My Lovely Hometown

I’ve never been in love with New York. I grew up here, I’ve lived all but a few years of my life here. There’s a lot about it I like, more than a few things I couldn’t live without. Like my family or my best friend, I love it and take it for granted, but that feeling that so many transplanted New Yorkers describe, especially from their early days here, the constant discovery and excitement -- downtown on Saturday night! bagels and the Times on Sunday morning! browsing at the Strand!– they’re what you do here, but do you have to get so gushy about it?

I used to feel that way when I lived in London, where even the grimiest Tube stop seemed romantic and old world-y, and running up to the top of a double decker bus was thrill every day. I thought maybe it was feeling I could only have for somewhere I hadn’t known forever.

Lately, though, I’ve had a surprising, Woody-Allen-movie-(in-his-prime) feeling about New York. The last leaves clinging to the trees in Central Park, a steam pipe venting on Lexington Avenue (is that a sight you’d see anywhere but New York? Of course not; other cities have utilities infrastructures that have been updated in the last 120 years), the Maya Lin clock in Penn Station – are these not beautiful? How could I not love this place?

Given my present mushy state of mind, it was a little disconcerting, then, to see not one, not two, but three people spit in front of me on the subway platform this morning, in less than five minutes. Them, I’m not so much in love with.