I’m on my way to New York.
As you may know, I grew up in Brooklyn, NY but I’ve been living in Israel for the last 16 years or so.
With six young kids, we don’t travel much. But I’ve been coming back to visit at least once a year to see family, especially my grandmother. (She left us this past December. See this post “Living with the turmoil inside.”
But coming to New York, specifically Manhattan, has always brought something up inside me.
I simply love the City.
There was a time when I was at school in New Jersey. Doing time, is what it felt like.
And once a month I ‘had’ to go in to Manhattan for an orthodontist appointment.
The bus was the 139. And every time I’d hear it roar by, every other day of the month, I’d feel a rush inside. Of anticipation. Of yearning.
Remember this famous passage from John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie?”
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself….A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
I still feel that way about going to Manhattan. It’s always been a refuge. An escape.
And if you can make it into mid-town Manhattan on Friday morning, March 21st I’d love to meet you.
Send me an email (or leave a comment if you don’t have my email) and let me know you’re interested I’ll reply with details.
Looking forward,
Dov Gordon
