ManicDDaily

I am planning to move from New York City in less than a week.  I will still be in and out of the City for work, etc., but I will no longer “maintain an abode” here, as they say in New York City income tax lingo.

I first moved to the City almost thirty-five years ago.  A cheap apartment had become available in my then boyfriend’s building.  (It is amazing how many life decisions are made in New York City based on real estate.)

We only heard about the apartment by chance–we were driving around Idaho when my boyfriend happened to call his super about some mail and found that a fire had burned out a tenant the night before.  (I don’t think the tenant had died, but honestly, I do not remember.  The only thing we focused on at the time was that the apartment was rent-stabilized and that we had better rush.)

Rent-stabilized, at that time anyway, meant cheap, i.e. affordable.

We hopped into my boyfriend’s van and hardly stopped to change drivers.  (The good thing about a van and out West was that two people could wiggle in and out of the driver’s seat with one foot maintaining, more or less, constant pressure on the gas.)

We got back to downtown NYC in fewer hours than should be legal, sweaty, window-blown and reeling from the sudden descent of Eastern skies –all that lowdown leafiness (much less the dinge of Manhattan), and, after delicately slipping a suitable reward to the super (a palm’s wad of crisp twenties), rejoiced.  (Which meant, got some really terrific pizza.)  (There is no pizza like true New York pizza.)

Of course, I couldn’t yet move in–smoke damage–but the apartment–a fifth floor walk-up with the bath tub next to the fridge (i.e. in the kitchen on concrete blocks)–was mine.

And so it went, through thick and thin, leafyness and damage, wads and wads (and wads) of twenties (and larger denominations), until, I realize, I have been here for most of my life.   Not, thankfully, in that apartment.  (Well, maybe I’m not so thankful.  It  really was cheap.)

I am not someone who grew up wanting to live here.  I certainly would not have come in the absence of that apartment (and okay, that boyfriend.)

But people are a bit like plants (or maybe just potatoes) – they are plopped some place and before they know it, they have put down roots, sent forth tendrils.  They entangle with that fence just to the side,  knot in the scraped brickface to the back,  fix themselves into whatever specks of earth (o.k. concrete) their feet find.  There’s inertia, but also–friends, jobs, family, and of course, familiarity — that family feeling we develop for a place, the comfort in our normal routes (even if rushed), the quiet calm that takes over us when our normal seat on the train or in our favorite restaurant is free, and that proud awe, almost a sense of ownership, we assume for wonders we come to know well–the entrances of museums, concert halls, the views down certain avenues or way up over our heads.

I am happy about the move and the fact is that I will still be in the City a great deal.    And yet, another part of me worries – oh yes- that still something may get left behind here, something I don’t know how to pack.

(PS – the above photo was taken a few days ago from Battery Park City, which is where I currently live, and which is absolutely nothing like my original neighborhood in NYC.  BPC is nice in its way too–beautiful–but definitely is lacking in some of the grit and character of that old neighborhood which was at the edge of Little Italy and Chinatown.  More on all that another time, if anyone is interested.)