Worth a Read

My Endless New York: an ode to world cities.

On Being a Boston Resident Again

I alone am back where we began.

I wonder if when my parents decided to build a family they knew it would disperse into an American diaspora, with pieces scattered across the Southern Tier, around the Great Lakes, and at times as far as California. We are individuals with our own paths who, for a brief period in time (in the grand scheme of things), formed a cohesive unit in a few select majestic cities and sleepy towns.

What many people don't know is that it all began (or rather, I began) in Boston. New York, of course, stuck with my sister and I the most, perhaps because it hosted our most formative years or perhaps because it’s just that kind of place. My new room in Boston is filled with maps of and tributes to New York—a sepia photograph of a snow-covered Central Park, an artist’s rendering of the dominance of the subway lines over the geography of Manhattan, an old New Yorker cover, a postcard that screams in eerie ghost-like letters “NEW YORK IS A FRIENDLY TOWN.”

New York proclaims itself unabashedly. Back on 168th Street, my gateway from my home on Fort Washington Avenue to the 1 train, I used to pass an enormous red sign draped over the skywalks of New York-Presbyterian Hospital announcing, “Amazing Things are Happening Here.”

Now, I am walking the streets of Brighton and Brookline, noticing no such proclamations of greatness or friendliness. I see a few “Boston’s Best” claims, decent marketing ploys but not quite infused with the specific certainty of New York’s self-descriptions. Yet this is where the McGee-Tubb family began. This must be a friendly town, where amazing things happen, or else we wouldn’t have began here!

Cambridge has always been a magical place for us, a place where upon arrival we feel some immediate and deep attachment. For now, here, it seems as though our tendency to carry our places with us is limited solely to the streets and nooks of this one Boston city-suburb. Conversely, somehow New York pervaded us and we fell for the city as a whole- as much as we inhabited it, it inhabited us. Though Morningside Heights occupies a special drawer, the entirety of Manhattan and even some portions of the outer boroughs belong to us as places we used to own.

Will all of Boston encompass me? Will the entirety of this place become familiar enough and steeped-full-of-my-life enough that it travels along with me throughout the rest of my stops and stations?

On Old Subway Cars, and Growing Up New York

The subway seats are orange on this train; surprising, because the facade is sleek and clean, digitized, the kind they introduced in the early 2000s on all the lines we never take. When we'd venture onto the 4 or R platforms, we encountered these beasts like modern aliens, their interiors lined with light blue bench seats. Now they've permeated the outer lines like ours, the A and the 1, these high-tech warriors ready for the repetitious battle of the evening commute. On this A train with a modern exterior enclosing those old orange, classic three-toned seats, we take standing room amidst a mezcla of New Yorkers speeding uptown, past the slow stuffy stops of the Upper West Side, directly from 59th to 125th. We will stay on a few more stops beyond this gateway to Harlem, but as the doors open here our eyes drift across the station in silent homage to our haunt of earlier New York days. When the doors close we return to our activities, writing and reading, reflecting and learning, two things these four-eyed sisters do best.

We both wouldn't mind slipping into an orange seat right now and feeling the cool plastic on our tired backs, dropping our bags from our shoulders to our laps. Most of the seats are occupied by bodies we may never know, despite the familiarity some of their faces present from previous travels along the A.

It's been a year and six months since we moved further uptown and to the west. Though we've switched our primary train (a life status change for a New Yorker, akin to divorce or an empty nest or a new job), we seem to be plotting our old patterns, tattered, tried, and true, onto this new map. To get to the places we've grown to love, we simply walk farther; to continue our quest for a moment on each inch of Manhattan, we venture deeper. Along these new routes, we grace the same orange seats, hosting us for the mere minutes between each of our destinations, the traverses of our concrete geographic pattern.

