A New York Minute

I was there only 16 hours and indoors for 13 of them, but New York City was as familiar as if I hadn’t left in June 2006. It felt like home.

Walking the few blocks from Penn Station to Fifth Avenue and 35th Street on Wednesday afternoon, I heard four languages that were not English being spoken. I passed people whose skin was every color in the human spectrum. A homeless man explained how he was getting his life back together as he sold me a copy of The Onion. A few hours later, in Greenwich Village, another man asked me where Charles Street is and I was pleased to be taken, after nearly two years away, as a native.

You can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t the city out of the girl. It all felt right – the crowded sidewalks, the noise, the rude business people banging their briefcases into my shins as they scurried past, eyes focused on the middle distance, cell phones permanently attached to their ears. You don't see much of that here in Portland, Maine.

Before catching my return train yesterday morning, I walked my old neighborhood. My building, my beautiful, little, brick townhouse on Bedford Street, is boarded up, street trash collecting at the stoop. It’s empty. No one lives there now – Drew Barrymore, who owned the top apartment, is gone too - but it’s clear that no renovation is in progress or, maybe, has been halted for some reason.

The plexiglass on the front of the box on a wall down the street, mounted there to post announcements from the Bedford-Downing Block Association, which I started 15 years ago, is smashed, the postings curled and tattered. It looks abandoned, although the association will probably fix it during the annual spring cleanup.

It was early morning, 7AM, and the few people on the block were hurrying off to work. No one I recognized. The two guys who run the corner deli came out from behind the counter to hug me, big smiles on their faces. I bought a cup of coffee for old times’ sake and got some cash from the ATM. I must have done that a thousand times over the years; it felt familiar.

I was sorry the laundry, where all the best block gossip is exchanged, wasn’t open yet and I had no time to wait.

I wasn’t born in New York City, but it was home for almost 40 years and I will always miss it. The noise, the hubbub, the street energy fit me like a second skin. As the train pulled out of the tunnel in Queens, I looked back at the skyline and my eyes got misty. If I could afford it, I'd move back in a New York minute.

(I want to thank Naomi Dagen Bloom of A Little Red Hen for writing such a nice report about my appearance on the Brian Lehrer Live show on Wednesday evening.)

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Nikki Stern tells about letting off steam in The Beast Within.]