Mr. Wonderful was history and I moved to Queens. Those were two great things in the continuing story of my life.
I had commuted to Manhattan for over a year on the Long Island Railroad and it was wonderful to be able to get into Manhattan in under an hour riding the subway. The trip from Long Island took me two hours.
I spent the first few months facing some of my fears. Some of the fears were ones I created for myself and others were fears that were given to me by a well-meaning friend from Long Island. She told me, “never ride the subway” and “never be in Manhattan after dark.”
I could understand how riding the subway could be a scary thing, but I always wondered why I shouldn’t be in Manhattan after dark. Is that when all the werewolves and vampires come out?
I suppose I could have avoided riding the subway by taking the bus, but I think that would have been a pain. I dealt with some of my fear of the subway by running up the stairs when I arrived to my destination. I figured it was harder to hit a moving target and if there were any would be muggers, I wanted them to work for it if they were planning on mugging me.
Working in Manhattan, I met one of the best friends that I’ve ever had in my entire life. She was the first person that I had met in New York that I felt accepted me without judgment. Hanging out with her also helped me to explore parts of Manhattan that I had never been too. She lived in the East Village and we spent a lot of time down there together. It is still one of my favorite places. It seems far away from the madness that is around the places in Manhattan that tourists flock to like Times Square and the area where Macys is.
I hung out with my friend, but I also spent a lot of time walking around Manhattan on my own. I loved to walk and take pictures. I would stop at various places along the way and write down my thoughts in my journal. I wrote most of the poems that I had published while sitting in one place or another in Manhattan.
How did I find God in the streets of Manhattan? I found him in the love I felt for my friend. I found him in my solitude. I found him by observing nature and loving the trees and the flowers every spring when they come back to life after a long cold winter. I found him in the face of a homeless man named Larry.
The newspaper that I was working for moved their offices to Los Angeles and I wasn’t invited to go along. It broke my heart when I lost that job. It was my favorite job in my entire career. But life moves on whether we like it or not. So, it is easier to just go with the flow of things and trust that God is leading us to something better.
I was working for a friend of mine in a shop on Canal Street that sold electrical equipment of all sorts. I loved the job because it was something that a woman doesn’t usually do. I don’t think that my friend thought that I would do as well as I did. That also made me happy. It always makes me happy when I prove someone wrong when they have already made a judgment about what I can or can’t accomplish.
I was in love with walking around Manhattan. I used to walk up Broadway following the path of the subway line that I rode all the time. Sometimes I would walk up one station stop and other times I would walk further. The furthest I ever walked was up to 59th Street and Lexington Avenue.
One thing that always made me sad was when I used to see homeless people. I tried to give to everyone that asked because that is one thing that Jesus said and I was trying to put what he said into practice. My mother once asked me, "What if they go and spend the money on drugs or alcohol." I told her that it was between them and God. I was doing what I thought was right.
One night after I left work and I was heading toward the subway, I saw a man with a hat standing in the traffic on Broadway, trying to get people to give him money. I walked over to where he was and I gave him a little money. He thanked me and asked God to bless me and I headed home.
I started seeing the same man on Broadway and on the train that I rode. I found out that his name was Larry. When I walked up Broadway, sometimes he would walk with me and he would tell me about his life before he was homeless. I would listen and give him whatever I could at the time so that he could get something to eat and find a place to sleep for the night.
We continued this way for months. It seemed I always saw him and we would always talk before he would move on to continue trying to get enough to take care of his needs for the day.
I left my job on Canal Street and went to work freelancing for a company near Grand Central Station. I didn’t see my friend Larry for about a year and a half because I wasn’t going downtown as much.
Then I found a job down near the World Trade Center and I was going downtown every day. I found Larry again and he was about the same and our relationship started over again. Whenever I saw him, I always talked to him and gave him whatever I could that day. Then I stopped seeing him. I thought about him, and I prayed for him whenever he came to my mind.
A year later I was heading over to a friend’s apartment in the East Village. There was a half-way house for men a few doors down from his apartment. I noticed a man standing up against a fence and then the man called my name. It was my friend Larry. He was staying in the half-way house and he was all cleaned up. I hadn’t recognized him until he called my name. He told me that he had stopped drinking and he was trying to turn his life around. I felt that this was another miracle in my life that God was showing me. No matter how bad things get, we can always turn things around.
