I choose to live in a big American city because frankly, I stick out like a sore sport in most rural settings and my accountant says we can’t afford London. One of my earliest pre-school memories was a Trenton to New York City train ride with my mother on a blustery Saturday morning. How much of that early 1960s day trip I accurately recall and how much is anecdotal family filler (pulled, kneaded and peppered over the redolent decades around my parents’ kitchen table) I’m not quite sure. Still, certain sepia frames have been imprinted in my mind for life— gazing up at the sky scrapers whose dizzying heights give me vertigo to this day; creeping like a mouse through the bowels of The Museum of Natural History, terrified of the mummies and the smell of all that marble; seeing a man get his arm tore off by a taxi cab while standing at a busy Broadway corner…I’m pretty sure; sitting on a New York City phone book for a child’s eternity at Mamma Leone’s, waiting for the dessert course to arrive. Feeding the ducks in Central Park. Observing the landscape artists with easels and tams, their turpentined pigments slathered on thumb-holed palettes, probably all long dead by now but full of abstract perspective on that day. Not peeing my pants for the entire afternoon.
A similar ferment churned in my gut when I first strolled the arrondissements of Paris; same thing along the canals of Rome; and Gaudi’s Barcelona. And while I can easily inhale the woodsy fragrance of say, a Walden Pond (or even Dyer, Tennessee) without much complaint, I am clearly no Thoreau. Once you think you see a guy get his arm torn off in Times Square, you can never really go back to the suburbs. Not entirely.
As each year strikes like lightning, I find myself being both drawn to, and repelled from, the urban twist of what once was Sandburg’s Chicago with its animal sense of outcome and yellow inner eye… ‘ hog butcher for the world.’ Liebling’s Second City. On a calm evening the whispers can Read more
