If nothing else there is (and will always be) the common bond of weather. It’s always there in the background, the topic of so many conversations, the easy ice-breaker. All comments always echoing the same thoughts: it’s so warm, can you believe all this rain? And the wind, my god the wind...
But whether the weather New York stays the same, and sometimes all you want is to get the feel of it the way the tourists do - this being a city of nothing but lights and excitement and possibility. Because once you’ve lived here a while all that can start to fade. It becomes just a place where you live, where you commute to work and come home and make dinner and go out for drinks with friends. So that’s why sometimes I like to walk down 5th avenue because it reminds me of how New York looks through outsiders eyes.
I walked down 5th avenue and sat on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral among the hoards of people and watched as they passed and I hugged my knees against my chest, (not from the cold) but from the rest of the world.
A middle-aged Italian couple sat down next to me, he had a map and she, donning a tan fedora, jeans and knee-high boots sat beside me and started smoking a cigarette. They were trying to find somewhere that I couldn’t understand, and while I cursed the fact that I took Russian in high school, (and that the wind took her smoke directly into my face), I wanted to go where they were going, I wanted to venture off with them, strangers who couldn’t understand.
She finally finished her cigarette with one last heavy drag and left it on the steps in her place. They must have figured it out finally, a destination, because they bounded right towards an empty cab and hopped in. The smoke still lingered in her absence and I thought about them as people and where they’ve come from and what their lives must be like. I’m sure they’ve had some tough times, (we all have) but there they were still, figuring out places to go and bounding towards taxis. That’s what I wanted to do at that moment, I wanted someone to come up to me with a map of where to go and take me with them, lead me by the arm into a yellow cab that would take us somewhere I wouldn’t have to think at all.
The wind picked up and the smoke from the fading orange ashes burnt out. That’s it. Sometimes it takes just being next to someone you don’t even know to make you realize the things you need to figure out in your life. I realized there on 5th avenue (and what other avenue in the world could afford such clarity!?) that I needed a map or a plan or a speeding cab or all three. I watched more people pass, cameras, necks tilting back so they could see the tops of the buildings, perhaps even the clear sky, all thinking: it’s so unseasonably warm, isn’t it?
The bells of a distant Cathedral started chiming Amazing Grace. I felt myself start to drift and the people passing now were just feet, just shoes, boots and sneakers and high heels. I watched them pace by, left right, left right, all with a plan or a map or a destination. They had it all figured out and I needed that too (don’t we all in a city so big and life so confusing?). Yet I remained motionless on the stairs, arms wrapping tighter, because I realized (the way you realize things on 5th avenue) that I am not a tourist. I am not passing through. I am here and so is New York, and the lights and the excitement and the possibility all just simply shift the longer you remain.
The weather here doesn’t make any sense, but then again nothing makes sense anymore. I sit directionless (and what is direction anyway?) as the bells ring in the air louder and echo over and over again how sweet, how sweet the sound.
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