Framework for Summer

My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;
This printed and bound book...but the printer and the printing-office boy?
The marriage estate and settlement...but the body and mind of the bridegroom? also those of the bride?
The panorama of the sea...but the sea itself?
The well-taken photographs...but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?
The fleet of ships of the line and all the modern improvements...but the craft and pluck of the admiral?
The dishes and fare and furniture...but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
The sky up there...yet here or next door or across the way?
The saints and sages in history...but you yourself?
Sermons and creeds and theology...but the human brain,
and what is called reason, and what is called love,
and what is called life?

-Walt Whitman

Amazing Things Are Happening Here

Following the blocks from the 1 train to my apartment, I can tell what time it is by which stores still have their lights on. I know it's late when even Starbucks, after the midnight hour, has closed. For the most part, the streets are deserted, except for the smokers escaping crowded, merengue-and-salsa-filled bars, nurses leaving awkwardly-timed shifts, mothers returning home, weighed down with groceries and kids' clothing and burdens.

Each morning, heading back towards the 1 train I am greeted by the sun streaming through transparent, lofty walkways connecting the 8th-10th floors of buildings over Fort Washington Avenue, igniting a huge red canvas that screams: AMAZING THINGS ARE HAPPENING HERE.

Fighting crowds just to walk down 168th Street, I examine my enemy warriors and wonder where they're going. What amazing things will they accomplish today? How are they contributing to what's "happening"?

Here, on 168th Street and Fort Washington Ave, is the Columbia University Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. What goes on inside its towering buildings and interconnected walkways is all but invisible to passersby, whose glimpses are limited to the wear on the face of a tired surgeon in scrubs grabbing 5 coffees at Starbucks or the quick transfer of a person on oxygen from the back of an ambulance to the hospital's emergency room.

This city is filled with these microcosmic concentrations of activity. Within the Medical Center's towering halls, scientists are building new vaccines, grandmothers are receiving their final doses of long-time medications, hungry student eyes are watching with careful attention procedures they must learn by rote. Further south and east, somewhere between the giants of Park Avenue and the art beat of the Lower East Side, the NYU Medical Center pursues the same activities, building another medical force and affecting another subset of our city's population.

These massive functions of institutions and structures so tiny within the grand scheme of this city keep me in constant awe of New York. Thousands of minute interactions build hundreds of daily rote processes and dozens of new discoveries all within this one four-block radius where, as it also happens, I make my home with hundreds of others who take their daily activities beyond the short limits of this neighborhood.

The interconnectedness of these tiny spheres forms the glue of this city. When a patient arrives from downtown or the Bronx, he brings his mother, who cleans houses in Queens, and his brother who used to own that beloved corner deli down the street. All the neighborhoods that comprise this city become intricately connected through the movements and alliances of the people who inhabit them. And so it goes, in all the many definitions of that vague word of place, its meaning rooted in the mind of the listener or speaker, amazing things are happening here.

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"Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

Why I Love New York

We are a web of small communities, connected by the moments we share in the public places that shape our daily lives.

Despite having a hundred native tongues, we speak a common dialect.

Thriving on anonymity in our constant interactions with strangers,we learn the most personal things about our neighbors and the people who surround us, even if we never learn their names.

New York Is a Friendly Town

In the Student Service Center at Columbia, black and white pictures of New York line the walls. At one end, a high-contrast shot of Grand Central depicts the calm in the station before rush hour. At the other end, the columns and statues of the New York Stock Exchange loom over students awaiting transcripts, the processing of a request to drop a class, and other administrative steps that build and categorize their education here. How many of these students were once destined to hallow the halls of these New York giants? How many of them were to be passing through the terminal to a hedge fund or a bank, or turning a close eye to the trade floor with each day's opening bell?

As this New York crumbles, what are their destines now? Will courses in Greek civilization and Western humanities equip them with alternate paths? Will they put their heads together and, moving full-force through the gates of their alma mater, begin something that is thus far undefined?

