I am back.
It’s always so refreshing, relaxing, reinvigorating and renewing to take a break away from your normal existence and be able to do the things you cannot do in Barbados like riding on trains; walking along streets where you have to bend over backwards in order to try to see the top of the sky scraping buildings; driving with your pooch tight with trepidation in the middle lane of highways with six lanes of traffic going in both directions.
Not to mention eating in restaurants where one portion can easily serve three persons with guts twice as large as your own; being spellbound as the normally green leaves of summer quickly morph into Nat King Cole’s multicoloured autumn leaves in preparation for the deep freeze of winter and so on and so on.
To be able to be in the carnival-like atmosphere of a WWE Monday Night Raw wrestling card and be almost within touching distance of stars like the Big Show, Goldust, John Cena, Kane, Randy Horton, Shemus and the Undertaker.
To be able to go to a shopping mall so large that you enter Macy’s at 11 a.m. and are still inside that one store when the public address system informs you that it is now 9:15 p.m. and the store will be closing in 15 minutes.
And don’t talk about the items that have been discounted or are on sale maybe just for that one day, like a Black Friday or a Columbus Day or a Labour Day. No wonder there are so many shopaholics who need to have counselling in order to help them stop spending all the money they have along with a lot of all they do not have.
No matter how many times I have entered New York by air or by land during my several score years on this earth, I am always fascinated by this city, whose streets are still held, in the imagination of millions, to be paved with gold and where the perceived hell of their own countries ends and the gates of Heaven wait to welcome them with the fabled milk and honey.
If truth be told, whether you like it or not, there is no other place on earth like New York. not Paris, not London, not Berlin, not Tokyo, not Rio, not Montreal, not anywhere else that you can call.
New York is an experience that cannot be captured in a single conversation, a single column, a single book, a single movie or even a single lifetime.
So I am back and, if you recall, I last wrote about being impatient to get away from what to me were the frigid temperatures up north in order to enjoy some of the heat that you all have been complaining about in Barbados during these past weeks.
Well, guess what? Now I am in this heat I would given anything to be back there to enjoy some of that cool autumn air that I left behind when I boarded the aircraft
to Barbados dressed like an Eskimo.
Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.
