Charles Simic reminisces about his R&R just after his army ship arrived in Brooklyn:
With hundreds of soldiers being discharged and my last name being down in the alphabetical order, it was hours before I was finally done with all the paper work
and permitted to leave. I recall sprinting through the gate of Fort Hamilton into the busy street and hailing a taxi that had just turned the corner. I may have shoved a soldier and his parents out of my way to get in, but I didn’t care. They could not have stopped me with a bullet. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the traffic was already crawling on the East River bridges, but I was in heaven. I leaned back in the seat and took in the skyline and the busy harbor as if I was seeing them for the first time.
No city displays its mixture of beauty and ugliness as brazenly as New York does. It’s one thing to see a city with cathedrals and other church towers from an approaching train as one does in Europe and another to see Manhattan with buildings of every size thrown together more or less haphazardly and its streets packed with humanity all coming into view simultaneously. I still can’t believe my eyes every time I see it.
(Photo: American astronaut Leroy Gordon Cooper is welcomed back to New York with a ticker tape parade on Broadway. By Keystone/Getty Images)
The Dish 