New York State of Mind

A dear friend from college, one of the first people I met at Lewis and Clark in fact, as she was my RA, has lived in New York since, oh, maybe 1996. I have visited her several times here, and also another friend of ours who lived with her for about a year. I’ve come in all seasons, and have, at a certain time in my life, been so familiar with my friend’s home that I brought my roller blades and would go out in the afternoons from West 18^th and 9^th, and glide down along the West Side Highway to Battery Park and back again. I still get email from a Chelsea wine shop, and can go right to H&M in Soho without having any idea what street it’s on.

It’s safe to say I’m fairly comfortable in the Big Apple. I know, for instance, that no one refers to it that way in any seriousness. I have come to accept that dirty streets—i.e. black gum polka-dotting the sidewalks, mangled trash tiredly flopping around in the wake of taxis and town cars, unidentified drying puddles of varying sour liquids—do not mean “bad neighborhood.” I even feel a certain comfort walking down Canal Street at 10:00pm on a Friday night, heading for the A Train.

I know that I’m far from having a resident mentality, though. I can’t, for instance, say “A Train” either out loud or silently to myself without breaking into song, sometimes out loud. This has gotten old already, as my friend now lives in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, and the A Train is the best one to take. (I have a similar struggle with 42^nd Street). I am also, every night, finding it amazing that my computer not only recognizes 12 local WiFi networks; it also tells me that three are unsecured, and thus I’ve been able to access my life’s blood, the Internet, whenever I wish without even trying to hook up to my friend’s secured network. People who know more about computers may tell me several reasons why I should just take the 17 seconds to be secure, but they’re not here right now.

I do feel like a country bumpkin whenever I first arrive. The miles and miles of high rises, the crowds of busy people, the endless number of street corners all featuring the same convenience store with the same bizarrely fresh and plentiful cut flowers—I find myself staring with my TV face (slack jaw, dead eyes) if I’m not careful.

It’s an amazing place, this city. Vibrant, varied, smelly—and beautiful. It’s like a foreign country.