The View From There

I was in Jersey City last weekend for a family wedding. It was big and fun and festive, and once the party got started, it was loud. Live band, heavy bass, great for the dance floor but not so great for my tinnitus. I needed an occasional escape.

Fortunately, it was easy to step outside onto a promenade along the Hudson River to get some cool and quiet air. I took advantage more than once—sometimes to talk to my various cousins; sometimes just to stand at the railing and stare. The picture above is the view I was staring at.

It’s not an angle I was familiar with, having spent my New York City years either in Manhattan or in Brooklyn, with the opposite view of the skyline from across the East River. But even though I wasn’t used to looking at the city from the Jersey side, a lot of what I could see was familiar, as I had lived and worked in buildings and neighborhoods that were visible from where I was standing.

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The skyline has changed a lot since I lived there, most dramatically and horribly because of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. There’s a new tower there that didn’t exist when I was a New Yorker. At most, there was a pit that my office looked down upon (after my company moved downtown to, yes, take advantage of cheaper commercial real estate). I remember standing in our conference room, looking down at the construction site and wondering what was going to grow from that graveyard. I left before anything took root there.

Further uptown, I saw more buildings that didn’t exist back in my day. But a lot was still familiar. There was the World Financial Center, where I worked as a secretary for years while running a small theater company with my friends. There was the pier at the end of Christopher Street, near where I once lived, across from the Lucille Lortel Theater. There, further uptown, was the Empire State Building, obviously, where I had once taken my three-year old to give my wife some peace and quiet with our new infant son. So many places that held traces of my past, and hundreds more places hidden from view.

There’s an old science fiction story, I think by Robert Heinlein, in which someone describes what it’s like to view humans from outside the flow of time. Instead of discrete bodies occupying a particular space in a particular moment, we appear more like giant millipedes, occupying every place we’ve ever been, all at one—connected bodies stretching out behind us wherever we’ve been, and connected bodies stretching out ahead of us wherever we’re going to be.

Looking across the river at Manhattan, I thought about the younger me who walked up and down those streets: back and forth from the West Village to the East Village to teach school and attend rehearsals. Up and down Lexington Avenue to visit my grandmother. Up and down 6th Avenue to ride my bike (perilously) to the park on nice weekends. So many snaking lines crisscrossing the city and each other, marking my days and years there.

And more: there I was, as a child, in my first sojourn in the city, in my little blue blazer and the necktie that my father tied for me and left on a doorknob before going to work. There I was, walking with my mother down East End Avenue to go to school, or riding the crosstown bus with her to go see the dinosaurs. There I was, careening around Carl Shurz Park with my little corgi or riding my bike (perilously) along the cobblestones of the East River boardwalk.

There are parts of Millipede Me crisscrossing other places, of course: Atlanta, Tucson, the Berkshires, Virginia, Pennsylvania. And lines connecting one place to another as I moved from place to place. I’ve marked up the map pretty well in my 60+ years. But in my early childhood years and in my 30s, I spent a lot of time right there in New York City, and it was strange and a little wistful-making to stand across the river and think about those times and all the past versions of me that still existed out there, somewhere, if only I could see my whole life laid out in a single picture.

Some part of me is still there in that city, I thought, in all of those places, going to and fro full of dreams and hopes and fears—crossing my own path a million times, probably, just as I was crossing the paths of millions of others who had walked those streets before me, (also full of dreams and hopes and fears), never knowing they were there. Just as future young people will cross my ghostly paths, and maybe even follow some of my footsteps, without ever knowing it.

I don’t know why, but it was a comforting thought.

None of it is gone. Not even the old buildings. Everything changes, but somehow, everything remains.

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