The Perils of Pedestrianism Explained

It’s been a couple months since the New York City Council legalized jaywalking in town and nobody has noticed this because everybody was doing it anyway. New Yorkers have been jaywalking since before there were stoplights. No New Yorker would stand on the sidewalk, no traffic in sight, and wait for the Walk sign. Nobody, not even Baptists or accountants or people suffering from severe clinical anxiety. Only tourists from the Great Plains would stand and wait for the light to change and this is a clue to pickpockets to lift their wallets.

The main hazard to pedestrians in the city is bicyclists who jayride wildly, flying down the bike lanes, whizzing through red lights, bikes and scooters whipping silently through the winter dark, riders dressed in black, like vampires, riding the wrong way on a one-way street, and especially treacherous are the delivery bikes. New York cops ride around in squad cars and during rush hour a squad car has zero chance of catching a speeding outlaw bicyclist racing through the three-foot gap between parked cars and cars stuck in traffic.

Eating in became popular during the pandemic — ordering food online from a restaurant to be delivered and eating at home. Many people who work from home also eat in — an invisible population that only ventures outdoors when they need to see their ophthalmologist or have a tooth filled — pale stiff-legged people who are uneasy in a crowd and wear masks and avoid eye contact. New Yorkers, of course, expect prompt service, even ordering exotic Thai and Indian dishes with special instructions as to spice and sauce and whether broiled or steamed — they phone in the order and expect it to be at their door on the 15th floor, delivered by Carlos the doorman, within 20 minutes or else they’ll call the Mughlai Temple Café and threaten legal action.

And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to the drugstore to pick up some Alka-Seltzer stands on the curb, peering into the darkness for some glimmer of light, some sign of motion, some clue as to approaching bicycles. This is the adventure of life in Manhattan, serious bodily injury from bicyclists delivering exotic food at high speed to stay-at-home software programmers.

This is why I pay extra to live in a doorman building. Felipe will deal with the guy on the bike, accept the charred wok vegetable medley and the crispy calamari and drunken noodles with peanut sauce and hand the bag to Lenny, who will bring it up to the 12th floor and leave it at our door and the food will still be hot though the restaurant is a mile away. This is a remarkable amenity. It’s not the cold weather that keeps my sweetie and me indoors, it isn’t the fear of stickups, it’s the fear of being run down by bicyclemen delivering food to other people. The fear of lying in the street while covered with garlic sauce.

Nonetheless, I like New York. I’m glad to be done with lawn mowing and snow shoveling. We live two blocks from the subway where the downtown train will take me to the main library or Lincoln Center or lunch in the Village.

And then there are the little human contacts that make your day, like my visit to the walk-in clinic on Columbus Avenue to have a plastic pad that had become detached from my hearing aid removed from where it was stuck deep in my ear canal. Not a critical problem but you can’t just walk up to someone on the street and say, “Could you take a pencil and get something out of my ear?”

So I sat in the waiting room and was called in to be examined and met a doctor who was (I could tell) slightly amused at the problem. The pad was way in deep, thanks to my trying to dig it out with my finger. I said to her, “You’re a little overeducated for this but where else could I go?” She laughed. She had a nurse hold a light and she reached in with tiny forceps and extracted it. She was from Seattle, had lived in New York for twenty years, and liked it. So do I. No matter what your problem, there’s someone in this city who can deal with it. You just need to watch out for bikes.

Garrison Keillor © 12.08.24