As promised, specific moments of gratitude from my summer as a “tour guide” at the Emprire State Building.
- Being up there on the night of July 4th after the lights had been turned off at midnight and watching neighborhood fireworks all over the city. To this day I wish I’d made a move on the girl I was up there with. I guess I was just shy, as it was an impossibly romantic moment and I don’t think she would have been there with me if she were averse to a kiss, but whatever. I’m still grateful for the memory.
- One morning I was in the observatory before opening and there was a blanket of low clouds beneath me and nothing else was visible but the tops of the Twin Towers. I was sweeping and it occurred to me that someone downtown might also be sweeping and looking back uptown at me. That we, with our brooms, were the highest-standing New Yorkers at that moment. The memory came to mean more to me after 9/11.
- I once answered the observatory phone and it was a little kid calling from Texas to see what the weather was like. He had also called the Eiffel Tower. We talked a moment until his mom picked up the other line and yelled at him.
- The McDonald’s across the street and going there for my dinner break. Specifically, for unknown reasons, I recall a rainy weeknight when there was no visibility and no tourists. Basically just me in the empty lobby standing around 4 hours before I could go to McDonald’s. How I appreciated those breaks.
- The theft of my copy of Man and His Symbols, which I was reading on one of those quiet, barely visited nights. A short line had piled up and while I was loading the elevator someone in the line took it. I must have been mad at the time, if only because I had nothing to read the rest of the night, but it struck me as a funny book to take and that stealing Jung would probably cause the thief to have nightmares.
Many thanks,
Me