Why New York?

The first in an occasional (or perhaps never to be repeated) series (I recognize that if this is a one-off, the word "series" is inaccurate) observation on why, after fifteen years, I still see those corny "I Love NY" t-shirts and think, "You know it, baby."

So today I'm on my way to pick up Lily at school and I'm walking up 32nd Street from the subway station trying to decide if I need yet another cup of coffee. At the end of the street I decide in the affirmative, and suddenly remember that there's a Dunkin' Donuts, like a comforting way-station to a Massachusetts native, one block south that I've walked by but never stopped in. I turn, and start the 20 second walk. As I walk, I look in the windows of the shops, which I've never actually done before on this particular block, because when I walk it, I always have Lily, and am preoccupied with her, or her massive amounts of stuff. I stop in front of a shop I have never noticed before, although I must have walked by it dozens of times.

It is a hat shop. It has an old fashioned name, something starting with a "B," I think, like Bartleby's Hats, although that isn't it at all. But you get the idea. And in the window are actual hats: not chic little knitted berets or baseball caps or ski-wear but real hats, wool and felt bowlers and houndstooth caps, hats with brims and structure, hats from straight out of a black-and-white movie. Although I can barely remember this, about as much as I can remember my father's brief foray into mustache-hood and my grandmother's fashion wigs, my father and my grandfather both had hats like these. JFK wore a hat like one of these. Men who were Men wore hats like these. Holden Caulfield had a hat like one of these, I am sure of it, to look older, more mature.

And as I stood there, looking in the window, I found myself thinking: Who wears hats like these today? How can this store, which somehow managed to give the impression it had been there for a hundred years (and maybe it has) stay in business?

And I kept standing there, staring in the window, and then I registered a man, an old man, wearing a sportcoat and leaning on a cane, trying on hats, considering them, and I somehow knew that he would buy one, although I had to keep walking then, if I wanted my coffee in time for school pick-up, which I did.

And as I walked back up the short block to Lily's school, which is in a building surrounded by Korean restaurants and delis, the ubiquitous Starbucks and CVS, I felt tremendously glad that this weird little hat shop, which I will never go in, never have need for, exists quite seemingly comfortably, right there on the corner of 31st and 5th. And that this little old man, who must have been 80, is walking around his neighborhood, maybe even this neighborhood, wearing an actual hat.

That's it. Thank you, NYC.