After September 11th, this city thought nothing would be the same. Together, we acknowledged a crisis and we began to pick up the pieces, to re-build our homes, and to fight to make it to a better time. We took pride in being a city that accepts difference and used the irony of the attack as an opportunity for empowerment and for return to the comraderie that defines this city. For two years this city felt shell-shocked, but over time we began to put a new face forward, storing that frightful day in our permanent memory banks and continuing onward as soldiers in the most powerful metropolis.

This time in New York's history is different. After months of newspaper headlines screaming crisis and failure, I am surprised at how much we continue to operate as if business is usual, as if nothing has changed. I can feel it when I turn any Manhattan corner that this is a farce, that we are players in a game that has surely run amok. When outsiders imposed tragedy on our city we embraced it and joined together to fight it, facing it head on as our truth. Yet now, when we impose it on ourselves, we are less willing to confront it. When will we acknowledge a new chapter in our history? When will we begin to re-imagine our destinies? When will we take all this to heart?

Some Food for NYC Thought

The New York Times has published the results of a survey of thousands of New York City residents. The results are interesting but not surprising. Here's a quick summary and brief analysis:

• The areas that indicate the lowest satisfaction with NYC's government services are also the poorest, meaning that they are the ones most likely to utilize government services and most likely to need them.
• Measures of sidewalk maintenance, playgrounds, street maintenance, rat control, and neighborhood cleanliness all get the lowest ratings in the poorest neighborhoods, suggesting that the city concentrates its efforts in more affluent areas.
• While only 33% of NYC residents surveyed are satisfied with NYC's public after-school programs, 57% of those who have attended a NYC public school after-school program in the last 12 months give good or excellent ratings to the program's service. This suggests that the data presented here don't tell the full story--in other words, as usual, statistics are misleading.
• 78% of those surveyed gave excellent or good ratings to the way the City of New York provides services in "your language." This suggests that either the survey was offered in multiple languages, or it was only given to those who speak English or Spanish.
  
• New Yorkers are dissatisfied with NYC's public housing, its services for protecting children at risk of abuse and neglect, its services for addressing homelessness, the NYC public schools, air quality, and the way NYC spends tax dollars.
  
• However, New Yorkers are very satisfied with NYC.gov, the city's public libraries, 311, 911, citywide fire protection, neighborhood emergency services, Medicaid, public senior centers, and subway daytime safety.
  

Back on 120th St, Dreaming of 120th St

For years we have paced this block on our way somewhere. To home, to work, to school, downtown, uptown, cross-town, even beyond the rivers that bind this island. It has held us when we have been marching toward a class we hope we won’t fail, a performance we hope we’ll nail, an encounter we’ll never forget. It has been our gateway.

I am here now, almost everyday, for different reasons. This street is no longer my gateway to somewhere else but my destination. I arrive here on 120th Street to learn, to argue, to develop, when from this same street I used to launch, bold and fearful, to learn everywhere but on this very street.

We’ve all departed somehow. To Chicago, to Alfred, to Poughkeepsie and back, to Washington Heights, we’ve found new launching pads and new places from which to depart. These new places are too new to define us. They seem temporary, ephemeral, like places we are visiting or lands we will conquer and then abandon. How long did it take for 120th Street to own us, and for us to own it? When did it become our starting point, the place at which we end and then begin again each day?

One intersection divides this 120th Street we used to know from the 120th Street that serves me now. On Amsterdam, turning left coming up from 119th Street has become my normal routine, though I constantly find myself glancing at what lies to the right, just making sure that it’s still there. Normally when people move they literally move, they relocate themselves and return just to visit. How often does someone’s former habitat become redefined for them? How common is it to learn to re-navigate a neighborhood because it serves a different purpose for you now?

New York, no matter how big it seems sometimes, is full of these reinventions. In such tiny city blocks we live every part of our lives here, and in doing so we categorize these little radii in order to organize our behaviors. This is where I work, this is where my daughter goes to school, this is where my doctor is, this is where I get my hair cut—we compartmentalize small spans of blocks, associating corner markets and flower stands and Indian restaurants with the places where we are going nearby. But when something changes, say your doctor moves to the same block as your daughter’s school, or your best friend changes jobs and now works in the building next to your favorite bagel shop, we re-invent, we re-categorize. We accommodate one more in this tiny radius of city blocks.

