1977: I learn we are moving to upstate New York from our rented home in Clinton, Maryland. Dad will be stationed at Griffiss AFB, and I will come to learn about B-52 bombers. Once when I am mowing the lawn a B-52 comes in so low over our house, blotting out the sun for an instant. You mean New York City, I remember asking? Images of Welcome Back Kotter in my mind, maybe West Side Story; terrifying, filthy, loud. Oh no, Mom assures me: that is hours and hours away. Nothing like that.

1982: We get basic cable, MTV. Life changes immediately for the better as I first see drums being played, and a whole lot more. Package includes WOR-TV; in-between Tom and Jerry episodes I learn of another universe. Carvel ice cream, Crazy Eddie‘s where the prices are in-saaane, something astonishing called Rockaway Beach. Can we go, I wonder. No, we cannot.

1983: Junior high theatre club trip down from Rome to see Cats on Broadway. So much Thruway, gray skies and bouncing in a school bus (no, even better: a charter). We are told to avert our eyes through Times Square, which isn’t Disneyfied yet. We do not. Rum Tum Tugger, flashing eyes on actors running through the aisles in the dark, a proscenium of artful garbage buffed to a high polyurethane sheen, a beautiful Siamese cat dancer languid upstage. Meet and greet with Terrence V. Mann at the stage door; a Red Lobster? I get a burger. Long trip home through cold and dark treasuring up what I had seen, a world so strange, so magical, just over there.

1988: weekend in the big city from college in Connecticut with two dear frosh friends. One’s cousin is a high-roller bridge champion and has an apartment in Battery Park; he’s out of the country at a tournament and we will have the place to ourselves. Innocents abroad–I am, at least; half my friends it seems come from Stuyvesant or somewhere in New Jersey. I am too dazzled by their brilliance to be scared, I just laugh and laugh and try to keep up. Ordering a pizza from way too far away, it arrives cold with a $30 delivery charge. Strolling through SoHo, galleries and street art on a perfect blue spring morning. Eating the peppers you are not supposed to eat in Chinatown, wondering for a few minutes if I will need medical help. Up to the observation deck in the South Tower, maybe a glass floor? But so high, so impossibly and improbably high. I look down because when will I be here ever again, but it feels wrong to be this high. Back to campus in Connecticut weary, thrilled, scared. The world is so, so big.

1995: Visiting my sister and her husband on Long Island, he’s got a gig at SUNY Stonybrook. LIRR all the way into the city, so cold. Letterman theatre, Statue of Liberty I think? I have been inside the crown but cannot remember when or how…or maybe I am confusing it with the Arch in St. Louis. It takes a long time to get places when everybody lives in the same place.

1999: Fellowship interview at Teachers College Columbia University. I am heading to grad school: will it be here? Crashing with another dear college friend, bagels and coffee in the blue cups, you know the ones. TC like a Habitrail for people, all hidden corridors and improbable staircases. I tank the interview–not meant to be. Can’t figure out the mix of swagger and humility that counts around here. Also, where would we live with two dogs?

September 11, 2001: I am teaching middle school in Durham when it happens, and I make some choices I regret. Even though I lived in DC for six years, it is the horror in New York I feel most. Today I feel it all again. So do you. Our city in ruins.

2003-2005: Two or three trips with my curriculum job to NYC. We collaborate with folks at Bank Street and have a contract with city schools. I am so out of my depth but am paddling as fast as I can. I ride the subway and try to play it off cool but am tense and scared. My professor friend takes it all in stride: it’s just her commute. I attend an early AM professional development session in a basement classroom with a set of folks I will always picture, for good or ill, when I hear the neolib argument about unions making dead weight teachers that get pushed around from school to school but never get better. The hotel has free coffee; I drink it until I am glowing. This is the height of sophistication. I take a town car from LaGuardia instead of a cab and get chewed out when I submit my expense report. I go to the Village Vanguard twice, because I know where it is and it makes me feel almost like a local.

2008: Back to NYC for a grant meeting with the School of Medicine. My PI and I meet with another researcher for drinks at The Yale Club. I start to learn what “flex” means. I say something foolish in a big room full of people and feel foolish. If you can make it there…I realize maybe I can’t, and wonder if that’s okay. (It is.)

2017: Two nights in the city with my eldest son on college tour; he is checking out Hamilton and NYU, where he has a friend. Crashing with yet another old college buddy; wow, am I well-friended. The trash trucks run all night. Is it ever quiet here? Another Chinatown dinner, dumplings for days. After, we stumble into a Little Italy street fair, sausage and cannoli, why not, elbow to elbow with a thousand strangers, carried along in a gorgeous daze beneath a thousand twinkling lights. The next day I stomp around the Strand while he interviews. The city continues. The city will always continue.

I wonder at other timelines that might have placed us here. I know that I will never live here, but that it will always also be mine.

I Love New York.

Image of One World Trade Center By Praneeth Thalla – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149819824.