I spent the afternoon with Huck the other day.  It was the end of his spring break and Momma had work to do and I realized I could easily blow off my job responsibilities and just go do something fun with the boy.  All we had to do was figure out what that something fun would be.

At breakfast we decided to keep it simple: let’s go see a movie. That was that.  I went to work, Jonny and Huck joined me for lunch, and as we ate Huck started to back-pedal a little on the movie idea.  I told him that’s okay, we’d think of something else.  We floundered a little bit trying to come up with a better idea.  Rock-climbing, book store, museum; nothing was getting us riled. Mommy couldn’t take it after a while and finally left us to our own devices more than a little disappointed.  She had such high hopes for our afternoon.

“Whaddya want to do, kid?”  I asked.

He just looked up at me.  I started rattling off some more ideas—things to do in the Big City: Times Square, Central Park, Battery Park –-I reached for an oldie but a goodie: we could hop on the Staten Island ferry and see the Statue of Liberty out in the bay.  That could be fun –and free!  Huck wasn’t interested.

And then I remembered, the kid’s been wanting to go to the top of the Empire State building.  He’s asked us about it more than once, in fact it was the one thing he said he wanted to do before we leave New York.  He’s in a play at school about the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty getting into a fight about who’s the better New York landmark.  The Building that King Kong Climbed has been on his mind.

“Hey! What about the Empire State Building?”  He looked at me with an elfish grin.  He wanted to go.  “It’s a perfect day for it!  The sky’s clear, it’s not the weekend, we got the whole afternoon —this would be the perfect day to go to the top of the Empire State Building!”  His grin turned into a smile.

“Yeah,” he said, “Let’s do that!”

“And listen,” I said in a hush, “Let’s surprise Mommy.  Let’s not tell her until we get there.” His eyes twinkled.  “We’ll text her a photo from the top of the building!”

His smile grew.  “Yeah,” he mouthed silently just in case she was close and eavesdropping.  We’d show her we knew how to spend an afternoon in the Big Apple.

“Let’s go!”

And we did.  We took the A train down to Penn Station.  We walked along 34^th street past Kmart and Old Navy and Macy’s and Herald Square.  We entered the Empire State Building through the main entrance at Fifth Avenue and we stood in all five lines and traipsed up six flights of stairs.  In just under two hours of hatching this plan, father and son stepped out into the open air of the 86^th floor observation deck and looked out at our world from way up yonder.  It was pretty cold up there that particular April afternoon.  We didn’t last very long.  So we felt we really got our money’s worth having paid the extra fee so we could go all the way up to the observation deck on the 102^nd floor.   It was nice up there; quiet and warm.  We hung out, took pictures, looked at buildings and tiny little taxi cabs.  We looked north to the George Washington Bridge to see what our neighborhood looks like from miles away.  We looked south and could barely make out Lady Liberty standing out in the bay.  We looked at the sky and all around.  Then we texted Mommy with a pic of Huck standing in front of an incredible skyline and blew her mind!

We looked out at the city.  We took some more pictures.

“It’s not as exciting as I thought it would be,” he said.  I gave him a fatherly look of befuddled amazement.  “It is exciting,” he continued, “I just thought it would be even more exciting.”

I have to hand it to him; he’s right.  

However, we both agreed that we were glad we did it anyway.

Now we still had plenty of daylight to burn and a whole city full of opportunities.  Of course, he really just wanted to head back to the church and “hang out for a while.”  So after a quick stop in a comic book shop and a soft pretzel in Herald Square, we walked to the subway and headed back uptown.  We got to our neighborhood just north of the GW Bridge and went to our second home, the church building at the corner of 181^st and Fort Washington Avenue.  I’ve worked there since the day we found out Jonny was pregnant.  That is to say, I’ve worked at that particular church all of Huck’s life.  We climbed the stairs to the gym and played around up there for a while.  I had made some ‘sock comets’ that I’d been wanting to show him.  He thought they were alright.  Twirling a tennis ball in a panty-hose leg is pretty entertaining, let me tell you.  Letting that sucker go and watching it fly up into air is down-right thrilling.  Oh, it’s no trip to the top of a skyscraper.  But it’s still plenty exciting.  And good.  I was sitting there thinking about how good it was to be able to take the afternoon off in a city full of people working themselves around the clock; how exciting it is to just decide on a lark to go view a world famous tourist attraction; how fun it can be to play with my son.

That’s when Huck said, “When we move to our new home –our new house in Arkansas, I wish we could find a house that had a tunnel in it.  A house with two tunnels, actually.  One tunnel that could go to a church like this one and another tunnel that could go to a building like my school.  That way we could finally live in a house, but then I could go down in the tunnels and no one could see me and I could just pop up in a school like my school or in a church like this one.”

Well, Huck, maybe when we get to Arkansas we’ll find a house just like that.