The problem with this recategorization, though, is that we lose things sometimes. I want 120th Street to always be the block I walked down to pick up lunch from the Apple Tree on one of our spring-cleaning Sundays. I want it to always be the street where I watched Cordelia, 6 years old with fire and glee in her eyes, jumping over the glittering sidewalk proclaiming that she saw the stars in the city ground. I don’t want these things to change, yet the more I re-invent this place the more these new moments seem to take their place.

I remember once hearing that the more things change the more they stay the same. I hope for me, for here, for this street, that is the case. I want it to always be simultaneously everything to me—the place where I first lived in New York City, the place where I learned how to reform education in America, the place where I left and the place where I will always, in my heart, begin.

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It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page…

-“Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion

This Is Not About Me

Once, someone wrote about New York. This did not seem challenging because it was the second city of light, the sister city to the city of brotherly love, the city where push-comes-to-shove in nearly every encounter and the city where most people seemed to be to be someone.

New York had always been a paradox to this writer--it seemed to host an immense pride coupled with a disconcerting unfriendliness in nearly all interpersonal exchanges. She dreamed of a comraderie generating a calmer, happier atmosphere, and though she loved New York this vision always haunted her, like the unknown freckled past of a quiet lover.

Her favorite encounters with New York were aerial. She savored the moments before arrival when she returned from London or Chicago or Ohio, when the city glistened below her and she was able to see Manhattan in its entirety. Glowing with the glaze of red traffic lights and the yellowed lamps of a million homes, her Manhattan from this angle was simultaneously containable and limitless. Almost always in the seat beside her would be a visitor, some wide-eyed dweller of some other incomparable city, amazed at the strength of the glow in every direction. Manhattan, that tiny island in the midst of New York City, would to that visitor be the home of giants, and the boroughs and suburbs that surround it would be the fortress, an army of two-family homes and New Jersey-tagged Volkswagens owned and operated by masses of immigrants...

Reflections on Days in Paris

On the eve of my departure from Paris, I am disturbed to realize that I feel that melancholy feeling that all writers have described about Paris. For all its demoralizing and unpleasant features, this is a place that wrenches its way into your heart. This is the city of love, of light, of magic in the face of bureaucracy (a word that in its very nature seems French) and language barriers and never-ending queues. This is the city to which all those who can return do--if not for habitation, than for that small sensation, that uncomfortable fluttering that occupies one's depths when saying goodbye to this city.

Yet for all its hate-to-love-but-do, Paris is not for me. The view of Paris from the 59th floor of Tour Montparnasse did not rouse any feelings of excitement or even interest in me. My city is New York--from the 110th floor of a city building I could spend hours peering over familiar neighborhoods from a new perspective or spotting gaps in the novel my feet have stomped out in 13 years of being in New York shoes. To Paris I have no connection. A view of all of Paris is nearly the same to me as a view of Seattle or Berlin or Seoul. It is an image, a fascination from the novelty of an aerial view, a moment to enjoy but quickly forget the specificities of. On the ground, Paris continues to be a new frontier to explore--this will never cease. Yet the Paris frontier, unlike New York or London for me, evokes anxieties that are prohibitive to true absorbtion of this city. My calmest moments here, those during which I can mimic most fully the sensations and habits of Parisian life, are silent and solitary. On a park bench in Jardin de Luxembourg, beside the pyramid of the Louvre, on the metro or strolling down a tiny rue, engaging in peaceful, coordinated coexistence, I am most in tune with Paris. Yet these moments are few, and are abruptly burst by a confused, flustered exchange of inadequate words with a Parisian, angered by my French-less intrusion on their city. No, Paris is not for me--I'll keep my quiet, distasteful love of this city close to my heart, as I pass through this place on my way to somewhere else.

