It’s hard to find something to say about New York that hasn’t already been said.
But the city, huge, noisy, arrogant, crowded, rude, grabs me by the heart every time I have the good fortune to visit. This trip is no different.
It’s mid-summer. The place is sweltering. It’s full of people, mostly tourists like us I am pretty sure. You get jostled, pushed, cursed at, honked at, and it’s always loud. My introvert inner soul quivers at the noise and the crowds. The constant motion around me.
Yet. Still. I love it here and love to visit. Short bursts of visit only, but visit I will.
As usual, we walked. And we walked and we walked. And we did the carriage ride. And we did the Staten Island Ferry. And we did Battery Park, and of course Central Park. And we sat and watched people. My list of things to do is still huge …. The Green Line is a big example.
I would love to see the Rockettes perform. I’ve never managed to be in town when they’ve had a show running. And when I’ve looked up the price of tickets I don’t know that I would be willing to take out a bank loan to buy a ticket. But my Mother was a dancer. And I think given the chance she’d have been a Rockette. She was a tap dancer extraordinaire. And later in life she discovered that she had been invited to join an overseas tour to entertain troops during WWII. But her mother, without consulting had refused the offer, and my Mother hadn’t found out until decades later. But she was a dancer beyond compare. So my heart would love to see the Rockettes beyond what I see by following them on facebook.
I marvel at the very being of New York. How can there be so much money, so much enterprise, so much spirit and ability to build a city like New York? The multitudes of skyscrapers. Most of them described as “the tallest in the city/state/country/world at the time they were built…” How much did it cost to build these fantasies in the sky? And some of them are pieces of art…the Chrysler Building is one of my favourites.
How are there enough people with enough money to live in them, run a business from them, populate them? How can there possibly be enough people with cash to buy the goods and services offered in these stores and businesses, to keep them all open? I am almost speehless (yet still my fingers fly over the keyboard) with the mystery of how New York City sustains itself
One of my favourite Netflix offerings is Pretend It’s a City. This Martin Scorsese series based on conversations with famous New Yorker Fran Lebovich (“wry writer, humorist and reconteur”) adds to the mystery of the place. I have watched it more than once and marvel.
I saw a tee shirt in New York that defines the place for me. It read. “Expensive AND difficult”. I’ve adopted it as my personal mantra as well as a description of New York.
We ate, we drank, we walked, we people watched, we sailed around the Statue of Liberty and we ate, drank and walked some more.
We’ll undoubtedly be back.