07)23(05 its 536pm

As if held away by the persistent wind, the thought of New York City and its grandeur is finally passive. For days in anticipation and in all of the minutes inside of its rusty stomach, and in shell shocked exit from its fingertips my thoughts have been captured by this amazing place, the only place of its kind, anywhere that I have seen.

We rolled down the New Jersey turnpike in perfect summer traveling families in minivan weather, stopping to tell toll booth attendants that we didn’t have any cash to pay the tolls with every ten minutes or so. We were still warm and glowing and excited and rested from our stay in DC, all of its museums, the comfort of Marilyn’s apartment, the rediscovery of the runaway kitty. I felt oddly at home on the east coast, and its cities, as if it was an accident that I had lived my whole life never seeing them. Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC, Boston, Chicago, all of these places had identities to me, strong ideas because of the endless hours of rapturous baseball watching I did growing up.

Also, we were out of the SOUTH. The south still in retrospect is so different and vivid from anything that the West or East coasts can even offer, and yet, I was happy to leave again, to not be stuck deep down there with the swamps and alligators and fried food and evangelicals and baptists and humidity. I think Kate and I began to feel that its embrace from New Mexico to Georgia had become an accepted part of our lives. While we were in the south we got used to the big deep darkness that sits around there waiting to awake, and we got used to the warm pie crust of friendliness that sits on its windows daring you to enjoy, and any Metropolitan sense of us was becoming obscured, nearly forgotten.

And then one night, mid July, we paid the last toll (or rather, couldn’t pay) on the New Jersey Turnpike and saw a massive and eery glow to the left of us, somewhere out over the water, the island of Manhattan, more grand and glorious than I would have ventured to guess or place in my mind.

New York City. Enough has been said about it being the capitol of the world, and yet, from my perspective, growing up in the peace and grooviness of Northern California, I want to be redundant a bit.

First off, as I walked the streets of Manhattan, whose skyscrapers really do tower over you like some holy and profane anomaly of beauty and power, I couldn’t think of a single idol or person I admired, artist or not, who hadn’t experienced or been experienced by New York City. When I say been experienced by, i mean that this city is an influence, sometimes THE influence for many a serious novelist, artist, musician, businessman, anything you want to name, the city is influential on the heart because it promises so much. It promises that someday you will turn a corner and walk right into your fate, your inspiration, your answers. It seems to cast a spell over what seems possible, and it wakes you up how much of it is real.

I know that I am venturing into newagespeak here, but that is fair, because that is how New York affected me.

Sarah and Richel, our friends from Portland and beyond, live in Brooklyn and they agreed to put up with us for a little while sleeping on our mattress on their floor. I might add that they very graciously agreed to put up with us and in fact made us feel very welcome. Its good because I was excited to see them too, to see how their lives are going in New York and to live it with them for a bit. Its good because they were instrumental in our having any sense of sanity attached to our exploration of the city, setting us up with maps, books, bookmaps, itineraries, and then on top of it all, taking the time to walk us around in their sparse free time. They would call us during our day from work to see how we were doing, wandering around the neighborhoods, and then meet with us in the evenings to take us to amazing cheap restaurants in cool neighborhoods that we never would have found on our own.

The day after we arrived Kate, Richel and myself walked through Central Park, which is on a sunny Sunday, a spectacle unto itself. In one field, the size of maybe two softball fields in a normal crowded city, five, I kid you not, five softball games were going on, when someone hit a fly ball into the infield of the other game it was no big thing. Any section of the park that was open to the sun was crammed tight with all shades of skin as New Yorkers rushed out to lie down in the grass, relishing the little patch of earth they were on as country folk would relish an acre or two. Merry go rounds sang ’40’s jazz tunes and street performers flipped down flights of stairs, musicians played top notch jazz in echoey bridge underpasses and miniature sailboats brushed past eachother serious and competitive, artists painted people staring at the lily ponds, lines of overheated underclothed folks waited for a chance to buy ice cream, and all the while the towers of Manhattan peeked over the trees like a mischievous school kid playing peeping tom. All of this reverence for simple things, all of this humanity, playing itself out in simple elegance and profundity, simply a sunny day but not so simple in New York, I felt that I was feeling what every person felt in some way, because we were connected to this city.

Now I know why Henry Miller’s paragraphs go on for four or five pages at a time, sometimes more. He is my favorite New York writer and a secret ally when walking down the streets of Manhattan, and he seems ready to burst every time he describes the city. So do I in a way. It shook me awake in some ways.