July 4, 2008

"Here's where I am, here's where I stand," tearing down the walls of apartment 2G in 90 Morningside Drive, pushing papers into heavy cardboard boxes, as we say goodbye with sweeping brooms and ladders to reach the cabinets we haven't touched since day one. It feels like we have been moving always--13 years of trips to storage and spring cleaning initiatives blend together now. We have lived here the longest, we keep saying, both as an excuse and as a coping mechanism.

How do we reflect? When do we look back to C.'s 1st grade "presidents" birthday party and M.'s senior prom? When do we honor these hallowed hallways?

We can see where we are now. C. is a young woman--she eats at school now and doesn't count her handwashes. Mom is tired but still exuding creative energy. Dad is the same as always but more worried. I am too practical, less passionate, disoriented.

For years we have defined ourselves as a family that lives in New York. Do we define ourselves as a diaspora now? Dispersed for economic and educational reasons? In Chicago, Dad inhabits a world of academia that many see only in movies. In Alfred, Mom will re-learn (or discover for the first time?) rural life and a real opportunity for leadership. Back in New York, remaining in New York, C. and I will navigate the remains of our youth. Like ghosts, we will traverse the streets of Morningside Heights pursing new, revised dreams. We will cross independently at crosswalks that used to require a held hand; we will make decisions that used to be made for us; we will open doors we could not have yet imagined.

Yet some doors, like that of 2G in 90 Morningside Drive and like 5J in 400 W. 119th Street before, will close to us, vaulting previous phases of our lives so that they are accessible only in the memories that visit us when certain smells or notes or conversations invite them. Now remembering seven odd years earlier than this moment, writing a poem that begins: "there comes a time when memories are all we've got. A shoebox of photos, an attic of pasts, decorating the modern memorabilia." We are so vulnerable to our memories--this has never occurred to me before. Nostalgia is the most powerful feeling that has no immediate rooting in the present moment. It is the past intruding on where we have arrived--it is a reminder that we may or may not need.

How long have we used this apartment, this home, as our base? From here we learned New York. Speeding down Broadway on the 1 train, we learned the restaurants of the Upper West Side, the Stardust Diner, the need to avoid Times Square, Younghee in Tribeca, Canal Street, the World Trade Center. Privately, we made our own discoveries, building secret New Yorks that no one else will share. We found patterns that suited us, routes we found preferable, places that meant comfort and safety and hope. We began to define ourselves through these individualized ties, these constructed days and weeks that we could allude to across the dinner table but never fully recount.

When did our relationship with this city change? Was it when M. left for college? When D. left for Israel? When the plan became to leave this city, to go our separate ways? Or was it only when we packed the last straws, the wrapping paper boxes, the Ganeshas over the doors?

Goodbye to New York, Part 6

The first thing I see when I open my eyes as we descend into LaGuardia is the New York City skyline jutting into my window. The transition from Cleveland (or rather Oberlin, Ohio) to airports to New York City is not a smooth one. I missed New York and I didn’t even realize it. Sometimes living in Manhattan makes us forget that we live on a tiny island and makes us dismiss the word “glorious” as touristy when it applies so well. Who could disregard such awesome man-made beauty, despite the sea of dirt and concrete and all the excrements of too many peoples’ lives? As we descend I watch the island from my aerial angle. I can see down all the streets, straight from east to west the reds and yellows that litter the perfect lines and comforting symmetrical grids. Now I’m stuck in the traffic I pinpointed from the plane when I muttered to myself “shit look at all that red, it’ll take forever to get back to the city,” spoken like a true New Yorker. I’m starting to realize that this will become my commute, this half-day trek from flat normalcy to vibrant hectic heights. I will be leaving the city behind, and it will not wait for me. I will come back a foreigner to the city that has been my home for eight years. I will get in a cab from the airport and frantically write in the dark backseat about how the city sucks me in and spits me out and no matter how much I keep up I will always be behind. Yet there is no other way to live the city life, to breathe the dirty city air and thrive on it. When I’m gone I will compare everything to how it’s done in the city, but after a few weeks my definition of the city will be entirely obsolete. When I return to it I will have to start again, rebuilding my definition, only to do it again and again for a lifetime. This is not a bad thing, though, for every time I return to Oberlin, Ohio, it will be waiting for me just as I left it, with everything in its proper place. I will know it and own it and I will not need a rhythm or a vibe because nothing will require that kind of synchrony. That kind of familiarity will be nice for a few days, but this city, the city, does not suffer from monotony, and its constant deformities and reformations will keep me from sinking into passivity, into “okay” and normalcy. The city makes do; it goes on what it has and doesn’t pause for departures. The city will not miss me; it will take my absence with nothing more than a grain of salt. I will never say goodbye to the city, because it has never said goodbye to me.

