I Heart New York

This is a tribute to the city I come from, the city I will take with me as I journey to Prague.

(insane late nights in Manhattan: colors streak & bleed.)

A friend said no matter how long I'm out of the States, I'll always be an American. I wonder. Not only am I moving to a foreign country, which in itself will probably change me, but I will be living there as an Irish citizen--much less paperwork to deal with. So the dislocation of it all is a bit strange--I'll be Irish, living in the Czech Republic--and I was wondering through it.

(view from The Ferry: the curved glass building always entranced me, even when the Twin Towers stood.)

And I realize I've dealt with dislocation before.

(My father worked in the Twin Towers till I was in high school. They had office Christmas parties there for the little kids, and I remember waking up so early for the commute. Floor 12A: no unlucky 13. I could see them from my front yard in Staten Island, until The Dump got so freaking huge that it obscured the view. As a kid, I would point & say, Dad's there!)

I grew up in New York, but I've spent over a decade living outside of it, in Florida & Long Island. It's not an easy transition. I remember how my anxiety spiked at everyone's slowness, and at the dearth of the night. Certainly the experience has modified my personality. I still have a New York heart; it's just certain behaviors that have dropped off. For instance, I've learned to calmly wait. The only dislocation I can understand is the loss of New York. A New Yorker is a stranger anywhere else in the world, whether it's in America or not. My life since New York has been a getting used to the strangeness of everywhere else.

(Feels like they've been running that Recession Special since I could eat solid food. Hot dog w/onions & papaya juice.)

I never thought of myself as an American. I am a New Yorker who left. I can't identify with America; it isn't visceral. America is just a concept to me, whereas New York is my hometown. I also expect I'd have more in common with a Dublin native than someone who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Or, put me at a table with a Paris native & someone from small-town Arkansas, and it ain't the Parisian playing odd one out.


Last night I watched Woody Allen's Manhattan. So many gorgeous pictures. For all of the brutal necessity & cruel hustle, a New Yorker can still sense in his heart the romance that redeems his hometown. He can still feel the thrill of the speed & the motion in the odd moments when he drops out of his future and into the present. Certainly, he won't stop whatever he is doing, but in that moment he can look around and think, My God, just look at this place. Like Woody Allen said, It's a knockout.

(Washington Square Park: in high school, when I was discovering that I wanted to write, I would come here and dream in my journal. Afterward, I'd walk to Strand, which is heaven.)

There are patterns of thought specific to & common among New Yorkers; I'm not sure the same can be said of Americans. For instance, I wondered how I would title this blog. Just The City would feel most natural--but for too many people, the phrase carries no specific reference. New York, New York--but I've heard that song too many times. So, New York? I wondered if I needed to be more specific and write New York City for the sake of outsiders. This is how my years outside have influenced me--I am now also sympathetic to the perspective of everyone not from the five boroughs, and so I modify my original thought for their sake. So, for all you normal people out there, here's an insight into the mind of all New Yorkers: people in New York City think of it as The City. If you're talking about the New York that exists outside The City, it's called Upstate.

(Thus, Long Island is an unclassified geographical anomaly, and it's best not to think about it too much.)

(I've been to the Empire State Building exactly once, for an interview w/a headhunter. 13th floor. I read Ulysses in the waiting room.)

My point is, I was born into this way of thinking, and it belongs to no one outside of New York. Even if someone real cool & hip from another part of the world decided he was gonna call New York The City, he couldn't possibly understand the full depth of the word. Maybe he would even know that, within the five boroughs, The City refers more specifically to Manhattan. But he could never conceive the world that is The City to every New York native. For The City is the world. It's not like every other city where you hop in a car & drive a half hour to get out. If you want to leave The City, you're in for a journey. It ain't gonna be short, and it ain't gonna be easy. He couldn't possibly feel how Upstate refers to a strange, faraway land where people on the street smile at each other and leave their front doors unlocked. Or all the associations that come immediately upon hearing the word Jersey.

I've left New York, but any kind of change I go through will only be a modification of my New York heart. I'll always be a New Yorker. As far as being an American, I mean, come on, even people from Jersey are American. You expect me to identify with that?