In New York, you walk everywhere. Nobody has a car—or, if they do, they don’t use it, except for trips out of the city. That’s because traffic is unbelievable. Every street is clogged with taxis and delivery trucks and limos.

Plus, there’s nowhere you’d want to go that the subway can’t take you. And all that stuff about the subway being unsafe…it’s not true. You just have to stay alert, and not look too much like a stupid tourist with your head buried in a map, or whatever.

But even if you are—a tourist, I mean—people will stop and try to help you. It’s not true what they say about New Yorkers being mean. They aren’t. They’re just busy and impatient.

But if you’re genuinely lost, nine times out of ten a New Yorker will go out of his way to help you.

Especially if you’re a girl. And you’re polite.

Walking out onto Thirty-seventh Street with Rob, it hit me: you know, that we really weren’t in Indiana anymore. I had never walked down a street with Rob before. Ridden down streets with him plenty of times. But strolled down a sunny, tree-lined street, with delis and pizza-by-the-slice places on either side, people out walking their dogs, bike-riding Chinese delivery-food guys trying to keep from hitting people?

Never.

He didn’t say anything. He’d been silent down five flights of stairs (Ruth and I couldn’t afford an apartment in a building with an elevator, let alone a doorman to announce our guests. And of course the intercom is broken, as is the lock on the door to the vestibule).

Now, in the busy after-work, trying-to-get-home-in-time-for-dinner crowd on the sidewalk, I realized someone had to say something. I mean, we couldn’t just walk around in dead silence the whole night.

So I said, “There’s a decent Mexican place around the corner.”