The Returned Townie
The streets of New York City are certainly not paved with gold, but there must be some magnetized alloy in the pavement of the five Burroughs that attracts the souls of the searching. You might assume the search is for fame, fortune, or adventure and you might be partly right, but really these people are searching for themselves: for what lights them up like Times Square and what parts of themselves are best avoided like…well, like Times Square. These people build up their tolerance to witnessing the absurd until nothing short of the smell of a conspicuously empty subway car can faze them. They are beholden to the magic that’s promised around every corner, just slightly out of reach. They are part of the throbbing nucleus of history and industry and culture and power and innovation and entertainment and LIFE. Then, one day, while floating in that nucleus - which could look like riding the subway or jogging in the park or eating lunch outside the office or having one too many pints at McSorley’s - it happens: they mistake the city as their own personality trait.
I know this because I’m one of them.
If this all sounds egotistical and self-serving let me assure you that it is. While I’m not confident I could have taken home the gold for name-dropping in the A-holeympics, I’m certain I’d have at least made Nationals. But what could I do? I had come there to find out who I was and I had found Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side and Astoria and Fort Greene and all these different neighborhoods I loved about myself! And then, nearly a decade later, I started dating someone who knew me before the glitter and grit of New York had settled into my skin, someone who knew where my bones were forged and, together, we agreed to go back home. We agreed to build a life that would expand beyond the two of us, a life that prioritized geographic closeness to our families, and a life on a quiet street with deer in the backyard beyond the fence. If you’re picturing a page out of a storybook at the moment, then I know you have never seen a deer up close in real life. They’re fuckin’ horses. It’s terrifying.
Despite the horror of proximity to woodland creatures, this life change has come with plenty of happy excitement and life experiences. Chief among them are marriage, parenthood, homeownership, and community building. It has taken learning and unlearning on my part, which I find fun. In fact, the only hiccup in my conversion to full-on suburbanite is my acceptance of my own townie-ism. I am still some crazed version of an elitist Crocodile Dundee in so many areas of my life. Take, for instance, a visit to a local playground:
“You call this a paaahk?”
“THIS is a PAAAHK.”
The truth, of course, is that they are both parks, one of them is more accessible to my kid, and I need to get the eff over myself. The ground my feet have trod does not determine who I am. That’s freeing, but it’s also a freefall when you feel like ‘who I am’ needs rebuilding. So here I am, trying to find the magic around every street corner in a place I knew throughout my childhood and where the streets curve on lazily instead of turning dramatically at right angles. I’m not a New Yorker anymore and maybe I never really was, but I have a few things the city left me with that I’m taking with me to my return to Townie-dom:
A city-honed work ethic.
An appreciation for the loneliness that exists in the most crowded places.
An acceptance of my own proclivity to search incessantly for what fires me up.
A corresponding acceptance that the search itself might just have to be enough on some occasions.
A deep respect for differing paths, for starting over, for starting late, and for the refusal to give up.
A vocabulary that would make a pirate blush.
New York didn’t make me, but it informed me and I’d be a fool not to put that information to good use here at home.