[transcribed] Visiting NYC

[chanaleh]

I'm on the bus out of Port Authority, back to Boston. I was visiting jessruth this weekend, since the Hans Koning publication party was Thursday night (on E. 69th St.).

I got to be a tourist all day Friday -- I walked from her place on E. 81st all the way down to the Empire State Building at 34th and 5th. It was amazing just walking (50 blocks) down Central Park and the streets of New York on a gorgeous fall day. I started off shopping around upper Madison and Lexington, bought a street guide to Manhattan ($8.00!), and had coffee and a muffin at Starbucks while I pored over it. Then I gravitated over to 5th, walked along the park, and reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had had some thought of going there (out of a sense of touristy duty), but since I didn't have that much time alone in the city, I decided that in all honesty I didn't feel like doing the museum. So I did the indulgent thing and toured the gift shop instead. Then I continued up [sic] 5th by way of FAO Schwarz -- which was surprisingly exciting -- they had a whole department of Star Wars, including a video display, life-size figures hanging from the ceiling, and a whole rack of pop-up scene birthday cards, which I almost bought one of for etrace. Then I walked on down to the Empire State (past Time-Life and Simon & Schuster on 6th, since I had detoured past Radio City Music Hall) and went up to the top of the building -- not to the very highest floor, the 102nd, which is all enclosed, but to the 86th-floor observatory, where you can walk around the outside like in Sleepless in Seattle. And then it was time to come down, get slightly disoriented, and take the 3rd Avenue bus back uptown (finally) so we could go to the 7:30 service at jessruth's temple of choice, Shaaray Tefila (Reform) at 77th (?) [79th] and 2nd. After which we went to her local Starbucks (a different one) and drank lattes in the upstairs loft on squishy couches while some guy on a guitar played cover tunes.

Saturday our mission was clothes shopping for jessruth's new job at GCI. Largely at the biggest, coolest Old Navy I've ever been in. And Saturday night we went to Lucky Cheng's, "the original drag restaurant" at the bottom of First Avenue. And then we walked a little bit around the "Rent neighborhood" -- Alphabet City and St. Mark's Place* -- before catching a cab home. And today we did the puzzle over bagels at H&H, like last time, and then I came home.

*Editor's note: It was on this excursion that I bought the stainless steel ring with the stars of David on it, that I would wear on my ring finger for the next several tumultuous years and come to imbue with great emotional significance. Some readers will recall this ring well.

Next time I want to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. And to eat at Ratner's on the Lower East Side. I have to go on a fact-finding mission for [the characters in my proposed first novel, still barely past outline form some 17 years later -- Ed.]. I think they should live in NYC, really, not Brookline -- even though it's always cool for authors to write about the places they actually live.

Anyway -- Manhattan is a fascinating place to be. Because it really is so much like its TV and movie self (Seinfeld and Mad About You and Fame and Crossing Delancey. And Simon & Garfunkel, and Harriet the Spy, and the Judy Blume books and everything). At least, if you have the money to participate. I told jessruth I don't see how anyone can live there and do anything but shop all the time. Though to me, the most defining element is the population of restaurants. There are so many -- the coffee-shop kind where some people really do seem to eat most of their meals, and the greasy sub shops, and then the actual nice places, each of which is so unique, yet almost interchangeable within the vastness of the mosaic. A lot like the people.

Something about the experience of being in Manhattan makes it qualitatively different from being any other place in the world. That quality permeates the experience; you can't just be your plain old self, you have to be yourself-in-Manhattan -- in some ways you have to be the city. Which is why it's no joke to call it the center of the world. There's something hugely unifying about it as an identity; it reminds me of a college campus in that way, with its own geography, systems, regulations, lingo, habits, and shape of existence. I actually think the geography influences that identity; the way all the avenues span the whole universe from north to south, and the clear-cut, orderly system of the numbered grid, make you feel that the entire space is yours to command. Boston, in its way, is much more a sprawl of loosely bound niches, little pockets of existence on a human scale. In NYC, you know you're a cell in a very large organ.