The first thing was that I got restless. All my life, I could happily spend a week in bed with a bowl of cereal. A couple years ago, I suddenly needed to walk for hours, felt trapped and panicky if I had to sit still. I especially loved walking across bridges: light on the water can make me cry with happiness.
When you grow up, it’s easy to forget what is fun. Stuff on my list includes walking over bridges, eating takeout in bars, playing gin rummy, going to museums and movies in the middle of the day, walking in cities, and mass transit, especially the 41 bus in Boston. And taking Amtrak between Boston and New York.
When I am feeling stuck, I like to practice my spycraft. Get on a bus, get off the bus, walk through a train car to the other platform. Wear sunglasses and AirPods, never stop moving.
I joined all the museums so I can just walk into the Isabella Stewart Gardner or the Whitney to pee and fill my water bottle and then keep walking. Just go look at the Rothkos at MoMA and freak out a little at the people staring slack-jawed at that huge eye of an AI dream, then move on. Twenty minutes at the Met, crying in front of Caravaggio’s Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist—long enough to get a crowd interested in the toddler Christ, then I’m out of there. I’m on the lam in New York. No one knows if I walk to Film Forum and watch a four-hour movie. No one knows how long I sit at the counter at Hamburger America, looking at the sort of prayer wheel that butters the buns.
I am married to a very smart and loving and practical person, who immediately understood I was going middle-aged-lady crazy when I stopped being able to sit still. Josey suggested I get an Amtrak credit card. If you book in advance and leave at 6:15 a.m., you can take the train to New York from Boston for $22. I love knowing what end of the platform to stand on, which exit to take to pass by Ess-a-Bagel on the way back to Penn Station.
On the train, I listen to Beyoncé or boygenius or Lucero and stare out the window at the wonder of this much freedom. I’m always happy I’m not incarcerated. Being on a train between cities is like the espresso version of not being incarcerated. It’s both incredibly American and hardly American at all.
When I leave New York, I make sure to sit on the left so I can look at the swoop of strung lights on the Hell Gate bridge; then I take my paper ticket and switch to the other side, so I can see the light on the water going north. I bring dollar bills and PG Tips tea bags, tip the cafe attendant for a free cup of hot water, brew it standing there by the free plastic packets of milk. It is funny to me that I am a grown-up lady, so set in my ways that I know Amtrak tea isn’t good enough. But also as restless as I was when I was trapped by high school. Except now I am grown! I can do whatever I want!
I have read a lot of books about menopause, and mostly what they make me think of is generations of women who probably also wanted to walk away from their lives for a minute. I owe it to their chilblains and prolapsed uteruses to stop and have ramen for breakfast when I am walking through wintry mix to the Guggenheim, say Nope, but Shavua Tov! to the people who ask if I am Jewish in Prospect Park.
The sculptor Donna Dennis kept a journal for forever. In 1972 she wrote, “When I’m alone, everything becomes beautiful.” Alone, plus traveling, plus on a train? It’s like everything is beautiful, cubed.
Once I took the B from Brooklyn to visit a gallery near Chinatown; the B and the Q give an absurdly paced and moving view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Just past the bridge, I saw a woman in a pink dress with a red jacket, kneeling on a red prayer rug on her fire escape. Also, I felt incredible tenderness for a man who was eating a pear, carefully avoiding a bruise. Also, a little girl who was excited about her wiggly tooth. I got to the gallery too early, so I went into a diner, a diner that for me did not exist the minute before I decided to go in. But then the waiter said What can I get you, my love? Later, when I was eating my French toast and sausage, I heard him on the phone taking a takeout order. He said goodbye like this: I FUCKEN LOVE YOU, MAN. YOU KNOW I FUCKEN SUPPORT YOU TO THE END OF THE MOON AND BACK.
Jill McDonough’s latest book is American Treasure. She teaches in the MFA Program at UMass Boston.
