Nineteen years and counting
Right about now, 19 years ago, I looked out the airplane window and saw the Empire State Building, its lightening rod extended like an insistently poking finger, trying to make the sky understand. I’d left behind everything I knew and everyone I loved in Kansas, but the new life I’d chosen for myself was waiting for me here, and seeing it all spread out below me like a sprawling concrete welcome mat was all the evidence I needed that I’d made the right decision.
I still can’t believe it has been 19 years already, and next August, I expect 20 years will blow my mind completely. I was 25 and full of that youthful certainty that I could not fail, would never look back, and never grow old. It’s not that at 25 years old, I had convinced myself that I was immortal and invincible – that I was anything but had simply never occurred to me.
It’s amazing how much stuff life can cram into a span of 19 years. Since I blew an excited kiss to the Empire State Building that August day in 1994, I’ve been through wedding rings and rings of fire (in one case, that was the same ring), I’ve grown and learned and crashed and burned and loved and lost and laughed and cried. I would have gone through the same kinds of things if I’d stayed in my hometown, I’m sure, but somehow, life’s triumphs and tragedies are a richer experience when you know you’re where you are meant to be.
I live in a New Jersey suburb right now, but New York City is still my home base. I did some of my undergrad work at NYU, I get my hair done at a salon just down the street from Madison Square Garden, I have my favorite writing spot in Central Park. I’ve stood in the pouring rain on a Manhattan street corner to collect signatures on a Greenpeace petition, I’ve ridden the subway after one martini too many at Angelo & Maxies, I cried watching Ed Koch’s funeral. I am unapologetic about my love for doing “tourist stuff,” much to the chagrin of my local friends. I’ve wandered the echoing marble galleries of the Met, I’ve been to Yankee games, Mets games, Broadway shows, cocktail parties at Lincoln Center, the John Lennon “Imagine” memorial, and a taping of Letterman. I’ve seen the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree and stood in the crowds at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade many times. I’ve walked through the streets after dark, when the city feels more exciting and secretive than it does in the open light of day. New York is always where I go to think, to lose myself, to wake up to the reality that there is a world much bigger than my four walls, and how much a part of it I am is completely up to me.
So many people I know back in Kansas (and elsewhere) still don’t understand, much less share, my love affair with New York, and that’s okay. It’s not for everyone, I know that. If it was, it would be even more crowded than it is now, and no thanks. But for me, it’s right. For me, it’s home. Happy anniversary to me and the Big Apple. Nineteen years and counting.
On the observation deck of the Empire State Building, summer 1993 – the trip that sealed my destiny.
