Passing Through
Our drive to New York City today went pretty much as expected. On a Sunday morning in June, the week-ending population of New York usually doesn’t set out on the roads until the afternoon. That means we expected that our morning drive from the country to the city would be light traffic. That was the case right up until we got to that mess of a set of tangled roadways around Jersey City leading to the Holland Tunnel. I drove this route for ten years of teaching at Cornell and watched the infrastructure of the route deteriorate gradually and steadily until they put it into under-repair status. Some things don’t change much over two years and those mess of a roadway are among them. It was bumper to bumper for a few miles in New Jersey, but the tunnel moved fine. Canal Street in Manhattan was the same old mess it always was with street vendors all over the place and people double-parking to load and unload merchandise. When we finally got to the Manhattan Bridge, we suddenly realized that we had breezed right through Manhattan. That seemed strange.
Manhattan is not a casual place. People don’t just happen to live there. It takes a conscious choice and a proactive stance to do so. Manhattan is an exciting but challenging place. There are plenty of apartments and homes, but everything from cost to neighborhood (sometimes refined on a block-by-block basis) is a choice that needs to be made. Working in Manhattan means you live in Manhattan, in one of the outer-boroughs or one of the four or five surrounding suburban area. Anything outside of Manhattan becomes a commuting decision. Is it a one or two subway ride to work? How long are you willing to be on the train and which train that leaves you how close to your place of work? I once knew a guy who lived in New Canaan, Connecticut, a toney exurban slice of the especially good life. His Midtown Manhattan job got moved to lower Manhattan. That sucks, especially for someone not on the main line of Metro North, but on a spur like New Canaan, but plenty of people suffer that fate. But then, he got transferred to run a business for his firm in Jersey City, a lower-cost alternative workplace that has increasingly suited companies and worker bees alike. But that left this guy with a three-state commute where he had to deploy four or five modes of public transport each way. Even by New York City standards, that’s a bitch.
It is often said that every New Yorker lies about two things; his income and his commute. There is no honor in a short commute, but there is craziness attributed to any commute longer than an hour. Some people live further away to get more land or more serenity (which is hard to imagine since commutes are rarely serene and often overshadow one’s life). I think the pandemic has upended the whole commutation equation. What is indeterminate is whether this is for good or temporary.
But I lived through forty-three years of these choices and can honestly say I’ve tried them all. Out of those years I lived in the suburbs for thirteen years (30%), in the outer-boroughs for four years (9%), in Manhattan for twenty-four years (56%), which leaves two years (5%) during which I lived in Toronto and commuted by plane. I feel as though I have lived the entirety of the New York City lifestyles. I was neither about needing to live in New York at all costs nor about fighting to get out. I took everything one day at a time and just went with the flow. And the flow took me through a forty-three year career, which is a lifetime spent working in New York.
When I left New York fifteen months ago for California, I didn’t regret it and I didn’t look back. I have moved so much in my life that I have learned not to look back, but to just move forward and muscle through whatever it is. To be clear, the past fifteen months have been anything but normal. I haven’t even been able to think about returning or even looking back at New York. But now I am back here and trying to come to grips with the normal passages that everyone goes through upon retirement. My first goal is to reconnect with and hug my kids and grandkids, and that I have done now. Or at least I have done round one of that. Tomorrow will be round two, Tuesday will be round three and then in the following few weeks we will completely normalize the bonds and make everything right with the world again.
Passing through New York today seemed like a fun thing to do since it was really a choice made by my GPS. I figured we would get a brief preview of the new post-pandemic New York. Who knew it would all look exactly the same? Weirdly enough, we are in our Brooklyn hotel room watching a new Netflix series called Manifest, which is about a plane load of passengers that go through some sort of time warp and have to reconcile their lives to the wrinkle in time/space continuum they have suffered. I felt like we have had a version of the same thing happen to us. Everything around us looks the same, but feels entirely different. I’m not sure what it should have felt like, but I’m certain that it shouldn’t feel like we were just passing through. This was forty-three years of my life and thirty years of Kim’s. That is simply too much of two lives to be a brief encounter.
I once wrote a story I called A Brief Encounter, which was about a man trying to grapple with staying or leaving his home in New York. It is told through a story of a pair of boy’s jockey shorts that get lodged in a city tree outside his house. They age badly and then disappear as mysteriously as they had appeared. They were just passing through the man’s life for about a year to remind him about what was truly important to him. Billy Crystal in City Slickers did that through a cattle drive, but this man had to do that through a pair of deteriorating underwear. Strange coincidence and no less poignant. Nothing just passes through as simply as all of that and New York is too big a part of our lives to be trivialized by a ten minute car ride.