Looking through cracks in train tracks

My hat broke in Brooklyn.

This is the grey-green flat cap which I inherited from my grandfather, age and provenance unknown; I have been wearing it since 2012 and it has survived rain, wind, snow, sun, and one memorable attempted drowning in beer by an idiot at a Rush concert. I knew the tweed had recently started to fray in front, leading me to think that I should take it to a tailor and see if I could get it carefully patched. I didn't realize there was a thin curved wooden reinforcement in the brim until it snapped, as apparently it did sometime between last night's reading and my realizing the fact around noon on 7th Avenue with derspatchel. I'm sure the guy who left his heart in San Francisco had it worse, but if anybody knows a good hat doctor in the Boston area, I'd love to get their name.

We were out in the bright grey windy day because we had plans for our last day in New York: first they involved bagels. We found them at La Bagel Delight, which was mystifyingly not where I remembered it from research the previous night (spoiler: they have two locations; I was thinking of the one in Brooklyn Heights), but which offered very fine plain bagels overstuffed with cream cheese in Rob's case, with cream cheese and lox and avocado in mine. Basically, a Philadelphia roll on a bagel, but on a bagel I actually like the idea—cream cheese on sushi has always been confusingly pointless for me, whereas I look back on my childhood habit of eating bagels with unsalted butter when there was cream cheese and sour cream right there on the table in front of me and wonder what I was thinking. Thus fortified, we walked back up 7th Avenue, Flatbush, and Schermerhorn to the New York Transit Museum.

(We have just passed through Bridgeport, streetlight glittering on dark scales of water. Residential windows at diagonals to the train, curtained like lamps or open to quick-sliding diorama views. A platform beside the tracks, bare-lit with a single anglerfish bulb. Baseball fields at night look like movie sets, artificially spotlit, green and empty. A power substation beyond the chain-link, looking like science fiction in the night.)

I hope to post more about the museum when we get the photos off the digital camera my mother lent us for the trip. Neither of us had been before. We knew it was in a decommissioned—but still functional—subway station from 1936. We had assumed something like the exhibit on the building of the first subway line in New York City and the artifacts from New York's transit history, including tickets, signs, and turnstiles; we were not wholly surprised by the temporary exhibit on disaster response and were delighted by the cable car models and the decommissioned city bus for climbing inside; somehow neither of us had realized that at the platform level there would be vintage restored train cars from 1907 to the 1970's and a working signal tower. The cars are filled with period-appropriate transit maps and advertising. We were both very taken with the good-conduct mascot Etti-Cat, an expressive tuxedo cat who feels bad about graffiti and feels good about being nice to fellow passengers. I got several pictures of my husband looking like the time-traveling actor that he is. He got a couple of me with history in the background. We had planned to spend the early afternoon in Brooklyn and then make our usual pilgrimage to the Strand, but we binned the bookstore entirely in favor of staying until the museum closed and kicked everyone out, a decision I do not regret. We came back to my mother's cousin's house (which is a fantastic brownstone of four floors and skylights and original molding everywhere; the accumulation of libraries must be a trait that goes back to the great-grandparental split), collected our stuff, and headed out to catch our evening train. We had dinner first at Veselka, because they are a tradition with us. I should just start making borscht myself so that I don't have to wait years between bowls. They make the only sauerkraut in the world I like—I had it on their Reuben with krakowska. We ate macarons from Macaron Parlour while waiting for the train at Penn Station. We are still in Connecticut as I write.

Hat notwithstanding, I think this trip has been one of the best things to happen to me in years.