Goodbye to New York, Part 4

I loved Miracle on 34th Street until I became a New Yorker. On that first Thanksgiving in the city, for that’s when Christmas starts here, the holiday became my third symbol of New York. I love the Christmas season because everything is so happy, even the women Goodwill Santas collecting dimes from wealthy Long Island shoppers outside of Macy's during a blizzard or even in slush. It seems like everything is dying around me even while remaining so hiddenly vibrant. Call me sentimental but I cried during the Christmas All-School chapel this year, when the first graders processed down the isle with plastic candles in all their glory, the children's eyes focused intently on the outstretched arms of squatting teachers at their destination. I picked out you and Bobby and Giulia and Laurence, vicariously remembering you when you were six through these unfamiliar children, at the same time mixing future with the past and present and wondering if my children will be repeating the same holiday ritual in a few years. Then during "Once in Royal David's City," the words to a song I hear only here serenaded me and the strong beautiful voices of the thirty other people in chorus surrounded me like the timbre of a tympani drum. My eyes watered and I looked around at all the other seniors near me and saw similar tears in their eyes. We knew security was quickly leaving us and tradition slowly releasing its grip on us, ready to exclude us the next time around, though we may not be ready to let go.

Our eyes danced over the rows and rows of Trinity students in their uniforms and formal attire, and for once we did not spite the rules we loathe nor did we desire to change the system we criticize, but rather we accepted it for what it is indeed and found the beauty somehow, somewhere, in the moment. Some of us remembered the Messiah Sing-In two nights before and how we stood outside singing carols, as always, and were not ready to shed the tears we knew we would later shed over the moment. And then when Mr. Rupcich told us he would be conducting next year at that event, smiles and tears all around in the basement of that old church that only we know by heart, some happy because they will see him in all his glory, some sad knowing they will not be able to return for it. In a heartbeat the service was over and we didn't know exactly how to feel. Lost?

Goodbye to New York, Part 3

On the day of my graduation from eighth grade I went to a party at the Canfield house, my second symbol of New York. At the time it was to me Nick’s penthouse, but it has become my haunt, saturated with awkward memories.

We’re listening to Nix Mix again, in the backroom of the Canfield house, where we have spent many indecisive nights. I put on Less Than Jake and everyone screams in revolt. This is the group I have known since fifth grade but didn't really befriend until ninth. We don't really know why we are friends except because we commuted to that urban Cathedral close with peacocks and choirs for a few years. We are growing apart but we cling to that common experience for stability, for the reminder that we are really all that we have to hold on to. I hide myself in the covers of Suzie's bed because we're watching some stupid action movie in the dark, and Madeleine comes over and gets in bed with me. We pull the blankets up to our chins to fight the air conditioning and whisper about loving and hating this place-- the same old people, the same old motions and movements, the same old Domino's and Coke, the same old shushing and laughing. The light is flipped on and Nick pounces on us and doesn't move, so we are three in a bed, pulling at flower sheets and fluffy pillows, and Max comes in with his yamhaca and feels unloved. Lights out again and the movie is resumed with Max in a chair and the rest on the couch, except for the three of us still performing a balancing act on the bed. We talk for hours when the movie ends, sharing stories about the sex we’re not having and whispering our fears. Someone shouts “hey remember that time on this very couch…” and the victim of the story blushes at the revelation of a memory she had hoped had been forgotten. In the Canfield house I have learned about the nature of secrets. I have learned that the city itself has too many secrets that they aren’t even secrets because no one’s keeping them, because no one knows they’re there. I have learned that you can’t have a secret if you don’t know you’re keeping it. So another night winds down at the Canfield house and everyone grabs trash on the way out, waving goodbye when it never really is.

