New Yorkers we'll be.

It’s surprising how quickly you’re forced to grow up. Even on the eve of my 60th birthday (if I’m fortunate enough to make it), I’m sure there will be something that will surprise me, something that will make me feel what I even then won’t want to accept - that there’s no going back, and then wishing, (perhaps), as I blow out the candles, that wasn’t the case.

Because you can think a lot of things, I think, about who you want to choose to become. As a kid you think you can choose, let yourself think you have infinite possibilities and non-expendable dreams. You even sat at home, like I did, in your little room in your little town thinking about a world outside of your own backyard, and aspiring to one day be a part of it.

Then one day, far from that when everything in your life is falling away from you faster than you can reach out and take hold of it, you’re sitting on the subway, barely awake, unable to read, thinking about your life and what’s becoming of it as you speed and stop, speed and stop 72nd, 66th, 59th...feeling like nothing makes sense, when a flash of light shakes you out of your stupor.
You look up only to notice that the foreign couple across from you in socks and sandals, just took your picture. Your gut reaction is to think that you got it all wrong, that the camera perhaps went off by accident. However upon further inspection you see them looking at you still and you feel oddly exposed. Through their thick accents they try to explain away your confused look: "We just wanted to take a picture of a real New Yorker," the man says, innocently.

It is then, I think, at that exact moment that you recognize who you are in the world. That before long the place you live can define your life. That your identity lies now in the pavement that surrounds you. However what’s the most interesting, is that until that stranger across from you said it, you’d seemingly forgotten through all the mess of life, about that thought you had all those years ago about leaving your small room and your small town to become something more, to become...a New Yorker?

You grow up and meanings change and things can happen from one point to the next that take you away from those divine thoughts of infinite possibility and non-expendable dreams. You regard the strangers now with silent smile of thanks simply for reminding you that not everything gets lost along the way.

I am a New Yorker you think to yourself that morning and that day and maybe even the rest of your life. Maybe that’s what will surprise me when I’m 60 - that I still am. What’s surprising now? That no matter how far away from home I go, how many pictures of me be in other people’s photo albums, or how fast I grow up - it’s easy (even if I sometimes forget) to remember that what I’ve chosen counts for something, even if most of the time it may not feel much like anything at all.