I have a deep and abiding antipathy to New York as a physical location. I hate the concrete and the treelessness. I miss yards (yards!). I miss space (space!). I miss people who are not either, as my mom and I discussed earlier this week, "buying the Prada shoes or polishing them." The inequalities kill me. The prices kill me. The snobberies kill me. The unending buildings when you take off from a New York area airport kill me.
Not that I want to live in the suburbs. But Detroit seemed interesting. We drove down 8 Mile, which was the highlight of my Detroit weekend. That and the U-Haul. Or the dog with half his body out the window on I-94 near Kalamazoo, which we had to just keep driving past because the Oakland Drive exit where we otherwise would have gotten the world's best hot chocolate is currently in a state of disrepair bordering on total destruction. I like cities, just not cities with nothing but buildings all pressed together with no space between them, going on for ever. When my plane took off from JFK last Friday and banked over the ocean, the city to the west and a gray expanse of sea filling the east, I was silently saying, "Keep going east. Fly over this ocean and take me away."
But every now and then, New York knocks me to the ground with beauty and humanity. It happens in a subway station, when two men are playing South American pipes and the clear sound wraps around the rushing commuters. It happens on the street, when the man standing outside my grocery store begging for change nods to me solemnly, because we see each other every day. It happens on the waterfront, where a deep red sun-disc melts into the clouds above the boats in the harbor as I make sure the sleeping baby is securely covered in blankets. It happens in a coffee shop in South Harlem on a sunny Saturday morning, when the almost-old man behind the counter says, "Now, that's a real smile."
Sometimes it happens in the tiniest of little things, like the fact that you can pay $2 for someone to charge your phone in 20 minutes in a news kiosk on Broadway at 31st Street. That's not an independent, self-sufficient North American thing to be able to do. It's a world in which we need each other, and I like it.
Not that I want to live in the suburbs. But Detroit seemed interesting. We drove down 8 Mile, which was the highlight of my Detroit weekend. That and the U-Haul. Or the dog with half his body out the window on I-94 near Kalamazoo, which we had to just keep driving past because the Oakland Drive exit where we otherwise would have gotten the world's best hot chocolate is currently in a state of disrepair bordering on total destruction. I like cities, just not cities with nothing but buildings all pressed together with no space between them, going on for ever. When my plane took off from JFK last Friday and banked over the ocean, the city to the west and a gray expanse of sea filling the east, I was silently saying, "Keep going east. Fly over this ocean and take me away."
But every now and then, New York knocks me to the ground with beauty and humanity. It happens in a subway station, when two men are playing South American pipes and the clear sound wraps around the rushing commuters. It happens on the street, when the man standing outside my grocery store begging for change nods to me solemnly, because we see each other every day. It happens on the waterfront, where a deep red sun-disc melts into the clouds above the boats in the harbor as I make sure the sleeping baby is securely covered in blankets. It happens in a coffee shop in South Harlem on a sunny Saturday morning, when the almost-old man behind the counter says, "Now, that's a real smile."
Sometimes it happens in the tiniest of little things, like the fact that you can pay $2 for someone to charge your phone in 20 minutes in a news kiosk on Broadway at 31st Street. That's not an independent, self-sufficient North American thing to be able to do. It's a world in which we need each other, and I like it.
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