Umbalella!

It’s December of 1986. I’m visiting New York City for the first time.

This was a really big field trip for me, and only possible thanks to a program called ALERT (Active Learning Experiences in Resourceful Thinking, if you’re into abbreviations). This program let us kids focus on one subject a day per week, contrasting heavily with the typical six-course day for most elementary and middle-school kids.

I’m sure that we were tightly packed onto a bus for the drive up, which I can only estimate must have taken about 20 hours. Did we stop to stay somewhere overnight? I really doubt it; this would have driven the cost of the trip up. Besides, sixth graders are pretty much invincible when their adrenaline begins to flow.

There were lots of reasons for our adrenaline to flow.

Before we even arrived, I remember being advised to watch out for the ladies of the night. I’m sure I was aware of prostitution before hearing this warning, but this was the first time I would be up close like this. Would we see the types of people I had only seen in movies up until that point? This was some kind of adventure!

There were all kinds of fancy stores I had never seen before, including toy stores with robust electronics sections. It might as well have been FAO Schwartz (can’t say with confidence) where I found this little robot called Spotbot:

This automated dog would walk forward for a bit, and then if it ran into something like a wall, it would turn and walk in a different direction. When I first heard about Claude Shannon’s “mouse” experiments where he got a machine to navigate a maze on its own by learning, I thought about this little cutie.

Here’s the belly. You can see the simplicity of the design here, but you can probably also imagine how over-the-moon I was to find this when I had just turned eleven years old. This was fertile fuel for my imagination!

In addition to simply being in the city and going to stores, the program insisted we see a couple of plays. I don’t remember everything we did, but I know one of the shows was 42nd Street, because I still have the cheeky magazine they gave us:

I also know they faked us out during the intermission, where the cast pretended as though the remainder of the show was canceled. This was all part of the act, but I’m pretty sure there were a bunch of confused eleven-year-olds that day. Thanks to fellow writer (and fellow adventurer I grew up with)

Princess Alethea Kontis

, I was able to piece this part of the story back together well. Alethea, thank you for reminding me of this moment!

After the play was over, or maybe it was some other time—memories are malleable—I recall a wondrous scene where it began to rain, and opportunistic merchants leapt out of nowhere, shouting:

Umballela! Umballela!

It took my ears a minute to adjust to what I was hearing—and seeing. For my ears, this was an important moment where I took a close look at a word I knew to be pronounced differently. I knew this pronunciation wasn’t technically correct, but I also saw how effectively it worked for these dudes (for they were all men) to do business.

I didn’t know anything about pidgins yet, but hearing this word uttered aloud over and over again opened up a tiny door in my mind. That door is still open today, and it has since widened into a love for linguistics that pervades my writing nearly as much as poop.

The way the word was pronounced suggests that these dudes were of Caribbean or West-African origin, and not totally unlike the way the Haitians I worked with for years would pronounce similar words.

While my ears were giving me this novel information and planting that long-term seed, my eyes were busy studying the scene. I watched as these men met the moment with absolute vigor, just hustling for that sale. They were all over the street in an instant, and got to where they needed to be (to the people getting wet) with an immediate solution to their problem.

I think being a business owner is deeply ingrained in who I am, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think about things differently than most other kids. That included viewing comic books as buy-and-hold bond certificates, and I understood the value of my own hustle.

In other words, I was already a budding entrepreneur… but there was still something impressive to see the fluidity by which these merchants flooded the street. And: they offered the perfect solution just in time. Four decades before the Amazonification of the internet made us expect everything right now, here were people doing the Mechanical Turk version of this.

I can’t say for sure how much this trip to NYC changed me, but it must have been profound. Prior to that, my folks had taken me on a trip to Washington, DC when I was perhaps six years old, and so it’s not like we were hermits who never traveled… but this was something altogether different.

New York was its own world, though. It was completely different than the place where I grew up. It might as well have been another planet. I would chase that exotic, exhilarating feeling for the better part of the next decade, ultimately shaping where I would spend most of my life: Richmond, Virginia.