The world's longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday.

And a week ago I found myself stuck in it in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big

beard whose religion evidently taught him to yield. So we moved at a glacial rate from 86th to

43rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train, I would have

been there in a few minutes, but that mistake had been made and now I watched pedestrians on the sidewalk passing us.

So what can you do? No need to get fussed up. You embrace stoicism.

Epictatus said the way to happiness is to not worry about things beyond your power to control, which includes this taxi ride,

totalitarianism, the cost of tickets to Tom Hoiser and other things that begin with

tea.

So the two VIPs I am meeting for lunch may have to cool their jets for a while.

I don't have their cell phone numbers. They're very important. So they'll just have to amuse themselves at the restaurant.

This is New York, a city teeming with amusement, you can stand on any corner and it will come walking

along.

I relaxed in the back seat as we inched through the 70s and I remembered the day I think it was in

1971 when I flew to New York from Minnesota and got a room at a flea bag hotel to Seymour on

44th Street, which I chose, thinking of Seymour Glass in Jadee Salanges, Franny and Zoe, a book I loved

in college. And the next day I walked around the block to 25 West 43rd Street and took

the elevator up to the 17th floor to the office of Roger Angel, a fiction editor at the New Yorker

who had bought some stories of mine, the dream of every college writer in America at the time.

Back then I was living in a rented farmhouse near Freeport, Minnesota, just one more impoverished

27-year-old, and I spent the money he sent me for the stories on that flight to New York

where after telling me how much he liked my stuff, he took me across the street to the Algonquin

...