A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island
and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.
The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth,
the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents
but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.
– E.B. White

Four years ago, I started writing something that I never finished. Days before returning to New York to celebrate my 53^rd birthday, I found it:

Soon after we arrived in Brooklyn on Christmas Eve 2017… A friend gave me a copy of EB White’s Here is New York, which I read in one sitting. Soaking in his words, I was inspired to respond immediately in my notebook…

Thoughts of this city, the heartbeat of America to me, take me back as far as I can remember. There is something about landing here and sensing this as a place where people live rather than wait for life to happen. Where they live their gritty, imperfect truths.

A while ago G and I talked about the idea that when you live somewhere a part of you remains there, and returning to these places somehow returns you to yourself. (She hated the idea; I loved it.)

To this day, New York City houses my unfulfilled dreams, paths not taken, a youth un-savored, a furious quest for adulthood.

It is the oxygen source of many writers I adore: Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Dorothy Parker, Anna Quindlen. The “nearness of giants.”

It is the backdrop of a favorite childhood memory: seeing my dad, sitting in a large armchair in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, after my mother and I had been away for most of the year. At six, I fancied myself a soul sister of Eloise, just stopping by for a few nights rather than living there. She was naughty when I had to be good. She was my alter ego, and I got enormous vicarious joy from her peccadilloes.

Having known London, Paris, Athens, Tel Aviv and others by the time I was eight, I was in a position to judge the city from a child’s perspective, and while Hamley’s, Piccadilly and the Changing of the Guard ran a very close second, the hansom cabs of Central Park and the perfectly located FAO Schwartz made NYC a clear win.

I was a child discovering the waters of ex-patriatism, and it is in that light that I still see myself. From somewhere but not of it. Forever seeking to root.

At “home” in California, I always felt as lost as if I were in England, missing it. I cannot think of a time in which I did not feel a bit homesick, except in New York City.

Despite this, I never imagined college “in the East” as my mother would say; she always made it sound so posh. My sights were set on Stanford, a place I knew well for its generosity to local high school students’ programs. When a college tour awakened me to abandoned desires for a university in the Oxbridge lexicon, finding one in America sealed my wish list tight in orange and black. In many ways Princeton was where my two homes of California and England met. [For the sake of accuracy, it is another place where my abiding sense of homesickness lifted.] One hour from NYC, the city became our stepping-stone out of ivy-covered ivory towers into the real world via parties, summer jobs and real-life interviews.

The summer I turned twenty-one I lived here the longest, until now, doing some of the most wonderful, exciting and stupidest things I’ve ever done. My greatest regret still lives in these months, along with the greatest adventures before motherhood. Walking into a bar and finding college friends unexpectedly, being treated to my first legal drink at Bellini, “shooting the worm” and getting a t-shirt for it at Lucy’s, taking a daring trip into the East Village for a drag queen’s boutique of fake Chanel and other fabulous baubles. Sub-letting on Gay Street in the West Village. Rarely venturing anywhere near the Plaza or FAO.

Senior year sent me into the city quite frequently with the relish of knowing it better. It was in this spirit that I applied and got a job at a Wall Street law firm, and then declined it, in the bright stead of engagement.

Within five years, then living in LA, I was successful enough (italics necessary) to be included on business trips to NYC. Licensing Show. Toy Fair. Memories of the Javitz and rooms at the Rihga Royal where I would have my starving-actor sister-in-law over for room service. The first time the porter took me up to my corner room at the all-suites Rihga, I asked, “Is this all for me?” Still basically Eloise, swinging my legs on the upholstered chairs, just a little more free to be me.

Sadly, these trips took an early toll on our marriage, and I returned home, expanded and proud, smelling a bit of smoke and subway—foreign to X, not in his domain. I shrunk to fit back in place. Ultimately, I felt the need to shrink out of my job entirely and fit more neatly into a job with him, for him, but with no credit, financial or otherwise. I did not see the price tag until much later.

My goal soon switched to motherhood, but it was slow to come, preparing me, making my longing grow.

With X’s full support, I planned a trip to Manhattan for the weekend of my thirtieth birthday, in the intense heat of summer. Before the babies, before the beginning of the end. We stayed at the Rihga and had several friends for dinner in Sutton’s Place, at March. I had forgotten what heat and humidity felt like. It was a wonderful time, but there was a readiness to return west. It may sound silly to say, but I felt like New York belonged more to me than it did to my marriage even though it was where we first invited our romance. [I almost forget this now.]

The city was where I traveled with my parents, where I turned 21, where my mother umpired tennis at the US Open—a few years I met her there, some of our best memories. The city lit the fire within both of us; we always traveled well together.

Soon enough, I will complete another turn around the sun, and coincidence or otherwise, I will be in New York City. Birthday number three. 21. 30. 49.

My words stopped here, unedited except in transcription from hand to typewritten.
670 Sterling Pl, #1, Crown Heights/Brooklyn.
April 2018.

*

Finding my old writing is a bit like finding bits of my self. It interests me what I omit and what I rediscover within and between lines. What memories still hold a charge and which ones are almost forgotten, if not for my written record.

I revisit my words, opening tenderly to each reference. Dad. Mother. Childhood. College. Marriage. Anticipating motherhood. Adolescence (not referenced but inferred, it is the very reason we are in Brooklyn, for G to dance—along with her unexpected decision to live w X instead).

The losses and the gifts. Dark nights and bright lights.

In the re-reading, I recognize my first birthday in New York City was when I turned seven, around the corner from FAO Schwartz. I knew this, but hadn’t counted it. I wonder why? Perhaps I hadn’t known where the piece was going—this happens, sometimes, as I write a first draft, totally free to see.

In 2019, I will return to NYC to fulfill a long-held dream of living there indefinitely, adding my 50^th birthday to the list. But it will align with Covid, and I will leave again. [https://whereiendandshebegins.com/2020/05/19/on-missing/]

Recently, G read Here is New York. Memory of this unfinished piece surfaced, and I searched for it as, coincidence or not, I was about to complete another turn around the sun.

About to be in New York City.

Yet again.

This time, purely to celebrate.

*

Today I can publish six birthdays in New York City. 7. 21. 30. 49. 50. 53.

This year’s party contained a glorious sort of magic as the last two I spent completely alone (2020 by mandate, celebrated on Zoom; 2021 by choice, exploring Lake Erie). This year contained a rare sort of magic as someone else planned it all. And this year contained an exceptional sort of magic in light of many previous wishes.

After a beautiful chorus of Happy Birthday, I looked straight at the bright candle flame in front of me. There was a grand pause—ostensibly to take a photograph—which gave my heart a chance to sit in the moment. Surrounded by friends and loved-ones, I realized that I was in receipt of my deepest wish: to love and be loved. In a city that feels forever alive to me—holding the past, present and future at its intersections—offering seemingly endless possibility.

These days I think about my dark nights only occasionally. When I do, I think how dearly I would like to reach into that darkness and whisper in my own ear, one day, new love will replace the old. New memories will heal past pain.

Even if it feels like year after year they will not—remember this and hold on—

Wishes do come true.

Most of all: you belong to you.

Photo: Morgan Library, NYC