Its been raining in New York for days now and the streets look the way they do in all the movies with the lights reflecting and the people running with umbrellas over head, and newspapers and coats. The tourists curse it. He/she/they say it’s bad luck, bad timing, bad news. Rain in June? they ask. And their maps get wet and they’re slowed by the rain and so are the cars and the busses and my commute home.
All tourists do when they come here is spend too much money on stupid souvenirs, all that crap from junk-filled stores to try make the memory more real. I take home matchbooks and napkins I’ve written notes on and mental pictures of faces and distinct sounds of laughter, and figure I have legitimate mental souvenirs of every place I’ve ever been.
And you can find yourself sheltered from the storm in a little coffee shop and realize that you don’t need a map to get you to the places in life that you need to see. And you don’t need to spend money on anything more than a café latte to strike up a conversation with a normal person with a normal life to realize that New York in the rain is just as good as New York when it’s not.
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