You can never stand in the same river twice. I don’t think you can live in the same city twice as well.
Between the late summer of 1990 and the end of 2003, a span of just over 13 years, I lived in NYC for a total of more than 6 years, basically half of that time span. Even when I wasn’t living here I was visiting often, including a week during my two years in LA. During that time I saw the city go through some pretty monumental changes. The earliest and most memorable was the whitewashing of Times Square and 42nd Street. Down went the porno theaters, up went Disney. In 1990 you didn’t go north of 96th street; by 2003 I had friends living on 155th. Even during the biggest change the city has ever undergone I was less than 100 miles away. I visited within two weeks to celebrate a friend’s birthday and before the one year anniversary of 9/11 I was back here to live.
In the ensuing 12 years I lived elsewhere and even did not visit more than a handful of time. So it really didn’t strike me as much of a surprise how much the city had changed in that absence. New York is more than just a place that reinvents or re-imagines itself. It is a place that simply keeps moving forward. Change is more than inevitable. It is probably the only thing that is constant here.
Of course the city isn’t the only thing that changed during those 12 years. I’m hardly the person I was when I left all those years back. Change has pretty much been a constant theme in my life as well, but as I grew older the changes seemed more drastic. There were higher highs, and much lower lows, and I found myself not responding with the same energy or intensity that I used to. Simply put, I had grown older (among other things) and my experiences were bound to be different.
I never really considered this possibility when I moved here in October. (And seriously, when have I ever considered the long term ramifications or short term effects whenever I’ve moved.) It kind of caught me off guard when I first got here how different I felt. Truth was I felt excluded, like the city had moved on without me. Of course it, why shouldn’t it? I couldn’t seem to catch up to it, and whereas in the past I would fearlessly charge after it, now i felt resigned to my place in it, just another wage slave trying to make a living.
Once again, some of the onus is on me. One of my best friends lives in Queens and yet I can count on one hand how often I have seen him. Several other friends don’t even get counted because I haven’t made the effort. Likewise to when it comes to taking advantage of all the city has to offer. I haven’t seen live theater, visited a museum, caught some rare independent film or even spent much time simply exploring. I always talk about doing that on my days off, but instead I seem to simply retreat from the world, seemingly unable to commit to doing anything.
Today that changed, if just a bit. I started my new job last week and today was one of my first shifts. Having seen the example set by the guy training me last week I stopped at the newsstand and picked up copies of the Times, the Post and the Daily News. (Anachronistic, I know, but each of them got read several times by my customers.) As I was crossing 3rd Avenue, paying more attention to the headlines on the papers than the signal on the crosswalk, I finally felt it. I felt like i belonged. I felt like I was back to being more than just a part of the city, but a part of it that was right there with it, in the mix.
To be honest I’m not really sure where that comes from. Some of it is the thrill of the new job, the professionals I’m working with and the potential that I know it has. Some most come from the confidence I’ve been feeling now that I’m back to writing on a regular basis. Some certainly comes from the changes in my personal life and the measure of peace and happiness that brings to me. And some comes from the fact that I’d been doubting the move for the last several months. I made a rash decision based on an old reputation a bar had, and it nearly drove me crazy.
Whatever the reason, there was a bounce in my step as I headed down 53rd street on my way to work, a bounce that stayed with me most of the day. (It started to flag around hour 9 of my shift, but that’s too be expected.) It isn’t the same city I moved to 26 years ago, and it isn’t the same city I left 13 years ago either. It is the city that it is now, it is the city that I live in, and it is the city that is, once again, mine.
PopcornJackTerry 