Oklahoma.
A car from Oklahoma, parked on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Stopped me in my tracks. I’ve seen lots of license plates from all over the map in my neighborhood but this was the first from Oklahoma.
Why? I thought. Why did someone from Oklahoma drive across the country to New York? Three possible answers, one of them improbable:
Someone from Oklahoma is visiting a friend or relation on the UWS. That is not probable; who’d drive thousands of miles for a visit? A visitor would take what we call an aeroplane. From a facility known as an aeroport. There are aeroports in Oklahoma; I know because I just scrolled around a blown-up map of Oklahoma and noticed fifty-one aeroports, actually, although some of them may be suitable only for cropduster flights (yes, I’m envisioning North By Northwest, but that cropduster scene was filmed either north of Bakersfield, California or somewhere in Indiana. So much for the accuracy of information via Google.)
So I’m eliminating the relative who drove all the way from Oklahoma.
Next possibility. Given what’s going on politically in Oklahoma –which, according to a recent Times story, “wants to be the next Texas” — a Sooner woman loaded up her car and escaped. Very likely and she is welcome.
Last, some MAGA Oklahoman drove all the way up here to join the pitifully meager group of other MAGAs hanging around the Criminal Court House to cheer on Trump’s perp walk. (Or attack drag queens and get beaten up for their noble efforts.) There are far more anti-Trumpers than pro-Trumpers and the media and police contingents out-mass both.
Which reminds me. I’d like my city to enact a law enabling the NYPD to request politely a search of any car from a major gun state. Or have a gun-sniffing police dog roaming through the gridlocks at the Jersey entrance to the GW Bridge, and the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels.
And don’t give me Fourth Amendment crapola here, not a day after I saw a car from Oklahoma in my neighborhood.