New York City was the first place I really ever felt at home.
When I moved there to go to college in 1979, it was a threatening place. The wheels seemed to have spun off the societal bus. There were muggings. Addicts. Homeless. Real estate people and investment bankers. There was no end to the danger.
But there was counterbalances.
There were stores and restaurants and newsstands that had been run by the same people for 30 years or 40 or 75 or more. Where they still did things, unabashedly, the right way. Even if it took a bit more time or cost a bit more money. Most places refused to make concessions to the modus vivendi--that is, selling out to Starbucks or McDonalds. Instead stuck to the modus New Yorkus.
After a while, you knew the guy at the fruit stand, in the Chinese place, the deli, the news stand, the bookstore. It was as close to Andy Griffith's Mayberry as a city of eight-million can be.
If you went to Zabar's, you got a schtickle of lox as a sample that could feed a family of four for a week. Up the street at H&H Bagels, hot bagels were made around the clock. You could burn the roof of your mouth and actually look forward to it. And in pre-internet days, there was the Saturday night at 11PM ritual of waiting for the Times truck at your preferred newsstand to get the Sunday paper Saturday night, put together with all its many sections with hands as expert as a surgeon's.
I'm not alone in this affection for the anti-Jeffersonian way of life. As Johan Borberg writes in his book "Open,"
The thing that really always got me about New York is that I believe nearly everybody, even the aforementioned muggers, drunks and drug addicts, and the guys making the bagels and slicing the lox and driving the cabs and sweeping the streets and throwing together the Times, had senses of humor. The energy of New York is like a particle accelerator and the accelerant has always been an element you won't find on the Periodic Table, but which should be number 1.
That element is found only in New York, and no matter how much you have while you're in New York, no matter how many years you've been storing it, using it, honing it, that element dissipates as soon as you crossover onto Long Island, or Westchester, or heaven forfend, Jersey.
The element is Kibbitzium.
I've appended it to the standard arrangement below.
What follows will strike some as wrong-headed. And maybe even xenophobic--unfairly dismissive of outsiders.
But there was a reason advertising was great when it pulsed with the energy of New York.
In New York, everyone everywhere was crowded together too closely. Apartments were small, dining room tables looked like lumberjack boarding houses at dinner time, with hands reaching for food and drink like light sabers in a Star Wars movie.
To stand out in such milieu, you needed a large dosage of Kibbitzium. You needed yuks, and volume. You needed speed and variety. You needed to get attention.
Living in New York is a competitive battle for attention.
Up here in the wilds of Connecticut, on a clear evening with mild temperatures, Tom texts me. He and his dog Pickle are in their fenced in yard with Jody and his dog, Izzy. I walk two-hundred yards and let Sparkle in through the white picket.
The dogs romp.
The men talk sports. Or gas mileage.
I want a hot poppy bagel.
And a laugh.
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