[Joy Katz]
A composer friend in Manhattan writes:
“It is always fascinating and disturbingly intriguing to hear from those who are exploring or have taken the roads out of New York.”
It's a little-known fact that many New Yorkers dream of leaving, and their lives consist in large part of talking about why they still live there.
Here’s what it feels like to be in St Louis: I walked outside early this morning and realized I must still be all braced for my neighborhood in Brooklyn—the brownstones rising up an arm’s length away, the dark color of them always at least in my peripheral vision; the streetscape as living room, with the Laundromat loungers slamming their cigarette packs into their palms, the kids in the Bad House setting off bottle rockets during the long summer nights, the trash on that one block of Union Street I always forget to avoid. I was physically clenched for this transition from our apartment to the street.
Walking out the door in St Louis is like picking up a glass pitcher and discovering it’s plastic.
All this space! So much you can waste it. By waste it I mean swing both your arms out really wide on the sidewalk. Fling a lacrosse stick. You can use up the air. Exhale forcefully, suck in a couple of quarts. It smells like leaves, and like honeysuckle, and, most comfortingly—on certain paths in a nearby neighborhood where a great poet lived—like old books stored in slightly damp basements, or like dining rooms decorated in Swedish Modern in 1970.
Front porches are sitting there, just sitting there, like empty helipads. It’s so beautiful! It’s so funny! It’s like the world came to an end and someone left you all this. Here, you can just have it.
All right, I’m a hysteric, tiny in a large streetscape among the tolerant, obvious shapes of houses, a few parked cars. It’s so quiet you can hear the bark falling off the birches. Who is this woman standing there with the little dog? HA HA HA… you can hear her, if your bedroom window is open…
(No one notices. They are in other parts of their houses.)
New York quiet is boughten, lush, expensive. It’s spa quiet, with tingling windchimes on a recording, or it’s rare, like Thanksgiving morning in Soho. It’s a quiet you have to work for: take two trains to the library, to Wave Hill, find a sitter, turn on the noise machine, make a day of it, stay calm. In movies, other movies bleed through. Always always, footsteps overhead. In the subway, reading your book, the sound of headphones: a dozen whisks churring in metal mixing bowls.
Would I be so gleeful if I didn't have the din behind me? If the jackhammers hadn't loosened up my teeth? New York, once you’ve lived there, is always is present in your body. Maybe Gothamites in remission make the best St Louisians. I can't imagine not loving all this peace. What would Howard Nemerov have said?
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