No Place Like It, No Place That I Know...

Sunday morning I caught the train down to New York City.  I was fortunate enough to have meetings scheduled for work the earlier part of this week and timed my arrival so that I'd have a few extra "free" hours in the city before it was time to get down to business on Monday.

It's no real secret how I feel about New York; I imagine that crazy, wild, wonderful, exhausting, pulsing city will maintain a special hold on my heart for all of my days.  Still, for some reason, on the train ride down to Manhattan, instead of giddy and excited, like I usually am when headed towards New York, I found myself in a sullen sort of state.  Part of it was that I was overtired and stressed about a multitude of things that all needed to be done at once.  It certainly didn't help that I had a frantic and rushed departure from my apartment to the train station -- because of course the cat decides to puke his breakfast up all over my kitchen floor two minutes before my taxi is arriving.  But there was something else bugging me that morning, something I couldn't completely put my finger on.  Do you know those moments when a sort of weepy melancholic state will just, bam, hit you out of nowhere?  It's like those mornings when you awake from an odd or upsetting dream and even though you know it was just a dream and not your reality you can't get your mind off whatever - or whoever - appeared the night before?  While I'm grateful that they don't descend terribly often in my world, I so hate when those emotions arrive.  Mostly because they can be hard to shake off immediately.  Though I try and remember, when melancholy decides to pay me a visit, that it won't stick around for forever.  It can't.  Perhaps one of my favorite books, The Power Of One, said it best: 
"You cannot prevent the birds of sadness from passing over your head, but you can prevent them from nesting in your hair." 

Anyway, my point is that I was in a rather rotten mood while en route to Manhattan.

******

Of course, as it is want to do, my heart lightened a bit once I made my way out of the cluster that is Penn Station and I sat in the back of my taxi cab, watching the city whiz by on a gorgeous early April afternoon, as my cabbie and I made our way downtown. Immediately after I'd checked into my hotel, hung up my dresses so the suitcase wrinkles would fall away, I headed outside.  My hotel was perfectly situated right on the line between TriBeCa and SoHo and I wandered toward Spring Street, intent on window shopping among the various designer and clothing boutiques in the area.  One of my favorite things to do in any city is roam its streets with no particular destination in mind, simply taking in the sights and sounds and people around me. 

I was doing just this, when my thoughts were interrupted by a man's voice.  Which, after a second or two, I realized was directed at me. I looked to my left, fully prepared to discover a crazy man was trying to talk to me.  Instead, the person that stood before me looked well dressed, put together, and not crazy in the slightest.  "I just wanted to tell you that I dig your outfit and your style."

I smiled and thanked him, my urban defenses still very much up and on guard.

"Seriously.  Your whole look is so...well, urban and hip. Well done.  And I dig that your sneakers are bright turquoise."

His statement made me laugh and I thanked him again, particularly for noticing my shoes, since I'd basically built my whole outfit around them that morning when I got dressed. "You know," I said in between sips of my smoothie, "some days you just wake up and you want to wear your pair of blue shoes."

He laughed and we talked for a few minutes about the usual sort of things that one talks to a stranger on the streets of Manhattan about - where we were from, what we did for work, etc, etc.  I was so taken aback by his kindness and authentic compliment (trust me when I tell you that I have enough street smarts to know when a dude is being a creeper versus genuinely chatting with you) that when he wished me a good day and turned to walk away, I had to stand for a moment on the corner of Lafayette and W. Houston to replay all that had just happened in the five minutes between us.

 ******

One of my biggest complaints about the dating world of Boston is that no one actually speaks to one another out in the city. And here, in a city of 8 million people, where I hadn't been for more than thirty minutes, I had a cute guy, my age, stopping me on the street corner to tell me that he digs my style. 

It was with that lighting bolt realization that I immediately turned on my heel toward the direction he'd walked, hoping against hope I could catch up with him.  "You didn't even ask his name!"I berated myself, as I searched the crowds standing at the crosswalk, wondering which way my fashion forward stranger had turned.

After a good five minutes of canvasing the area, I gave up my search, disappointed.  He was gone, of course.  That's what happens in a city as massive as New York.  And it is frustrating and aggravating and can leave one wondering "what if" for all of their days.

But you know?  It's also one of the things I absolutely love the most about New York. something I haven't quite found in any other city that I've lived in.

It is a city where anything - absolutely anything - can happen. 

You just have to be ready when it does.  

 ******

"I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."
Joan Didion