this cold autumn day

Fall's first day

First day of autumn
Acorns crushed on the road like
Peanuts on the bar floor

It felt more like summer today than fall -- 80 degrees, bright sun, humid. My arms and face got a little rosy as I ran three miles up on Garret Mountain. Could have more of the same tomorrow, but then it looks like autumn will arrive over the weekend with rain and temperatures in the 60s.

After the weekend, we're into the last stretch of baseball's regular season, which can be a relief (the day-to-day grind at work), a pain (the postseason is four stressful weeks) or heartbreaking (when the Mets still have a chance, only to fall short). With injuries wiping out the Mets' season before the 4th of July, at least there won't be heartbreak. Now I'm just waiting for the end so we don't have to watch the losses mount and can forget about them for a few months, until it's time to get our hopes up again for 2010.

It was a great summer. We had barbecues, late nights on the porch and visits from friends. We played Rock Band with the windows open and breezes coming in and only needed the air conditioning for one brutal week in August. I painted the exterior of the house with help from a family friend and have only a few more details to finish before the job is complete -- details so minor that I haven't rushed and it's been about a month since I picked up a paint brush. I may go out there one of these next two days to take care of a couple of them.

And it was a great summer for traveling. To Boston, the Cape and Maine in May; Cleveland in mid-July; back to Maine for rafting at the end of July; then Boston again for my college roommate's wedding at the end of August (a weekend I really should write about before I forget the details; perhaps I'll tackle that one of these next couple of days).

There are times -- sometimes daily, at the least a couple times a week -- when I'll find myself unhappy that I work nights and weekends and don't have the luxury of regular dinners with my wife or dates with friends. I miss out on a lot of things, have to skip get-togethers and weekends away. But then I feel fortunate to have a job, let alone one that can be fun and pays well enough to let us have this house and take these trips. And I still got to do much of what I wanted this summer, even if I didn't do it as often as I wanted. So maybe I didn't dig a single toe into the sand this year or even slip on a bathing suit one time (despite buying two new ones during our rainy visit to Freeport in May), but I'm not as drawn to the crowded, hot beaches as I used to be. I'm sure I would still enjoy a body surfing session, but Casey's not a beach person and living an hour away makes it more of an excursion than the 15-minute drive from my parents'. An afternoon at my uncle's pool would've been nice, but it just didn't work out this year.

So here's to a dip in the pool in Scottsdale in March and perhaps riding a few waves in Long Branch in August, next year. But first, the fall. A great season, after all.

Rainy day remembering

For the first time that I can remember -- and I admit that I don't remember each and every one in the past eight years -- Sept. 11 is cold, gray and rainy. That morning eight years ago, as I've written before, was clear and crisp, a brilliant blue-sky day marking the handoff of summer to fall, the sun still warm enough to be felt on bare arms but the air a touch cooler, so that wearing jeans feels just right. Many of the anniversaries since have amazingly featured the same weather, including the day in 2006 where the sky seemed to be the same deep blue and the air the same degree of Fahrenheit.

Not today, though. In fact, until I came downstairs this morning and logged onto Facebook and saw a few status updates, I'd forgotten what today's date was. Even though I saw the Tribute in Light from Hoboken last night, a long, deep sleep (and some pretty out-there dreams) had temporarily wiped my mind clear of the passage of time. And what a long time eight years is. It's the difference between middle school and senior year of college (or being a high-school freshman and a first-year employee). It's also the time passed from birth to third grade, the age of the students that Amanda, the sister of my friend Nate, is teaching in Hoboken. At dinner last night, before we turned our attention to Titans-Steelers, she was telling us of today's birthday party in the classroom. I asked how old the kids were, and when she said 8, I replied, "So the one with the birthday tomorrow was born on Sept. 11, 2001." She replied, "Yep. They were all born in 2001, so they don't know what it was like back then."

Eight years down the road, and Ground Zero continues to be a construction site like so many others in New York -- an open pit. I haven't been there since last summer, but there's a little bit of progress to be seen, in the form of the first steel beams for the new tower. But as we get further away from that date, the lack of a rebirth and a memorial becomes more noticeable. The Pentagon and Western Pennsylvania have their memorials, and though they were constructed on the lawn of a federal compound and in a rolling field and therefore didn't have the multiple layers of permits, approvals and government oversight to maneuver through, you'd think that by now we'd at least have a target date for the World Trade Center's rebirth.

Someday I hope to look out over Lower Manhattan from the office or the High Line or Hoboken and not have to imagine the magnificent view of the Twin Towers rising above the cluster of buildings at the tip of Manhattan. The Freedom Tower or whatever ends up being there will stand tall, providing a suitable substitute to allow my mind's eye to picture the two square towers standing side-by-side as I remember them.

Wake-up burger

I had the best alarm today. I'd set a reminder on my phone about lunch (because I can sometimes forget when there are leftovers in the fridge or something ready for me to heat up), and so at 12:30 (I didn't expect to sleep that long, but there you go), I woke up to the alarm on my phone and the word "BURGER."

Mmmm... Wake-up burger...