Where I come from: A New Yorker yearns to return to the city hit by coronavirus
By CHARLES E. KRAUS
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
MAY 23, 2020 | 10:00 AM
Hometown.(Frank Franklin II/AP)
I was set for my next return visit to the city. Few days, some of the old dives, updates with aging friends. Find out if Tannen’s Magic Store had moved yet again. Major stop at the Strand.
But, of course, due to circumstances beyond the control of anyone charged with controlling things, I’ve been authorized to stay put in Seattle.
Every once in a while, between pandemics, I do get back to the city that set me in motion. Heading to the scene of the crime is an ongoing process. I mean, really ongoing. Fifty plus years of plane, train and bus rides, from schools, the military, homesteads in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Eugene, and for the last 30 years, Seattle.
Doesn’t seem to matter where I am, New York continues to be an urge. My spontaneous responses to life have a Bronx point of view that features Manhattan aspects and too much exposure to Jimmy Breslin.
As a reward for sailing through my first year of college, dad lent me his American Rambler so I could take a road trip to Chicago. Somewhere in Ohio, I started feeling homesick. Thought it might be nice to talk with my mother. I pulled into a rest stop.
Back then, there were structures called phone booths and occupations called telephone operators. Using the General American Regionalism I thought I’d acquired in freshman diction class, I informed the operator that I wanted to place a long-distance call and reverse the charges to my parents’ home.
"Where in New York is that?” she inquired. Diction classes. Yeah, shore.
Each of my kids has taken a turn living in the city, so for a while I had free crash space. Later trips, I found oddball lofts, and from time to time sheltered in an East Village ashram that provided a mediative soundtrack, incense, complimentary fruit and outstanding bagels. Very Middle Eastern.
I am addicted to all the usual NYC stuff, the endless resources, cultural blending, the clear-eyed skepticism informed by a communal dose of sarcastic humor.
But there is something else. It’s invisible. I mean, you can see the evidence, the influence, but it is actually one of those implied forces. People who live in New York don’t realize it exists unless they move away and suddenly notice that the rest of the world takes place in slow motion. Or unless they’ve been sheltering in place.
I’m talking about energy. Synergy. High voltage atmospherics. New York does it. Does it fast. Does it efficiently.
I am old. You may have guessed. But I’m older in Seattle than in New York. Here, I mosey along. In the city of my birth, my gait picks up speed. Falls in with the pace. Obtains an mph that would exhaust me if I employed it on Seattle sidewalks.
Manhattan supercharges me. I walk and walk and walk. I’m caught in a flow of vitality that carries me.
I swear what I’m about to write is true. You got my word as a son of the Bronx. On my last visit, I walked so long and so far and so fast that when I got to the shamble of a room I was renting in a loft the proprietors were calling a hotel, I removed my shoes and the bottoms of my feet were black. Not dirty; I launder my socks. The soles of my feet had turned dark black.
Be well, New York. Here’s to better days. Stay-at-home goes away, I’m plotting my next visit. With better shoes.