A few months later I saw my friend Larry on the train again. He was living in Brooklyn somewhere but he still had to ask for money on the subway. I felt bad for him but I felt no judgment. He almost started crying when he saw me. I just smiled and starting talking to him and gave him what money I could. When I had reached my subway stop, and I was heading for the exit, he called after me and said he wanted to thank me. I asked him, “For what?”
I know what he wanted to thank me for though. I think I was one of the few people that took the time to see him as a human being and as a friend and brother. When we look at people who are down on their luck, we should never judge them. We should help them anyway that we can. I always think about my family. What if one of them was homeless? Would I just pass them by or throw money at them and keep walking? When you start looking at the world like we are all brothers and sisters, your heart changes also.
It has once again been a few years since I’ve seen my friend Larry but I still pray for him whenever he comes to my mind.
(To be continued....)
© Pamela Sawyer, 2012
My arrival in New York wasn’t exactly what I had dreamed about and Mr. Wonderful going bowling with his ex-girlfriend the first night I was there wasn’t what I had expected but I was beginning one of the greatest adventures of my entire life and Mr. Wonderful was definitely wonderful in the beginning.
I didn’t have a lot of money when I left Texas and Mr. Wonderful let me stay with him in his apartment until I was able to find a job and a place of my own to live.
I had been in New York for about two weeks when I had both. I was hired at the first job I applied for. The job was working for the company that did the typesetting for a big Hollywood newspaper. I was impressed and so was my family.
Before I left Texas, I wrote my resume and had it printed. Then I went around to all my former bosses and some of the customers that I had worked with in the advertising and printing business and asked them for letters of reference. So, when I walked in for my first interview, I had the resume and five letters of reference. Later, the person who interviewed me told me that they had been impressed with how prepared I was. I was amazed. How could someone in New York be impressed by me? I was just a little girl from Iowa.
After I found my job, Mr. Wonderful took me to a rental office and I found a place to live. I rented a room in a house on Long Island that was just a few miles from where Mr. Wonderful lived.
The relationship with Mr. Wonderful seemed to be going okay for a while, but then I started noticing some things that didn’t fit. He was always going out with his friends or busy all of a sudden. One night when I was staying at his apartment I could hear his landlord talking to his wife in the apartment below about how he had someone else in his apartment the night before.
The friendship with his ex-girlfriend had moved back to being more than just friendship and he was juggling seeing both of us. I confronted him about it and that was the first time that we broke up. The breakup didn’t last long. He seemed to like being with both of us and I had convinced myself that if I showed him how wonderful I was, he would choose to stay with me. What a laugh.
My job was going great. I loved where I worked and I loved the people. Then technology stepped in and changed things. In 1990 the newspaper we did the typesetting for decided they were going to start producing their own type using computers. I was layed off because the company couldn’t afford to keep all of their employees without the business from the newspaper.
My layoff lasted about two weeks. The managing editor of the newspaper has told me to keep in touch. I called him one day to ask him if he knew anyone who was hiring. He told me to wait a few minutes and he would call me back. He called me back and told me to come into the offices in Manhattan for an interview. This was the next step in my grand adventure. My dream of New York had always included Manhattan and living on Long Island was getting boring. I wanted to be closer to Manhattan so I could go there whenever I felt like it.
After I got the job in Manhattan, I decided that I wanted to move out of the single room that I had been living in for three years. I moved further out on Long Island and the commute into Manhattan every morning took me two hours on the train.
The new apartment that I found was in the basement of a house. I loved the apartment, I loved the area where I was living, and I loved my landlords, but they weren’t very nice to each other. They used to come home late at night, slamming doors and yelling at each other. I lived there for nine months until I had had enough of being awakened with their yelling.
I started talking to some of the people that I was working with in Manhattan about where I should live. I had no clue about where to move after living on Long Island. One guy told me that I should move to New Jersey. I insulted him by replying that New Jersey smelled bad.
Then one of the editors told me to ask one of the secretaries and another part of my life changed. The secretary lived in Queens and she had a friend whose mother owned apartments that she rented out and she had two apartments available. I took the subway home with my friend and she introduced me to my future landlady. I fell in love with the area as soon as I saw it. The apartment that I found was about 1-1/2 blocks from the subway and there was a grocery store around the corner.
