My New York

Dear Nana,

A few evenings ago I stood in front of my building on East 80th street and watched a family across the road as they stood in their New York City version of a front yard. Their townhouse has a small front patio, the closest that a New York City home can get to having a yard in the front, albeit concrete and gated and no more than 100 square feet. (They, no doubt, have a roof garden and perhaps a back yard, hidden from the likes of me and other passersby not so fortunate to have anything resembling outdoor space.)

The father and mother and their two young girls, both under the age of four, frolicked in their "front yard" admiring their new Halloween decorations - big, billowly balloons in the shapes of an eerie tree, headstones, skulls, and pumpkins. (It sounds a bit macabre, but it isn't at all. The puffiness of the balloon formations somehow softens the effect of a graveyard on one's street.) As I watched the little girls gleefully poking their new decorations, it occured to me that everyone who lives here has a different New York. The New York that these girls will grow up in will, in all likelihood, be much different than my New York. Theirs will include trips to Barney's for new patent leather shoes and school clothes, rigorous private school educations in which colleges are chosen and sought after before puberty, birthday parties to rival weddings, and countless trips in sleek Lincoln Continentals to avoid the pedestrian nature of the subway.

Whether or not I aspire to be like or unlike these people is unimportant. I simply highlight them here to make the point that every New Yorker's New York is individual. Your New York city began in Brooklyn during the heyday of the Brooklyn Dodgers when you lived within walking distance of Ebbets Field in a Flatbush that was a different universe than the Flatbush that exists now. Dad has told me that he could hear the roar of the crowd from his bedroom on warm summer nights as they cheered on Jackie Robinson, his childhood hero. Your New York later became the Upper East Side where you lived and worked as a teacher at PS 6 and Grandpa ran a bookstore on Madison Avenue. But I never knew you in that New York. I wasn't alive yet. Your New York, the one that I grew up hearing about, was a one-bedroom apartment on East End Avenue. When we visited you'd take us on walks by the East River and a stroll through Carl Schurz park. Your New York was the Metropolitan Opera house, Broadway matinees, and weekly movies with your best friend Beatrice. Your New York was dinner at Ottomanelli's where they had a delicious "steak" burger, long walks in your neighborhood, trips to the "market", and the New York Times in a chair by the window. (As I write this, your old newspaper stand that always held your Times sits beside my desk. It has been reincarnated as a music book holder containing Jim's guitar practice books. He's getting quite good I might add!)

My New York, although quite different from yours, intersects it in many places. I live, as you know, only a few blocks from where you lived, so my paths of today cross your paths of yesterday quite frequently. I go on runs by the East River often, passing your apartment and waving hello. PS 6 is around the corner. Ottomanelli's is just a ten-minute walk away.

And while my New York and your New York have similarities, my New York is, well, mine. Just as yours was yours. My New York is a small apartment on 80th Street, only steps away but miles apart from the neighbors across the street and their perfectly pruned windowboxes. My New York is the pub where Jim has worked for the last 8 years and where I first met him in 2001. My New York is walks and runs and picnics and Sunday Times crossword puzzles in Central Park. My New York is a glass of wine (or two or three) at a sidewalk cafe with a friend on an unseasonably warm October night. My New York is East Harlem where I go each weekday to teach in a wonderful little school that is small enough to feel like family. My New York is trips by subway downtown (and I mean below 42nd Street, Nana . . . I once asked you about 14th Street and you told me you hadn't been below 42nd Street in 30 years) where Jim and I wend our way through smaller streets and visit friends who live in the neighborhoods. My New York is running errands, something I absolutely love to do. Seriously. Because in New York it's just so easy! Everything is right nearby and I get absurdly satisfied when I efficiently map out my route to grocery store, bank, drug store, and home again.

And my New York just like your New York, is, quite simply, the most magnificent place in the world. When I was young and you visited us in Michigan, you would talk of your New York and it planted a seed in me. I wouldn't know it for years to come, but I would go there someday and I would live in the "city," a word that I thought belonged only to New York because you called it "the city" in such a way that it seemed like the only city in the world.

So here I am writing to you, Nana, from my New York which is no better or worse than anyone else's New York. Just different. And that's what makes New York City so unparalleled. Because on one block or on one subway or on one crosstown bus, one can find countless different New Yorks. And yet all of us with our uniquely individual New Yorks, have one thing in common. We adore it. And that, perhaps, is why, despite the differences between so many of us, New York continues to be "the city". It is a place where everyone fits in. It is a place that even we who have lived her for ten, twenty, fifty years, keep rediscovering and molding for our own.

As E.B. White wrote of New Yorkers: "although we have lived in New York . . . the place never seems anything but slightly incredible and we go along with our mouth open and face unbuttoned." My New York is more than slightly incredible to me, even in it's simplicity. And I have you to thank for planting that seed in me so many years ago, Nana. Here's to the next time our New Yorks cross paths.

Love, Katie