Goodbye to New York, Part 2

"Who's playing tonight?"

"Wayne," responds a tiny, hunched-over man with a black and yellow cap sitting placidly outside a tiny, brick-lined doorway. "It's ten bucks," he says, as two twenty-somethings in Columbia tee-shirts enter the narrow stairwell with Heinekens in hand and smug faces, amused by themselves for inquiring about the musicians of a jazz world with which they are entirely unfamiliar.

We enter behind them, paying with crumpled, used and reused ten dollar bills, and follow them down the stairs into a dark, musky, scarcely-populated room. In the corner, a few disheveled musicians sit on a bookshelf, staring blankly at a half-full pitcher of cranberry juice on the dry bar. Small's has forks, barstools, cups, and even a microwave, but has never served anything but cranberry or the occasional apple juice, as I learned on my first visit there, when I attempted to order a Coke. Fifteen or so trips later, I have learned my lesson and now carry a bottle of water and a candy bar with me, in case the jazz inspires some chocolate craving in me.

I tell Katie, who has never been here, that the musicians arrive when they like. At 10:30, they've set up and begin to play. As they swing into their first number, I enter a trance, fixated on the welcoming picture of Louie Armstrong directly behind the band. I had been convinced it was a photograph of Duke Ellington, but after the set that night, the owner told me otherwise. Despite this new information, the photograph still looms in my memory constantly, as my first symbol of New York, a reminder of smoky, hazy nights spent at Small's and the eerie familiarity of a single smiling face.

Nick, an aspiring jazz musician and connoisseur of sorts, introduced me to Small's two years ago. Now, when I ask him to accompany me on one of my many trips there, he refuses, claiming it is "selling out and losing its cool." To me, though, Small’s is just beginning. I can't get enough of that dark enclosed space where New Yorkers blend with an occasional out-of-towner, businessmen fare well with musicians, and where both nobodies and somebodies go for relaxation and a good rhythm. I find myself constantly drawn to its sepulchral feel and familiar tunes, its secretive existence and early morning hours, its good taste in jazz and its ability to make me feel at home downtown. The dissenting chords, giant bass plucks, and harsh sax notes make me think, ponder, question, and perhaps most importantly, live.

When we leave Small's, I stay to talk to Mitch, the owner and peaceful collector of the cover charge. He begins our conversation with a simple, "good?", and I respond, "as always." We launch into a discussion of hungry mice, how to salvage the dying Fat Cat (his billiards/jazz club joint that isn't doing so well), what makes a musician (and a good one at that), the importance of style, and Walt Whitman. He tells me he's his biggest fan, and that in the 1950s, before this small hole in the ground was Small's, it was home to Lenny's Hideaway, one of the first gay clubs in New York, a place patronized by many of the famous Beat poets. I'm in awe of the history of such a tiny room and go back downstairs for a minute to see if I can feel the presence of ghosts or history or maybe have some lines come to mind, and they do. Duke Ellington saying “playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.” Whitman's "What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?" Whitman's "Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem." I go back upstairs, haunted, and continue my back-and-forth chat with Mitch, who plays violin on 68th and Columbus during the day and reminds me of an owl in some way, holding deposits of information and releasing them slowly to people who tap into them enough. I promise to return soon, and at one a.m., hail a cab to my uptown abode, fulfilled once again by an evening of rich jazz and conversation I've found only in New York.

