Loving New York
The dreams are starting again, sooner than I expected. In this dream, I board an overnight flight across the county and start a fresh day in New York City. Ascending the cracked, smelly subway steps into the noisy city air feels like a homecoming. I’ve barely slept, but who cares because the streets are overflowing with coffee, pastries, bagel sandwiches, attractions, and distractions.
I carry a guidebook with me everywhere, debating which new places to visit on top of the sights I tend to see every time I’m in New York. I have no schedule except the curtain time of the play I have a ticket to the next night, and no agenda besides soaking up the energy and culture as much as possible. Even that almost feels like too much: How can one person, with only a few days to spare, properly appreciate this overwhelming city? I try my damnedest and get exhausted doing so, racking up thousands of daily steps more than usual.
It’s been only seven months since I lived out the fantasy (see Just in Time). I figured it would be at least a year before this particular craving bothered me again, but obviously I’m an addict because the slightest thing triggered me this week. At work, I browsed for something to listen to on my phone and found a playlist of New York-themed music. (I just signed up for the streaming service Qobuz and somehow it already knows who I am?) Much of it was familiar songs about the city by Billy Joel, Ryan Adams, and Jay-Z. There were also many songs named after Manhattan streets and neighborhoods, including three alone about 14th Street. I put it on while I worked.
Midway through, I was startled by a 30-second interlude of actual subway noises: squealing metal, the muffled ding of a departing train followed by the prerecorded warning to “stand clear of the closing doors”. It’s no shock that I felt instantly transported away from my desk in Oregon and onto a subway car in New York. What does surprise me is that after the music resumed, and several days later, I still feel an intense longing to be transported there. It’s closer to an ache.
I’m lucky that occasional cross-country travel is within my reach. I’ve thought for a long time that if I could afford to go to New York every year, I would, but there are pragmatic concerns beyond the spending of my own hard-earned money. My child has a college fund that could use some of the cash I would spend on plane tickets and a hotel. And arguably, my family unit would prefer that I save my vacation days for us instead of burning them on solo travel.
What’s more, I feel like there’s something unseemly about my desire—as if I have a secret lover or a substance addiction. It’s almost uncomfortable how badly I want to go sometimes.
I’m trying to scratch the itch in small, non-committal ways. It never hurts to fantasize. I look at flight schedules and think about which part of the city I might stay in next time. I replay previous visits in my head, trying to evoke memories of what thrills me about New York. Famous, familiar pieces of skyline rising around a patch of greenery in Central Park or Bryant Park or Madison Square Park. The strange comfort of being surrounded by people speaking in a variety of languages and accents. The borderline nosy enjoyment of watching them, wondering which of them live here and if so, how do they eke out a living.
The excitement of being in a Broadway audience as the house lights go down, then forgetting about the outside world for two hours. The in-crowd feeling of being crammed into the Comedy Cellar and waiting for famous comics to drop by and perform short sets. The feeling that culture is always just happening there. Art students are getting inspired at museums; rock bands are forming; writers in coffee shops are working to get a piece published; business and tech people are making deals; television shows are being filmed. It’s a constant hum that feels reassuring to me, perhaps because the noisy thoughts in my head are in good company there. Also the collective energy is an antidote to my small, ordinary life.
Reliving memories of my six(!) New York vacations can go pretty far toward soothing the beast. To folks who live there, the city is probably changing all the time in good ways and bad. To me, a perpetual tourist only scratching its surface, the city is always enjoyable and inspiring. I could go every month for the rest of my life and never fail to find something new.