Mr. Wonderful and I had broken up just before I moved to Queens. I got tired of spending all the holidays by myself and I got tired of being with a man that thought it was okay to have two women that he was juggling and lying to all the time. I decided that it was better to be alone than to feel like I was only second best in someone’s life.
Living in New York has been one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I thank God that he has allowed me to be here. I have grown and changed for the better in every way. I used to think that I had to go climb a mountain or live in a cave to find God. I found God in the crowded streets of Manhattan. He just needed to get me alone for a while so I could pay attention to all the wonderful things that he was showing me.
(To be continued ...)
© Pamela Sawyer, 2012
Two weeks after I heard the words, “You’ll never go to New York,” I was on the road again. I went around and said goodbye to all my friends and I had Thanksgiving dinner with one of my friends. I didn’t tell anyone in my family that I was leaving though. I just left.
I left San Antonio at 9:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening, November 28, 1987. It was pouring rain. At one point I had to pull over for a few minutes because it was raining so hard, I couldn’t see where I was going.
This was before Mapquest and before cell phones. I had planned our a route that would have taken me across the country to Jacksonville, Florida on I-10 and then I-95 straight up to Atlantic City, New Jersey. The man who ran the Drive Away Company that provided the car for me recommended another route. I decided to follow his directions.
I drove through Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky without any problems. I was driving main roads all the way. When I got into West Virginia that is when the problems started. It was a two lane road. It was dark and it was foggy. I was driving about 30 miles an hour with the emergency flashers turned on. Finally, a truck driver in a semi passed me. He flashed his lights at me and I knew what he was trying to tell me. I followed him out of the mountains of West Virginia. Thank God for truckers.
I stopped during my trip through West Virginia and placed a call to Mr. Wonderful. I told him that I was tired and I was going to stop for the night. He begged me to keep going because I was “so close.” According to him, I was only about 8 hours from New Jersey. He told me that he would meet me at a casino in Atlantic City.
I continued driving and because of the conditions in West Virginia, it took me about 12 hours to get to Atlantic City.
After West Virginia, driving through Pennsylvania and New Jersey was a cake walk. I didn’t have any problems other than the hallucinations that I started having after driving for 36 hours straight. There are green signs that tell you the distance to the next city or town along the interstates in the U.S. I kept seeing those signs up ahead and when I got to the point I thought they should be, there was no sign. I also thought I saw a tree jump out into the middle of the road at one point.
I arrived in Atlantic City, New Jersey sometime during the day on Saturday. A drive that was supposed to have taken me 24 hours, took me 36 hours. I was tired and I wasn’t in a very good mood when I got there. Mr. Wonderful came out of the casino asking me what took me so long and telling me that he had called the highway patrol because he was so worried about me.
We took the car I had driven to a car wash and I cleaned it up. Then we delivered it to the people who owned it in Ventnor City, New Jersey.
After we delivered the car, we headed to New York and the land of my dreams. Oh what a dream it was. On the way back to New York, Mr. Wonderful told me that he would have to leave me alone for a few hours after we got back to his place on Long Island. He had to go bowling.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had just driven 36 hours to be with him and he was going bowling?
He had a girlfriend that I didn’t know about when we got involved. He had broken up with her but they were still on the same bowling team. He didn’t want to tell her about me because he didn’t want her to know that he had met someone while he was in Texas. When he broke up with her he had given her that famous line, “I hope we can still be friends.”
When we got close to New York City, we were passing the landfills in New Jersey. The wind was blowing just right that day. The smell was awful. My first impression as we entered into New York was that it was dirty and ugly. It was a cloudy day and nothing looked appealing to me.
My arrival to New York wasn’t all that I had imagined but there were some positive sides to it. I was in New York and after Mr. Wonderful left me in his apartment to go bowling with his ex-girlfriend, I called my family to tell them where I was. Shocking my family has always been a great source of joy for me. I accomplished that when I called them and told them that I was in New York.
I learned many things on this trip. Number 1: I will always map out my own trips unless I feel like I’m talking to someone who knows what they are talking about, like a trucker. Number 2: Many times reality isn’t the same as what we imagine, but we can make it work if we try. Number 3: God uses others to get us where he wants us many times, but that doesn’t mean that they will remain in our lives. Number 4: If you meet a guy who is from another city or state, find out if he has a girlfriend, wife, etc. before getting involved.
(To be continued...)
© Pamela Sawyer, 2012