My City is Scrabble without Vowels: Goodbye to New York, Part 1

Dear D.,

It’s Friday night and a woman with a heavy covered voice is crooning down from the crooked stage, and someone is chanting in the background, keeping her beat with deep vocals. Her name is Sugar and she’s black, big and black with cornrows, lots of them, and eyes of color café and roots in Harlem and Ghana, and a lover in every South American country, and round hips and large perfect thighs with purple brown stretch marks that she reveals when she’s feeling sexy, when she glides that jean skirt up her leg to show some big black skin and scream “I’m black and I’m proud, I’m morena and I don’t give a shit what you are just listen to me and love what you hear, love what you preach and don’t you give up on your dreams girl, I don’t care the color of your skin.” She’s rich with salsa rhythm constantly keeping her gliding those notes out like a queen, a big black queen, and she lets the loud heavy real sounds drip out of her mouth like nutella or water from a faucet, smooth and so simple and concrete. She’s spitting out phrases like saliva and scatting all over the place, left right and around her curves and up her spine and yours and down your throat. We’re in the corner, clapping and laughing, screaming shaking watching her go go go and we wish we were black, or at least I do, we wish we were ethnic and could sing like that and have people laugh with us and not at us, we wish we could shake our big bosoms and big asses and have everyone call us sexy and not fat, have everyone say we’re beautiful and not just another white girl. We’re the only white ones there and that scared us the first time, made us feel alone and uncomfortable and we thought we couldn’t clap, but now we’re jaded and we don’t care what they think and they don’t care either, here we don’t even think, we don’t know the color of your skin and it doesn’t matter what you are or where you’re from as long as you can get that beat into you and exist with it and for it, and move to that rhythm like you mean it, and when you’re here you do. When we leave the underground club, it’s raining in Harlem, and the streets are glistening with wetness, mimicking our sweaty faces and damp bodies. Everyone’s shouting goodbye and good luck girl and shit man I gotta piss and we’re waving and scatting and you might say we’re acting black but not even a black person can define black, so can you? We’re tired of being racist and going to a white school and shunning Spanglish as unintelligent and we violate our standards and are vulgar and that’s the way the city life is, our city life. We are selfish, we don’t want the whites to come here, we don’t want to lose the black flavor and the Latino taste and the vulgarity and dignity of minorities. We don’t tell them, especially not the tourists who think they want to see real New York but shit in their pants at the mention of 125th street and can’t conceive of a New York that is poor and struggling, that curses and spits and pees on itself when it has to and shares mixed drinks and salsas, Latinos and whites, and dances in the streets.

I wish you would have shared this New York with me. I wish you would have escaped your confines of the Upper East Side and released yourself into the depths of this city. Why can’t we teach each other to live? Now I’m leaving, leaving you and this city, and you haven’t seen my places, seen where I have learned to live, seen where I have become who I am. In the time we have been together you have taught me to fit into your book, your land of Tasti-Delite and Central Park and seventh floor apartments and Duane Reades, your existence of the M86 and gummy bears and 91st and Columbus, please, and step on it, it’s already 8:11. Why is every Friday a Blockbuster night when this city is rolling over in its grave a hundred times a minute while you bask in tasks that occur everywhere, all the time, except for in this city? Why are we suburbanites in the middle of urban bliss? We don’t share the same appreciations. Candlelight vigils on Columbia campus are “boring and such a waste of time” to you, a walk down Columbus is “pointless” and an $8 concert at CBGBs is “bad music, and downtown is too far anyway, let’s just stay here.” I have obliged pretty much every time, and now I am leaving this city, and leaving you, and we will never know what could have been of those long quiet Friday nights. In these last few months let me show you my New York. Let me show you my city that is made up of symbols, thousands of memory-joggers compiled.