Sunday Morning in the City

Massive technological breakdowns here on many fronts, but all is resolved, and so am I: to begin anew, as spring sets in for real.

Yesterday, as is always true these days, our household was awake and active by very early morning, and because my father was here from Massachusetts, and because it is true that most bagels outside of New York (and even many of them inside New York) are inedible, I headed out into the post-dawn of an urban Sunday morning to acquire some good ones and bring them back for us all. 

I love city Sunday mornings, early, early. There is something post-Apocalyptic about the empty streets, the gray silence, the pigeons pecking abandoned fast-food wrappers in the gutters. I remember thinking years and years ago, on an early Sunday morning in another lifetime in another part of town: I can see how someone would think this was depressing--this gritty street scene--but I, I who grew up surrounded by manicured lawn and freshly-mown pastures, a pond with actual swans and flowering dogwood trees, I find it beautiful somehow, alive and real and, well, alive, in a way that my suburban landscapes never are.

I still remain amazed by how I love the city, how completely I took to it after years of fear and skepticism, how fully I melted into my neighborhood, each neighborhood after the other, once I found my pace on the sidewalks, exchanged nods with the men selling papers at the corner newsstands, walked the dog, or dogs, around the trees in the patches of earth that persist in growing things in spite of their beds of concrete. But even more, I surprise myself with the beauty I see in my city, and I can call it that now, and how when somebody else says to me, I can't imagine how you ever get used to the loudness, or the commotion or the press of bodies in the subway cars at rush hour, I always feel a little bit confused, as though my brain can't quite process what they are saying enough to send the message to my state-of-consciousness, and it's not that I don't see it or hear it, the dirty, the hot, the loud, the crazy, the sad, the angry, the grayness, the rumble, the siren, the too, too much, it's that I just don't see or hear it that way, that raised eyebrow, vaguely disapproving, faintly superior outsider kind of a way; I never have.

To me, child of a beautiful home in a beautiful yard on a beautiful street in a beautiful town there is so much alive here on every patch of dirty sidewalk, so much beauty in the faces on the stoops at sundown, the transactions at the newsstands, the friction of the shoulders bumped on subway platforms, the arms raised on city corners, the water flowing in the gutters from one street to the next, ad infinitum, as the people walk and climb, run and pass each other, smile and gaze ahead, headed for any of an infinite number of destinations, headed home.