Buses, Boats, Whatever

Ha, one of my first NYC humiliations was not knowing what a jitney was. Finding out when the earliest jitney left from the Upper West Side for a demanding celebrity landscape architect (to celebrities, I don’t think she was Tommy Hilfger or David Geffen famous) in a 1998 office with no internet turned out to less difficult than I feared. Hamptons Jitney was in the rolodex, but I thought it was a boat. I don’t know when I discovered that it wasn’t. (Maybe three years ago I mentioned this to a fellow Portland ex-pat who has lived here nearly as long as I have, sort of as a reminder of how now- things sounded so foreign years ago, and she had no idea what a jitney was. Maybe that happens if you live in the same Brooklyn neighborhood for over a decade?) All I knew was that the Hamptons were someplace on the water that wealthy people traveled to in the summer. Why would they pay to sit in a glorified Greyhound?

You know what would be really cool to take to the Hampton? A jeepney!