New Moon by Richard Grossinger

Author:Richard Grossinger [Grossinger, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781623170974
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2016-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

5

TEEN TOUR

Months earlier a travel agency offering a cross-country tour for teens had made reservations for the group at the Fontainebleau, and my mother impulsively signed me up. I insisted I wouldn’t go, but she held the slot and, with my attention on finishing Horace Mann and getting ready for college, I made no other summer plans. My father refused to allow me at Grossinger’s for that long, and I had outgrown camp.

By early June the tour began to take on fresh appeal, crazy as it was to imagine myself on a marathon of buses, trains, and boats with strange kids and chaperones. The transition occurred in my unconscious. I dreamed of being on an ocean liner, giant fish swimming around glaciers, Chipinaw’s dale transported to Italy and France with torqued and Eiffel towers, boys and girls at a forest festival that fused a Robin Hood movie with my grade-school daydreams of other worlds. So on the first of July, Bob escorted me and my suitcase downtown in a cab. We were a bit late and I was nervous.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “These things never get started on time.”

“Maybe it will be a mirage and I can go home.”

“C’mon, Richard. This is a chance to see some of the great venues in the world: Niagara, Banff, San Francisco, New Orleans. I don’t understand you kids. If someone had offered me such a trip at your age…. ”

Not having had breakfast yet, he requested a stop at the Automat. I answered by staring at a clock through a shop window. “Ten minutes,” he argued. “Give a man ten minutes.”

We pumped coins from his pockets into slots, opened little doors, and took out released plates of food. I quit on my slab of ham halfway through, but he seemed to dawdle forever with coffee and eggs. Finally he closed the Times, and we walked across the street into Grand Central Station.

We found the meeting-place at once—a spiraling cluster of teenagers. The tour leaders introduced themselves: they were a music professor from Rutgers named Simmons and his wife.

“My husband’s very interested in this line of work,” offered Mrs. Simmons, “because he’s as fascinated by trains as most youngsters are by spaceships these days.”

“Looks like a nice bunch this year,” he called out, approaching with his head half turned. He had square clumps of hair on either side of a bald pate.

“Yes, Sherman; it does.”

“Excuse me,” Bob interjected, commandeering Sherm’s attention by name, “but your wife told me you were the expert on trains—”

“I am.”

“Then could you tell me how soon this group will be departing?”

“We hope to get started in—” He paused to look at his watch. “About an hour.”

“See, I told you,” Bob said. “You lousy so-and-so wouldn’t even let me finish my scrambled eggs.” He gave me a friendly swat.

“Sorry. You were right.”

“This looks like a young girl’s nightmare,” he commented as he scanned the group. “Any guy would give his right arm to be on this tour.” In fact, when we finally all collected, it was twenty-eight girls and ten boys boarding a train to Buffalo (the 2.

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