Lost in transit

The Same River Twice

This morning I dreamt that I had gone back in time, to the New York of my childhood.

I was down in the Village, walking along Sixth Avenue. It was a beautiful summer day, and the sunlight glinted off the old shop signs with their block letters and slanted scripts, and the rattley old buses, rectangular and homely, but looking like a real metal vehicle instead seeming to be made out of white plastic. I walked past the stores and marvelled at how many stores in New York used to last for decades, generations even: an old lunch cafe with its 40s-style speckled counter top and spinning stools; a small newspaper shop, the bright red "Optimo" cigar sign above the door and rows of the yellow boxes in the glass counter under the cash register; a shoe store with deep display windows that lined the hallway to the entrance, selling kid's school shoes and sensible women's pumps and conventional brown or black shoes for men.

I stood looking at the shoes, wondering if I went in there if they'd have pretzel nuggets and Archie comics for me like they did when my mother would take me for shoes when I was a child, and a bunch of laughing kids, four or five little boys, passed by, and stopped to bring me into their conversation, as you do when you want a disinterested third party to settle a bet. "What's the silliest name you can think of?" said the ringleader, a boy of about 10 with brown hair and eyes and caramel skin. "For a person or a pet?" I asked. They looked at each other briefly. "For a person!" I put my hand up to my chin, as if it were a matter of great import, and said, "Sylvester." This elicited instant shrieks and giggles, and they moved on down the sidewalk crowing "Sylvesterrrr!" at passing businessmen.

I was back in the NYC I loved, when it really was a crazy and special and cool place to live, to be from, different from the rest of America, from the rest of the world; before the big-box chain stores came in and took over old department stores and warehouses, with their giant signs that you could see along any interstate anywhere else; before that pit-bull of a mayor "cleaned up" Times Square for the Midwestern tourists, putting in all the franchises they can visit at home, and got rid of the strip clubs and dancing in gay bars and put up the street cameras and kicked out all the homeless people; before flimsy plastic cards replaced punch-cut metal subway tokens that clinked satisfyingly in your pocket; before Starbucks and Blackberries and cell phones and the internet, when everyone ordered a one-size coffee in Greek paper cups and got their news from the papers and the radio and the TV. Before my parents split up. Before the towers fell.

But that's thing about nostalgia. We don't cherish the way things were because they have any particular, inherent worth; things weren't necessarily better back in the old days, in fact, were rarely so. It's more that back then we lived with less of a burden of knowledge, of the past; the accretion of years and sadness was still so thin and light as to feel nonexistent. This is a necessary consequence of growing older and growing old, of seeing the old shops disappear, replaced by a new city we don't remember, and the new faces in the playground, wondering what sort of world they will be growing up in and how different it will be from ours. We turn to nostalgia not to relive the past, but to relieve the present: to be able to put aside for a bit the anxieties of a world we have little or no control over, to return to the one domain where we have complete mastery, a world that doesn't exist – that never existed – anywhere except in our own minds, and hearts. And in our dreams.

I woke up, feeling an ache for New York, desperate to be back there, back then, when I was happy to live there, when I never thought I could ever live anywhere else, and indeed never wanted to. But at the same time, knowing that that New York is gone forever, if it ever even existed, felt like I never want to step foot in the place again – because far worse than the feeling of not being there is the pain of having to leave it. Staying away from something you love is always easier than having to say goodbye.

Posted by wildsoda at March 20, 2007 12:44 AM