When We Remembered Zion

I have been thinking about New York lately. I was standing on the asphalt at the playground on a recent sunny day when I saw the silver-lit arc in the sky made by a flock of pigeons in synchronized flight with the sun glancing off their wings: a beautiful sight, one frequently seen in the New York of my youth, and an image that is, for me, a sort of personal leitmotif. I've had bizarre dreams about the city lately, too, geographically incorrect dreams in which the Hudson River runs right through the center of it, separating East from West, and I have a gig singing Piaf songs in a neglected hole-in-the-wall café, and the denizens of Zuccotti Park storm the bastions of Park Avenue. I've thought a lot lately about my family, friends, and semblables still living there (their numbers are smaller now than they once were), and have contrasted their lives with my own (right now it seems there's nothing but contrast). I think of the holiday season in the city, and the happy-inducing sight of streets thronged with life. I know there are people in this world who prefer to live in the country and never see another living soul, but I can't quite believe it somehow.

I wonder how many marriages and other relationships, if taken out of New York, would fail. My unscientific guess is quite a few. The city is itself a massive safety valve; no matter how cramped your quarters, you can leave them at any time and actually go somewhere else and still return home in ten minutes. The teeming, rushing life all around buoys the spirits; aesthetic pleasures of all kinds abound. One can have myriads of secret lives there -- I don't mean affairs or other insidious secrets, but, rather, tiny, mundane ones:  favorite places, favorite trees on favorite streets, favorite cups of coffee at favorite diners.  It seems to me that in small towns, or in the suburbs, one has fewer means of release, fewer tiny secrets to maintain, and one is therefore much more exposed.  I'm not sure whether total exposure to the other is ultimately good for relationships, but I'm far from an expert on these things.

I started reading this article, but it seemed like every other paean to the city by a young transplant that I've ever read, and I got bored and stopped. I did like this quote, though:

Jeremiah Moss, the writer behind Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, expresses a frequent complaint: "Newcomers to New York want backyards, bicycles, and barbecues. They want Greenwich Village to be like their hometowns in Wisconsin," he says. "Underneath this—and not very far underneath—there's a seething hatred of urban life. They don't like the dirt or the smells. They don't like the kvetching and the neuroticism. They don't like the layers of history. They want to tear it all down and make it clean and new."

And some of the comments are interesting, like this one [all sic]:

Anyone who calls themselves a New Yorker that was not born here is not a New Yorker in mind and thus we are left with the high-line, cup cakes etc and yes Wisconsin. I have been here for 35 yrs. and still a hick from the Midwest but I hated the mid west and do love NY but it is so hard to see now. New York City just seems to exit in photos and it is not in Brooklyn either but perhaps in Queens were no trend loving person would dare go to without the ok from fill in the blanks...of bourgeoisie papers or blog. I lived in the days of the Robert Christgau and Sylvia Plachy and the art for art sake of a seemly bygone era. Now it is just to much like all the other crap cities it is a cartoon version of some city has little substance to back it up.

(The High Line is a new park built on the old elevated freight rail lines on the far West Side of Manhattan.)

All in all, I suppose that everyone who loves New York is a nostalgist. If I moved back, it would be to a different city than the one that is branded not only upon my memory, but also, so it feels, upon the molecular structure of my being.