City of Extremes, City of Contradictions

New York City: There’s something about living there that tugs at your soul and makes you feel like you’re really living in the world rather than just driving by it on a suburban street. When I taught high school there, my walk from home to school consisted of a treacherous crossing under the subway line at Queensboro Plaza and then walking along Queens Blvd (known as the Blvd of Death because of all the accidents that occur there), across a bridge, and down Thomson Ave--it was a miserable, gray, industrial, filthy, smelly walk, always accompanied by wind, traffic, and a few sketchy looking characters. I hated that walk, especially on rainy, snowy, or just cold days. But I remember it now with a sense of having really lived it, having braved the elements, having really connected with the city and the people around me. I don’t think I will remember my trips to Target that way.

Some of the contradictory extremes I see in New York:

It’s distinctly American: I think of all the flags that sprang up on doors, balconies, banisters, car antennas after September 11th as the rest of the country rallied around the city. Yet it’s also very un-American and international: I believe Flushing, Queens claims to be the most ethnically diverse zip code in the world; the subway line that connects the Asian neighborhoods in Flushing with Manhattan has been called "the International Express"; and my high school students literally could not get their minds around the idea that I am American and nothing else, that my family came from somewhere else but it was over a hundred years ago, and I’ve never known a member of my family who wasn’t born in the States—these things aren’t real to most of the students who attend the schools of New York City. It’s also the best place in the world to find cheap, authentic cuisine from anywhere in the world, and I mean anywhere: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, China, Japan, Thailand, India, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, Egypt, Lebanon, even Bulgaria, Bosnia, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Armenia, Indonesia, and the Carribean.

It’s a metropolis but also an intimate neighborhood, where we knew our butcher, baker, and green grocer, and the old Ukrainian woman on the bottom floor of the next-door building, who held our hands, kissed us, and insisted on babysitting our children ("when you have a baby") every time we walked out on the street.

It’s chic, fashionable, and classy; people live in brownstones in Brooklyn or doorman-attended apartment buildings on the upper west side; young singles and newly marrieds eat in trendy cafés and restaurants after buying flowers at the corner grocer on the way home from their corporate jobs; people shop at small boutiques in the Village or the large stores at Harold Square; people meet at Starbucks to pretend they’re European . . . oh, I mean, to talk art or literature over coffee sipped at small, indoor café tables. But it’s also down to earth, earthly, and down-right filthy, grimy, and full of ugliness—the ugliness of miles and miles of stone and cement, redeemed only by manicured flowerbeds and unspontaneous trees; the ugliness of homelessness made faceless by newspapers used as blankets and bodies turned to the wall; the ugliness of underpaid, overworked immigrants who man hotdog stands instead of teaching philosophy like they did in their home countries.

For me personally, New York equals Queens. Although native residents of Queens consider "the city" to be Manhattan and (some of them) rarely go there, "the city" for me and dh consisted mostly of the streets and avenues of Queens, the Italian salumeria on 30th Ave, the Greek imports store on 32nd Street, the Mexican restaurants on Broadway . . . Joey in Astoria and Floozgirl highlight all of it best. Our favorite part about living in Queens was being members of the church there, getting to know people that we otherwise wouldn’t have known if the church didn’t force us to serve and love those around us regardless of their background.

And, for me, the contradictory extremes of the city consisted of this place where I took on enormous Church responsibility and made good gay and lesbian friends. A place where I worked in the sexy halls of high-end publishing and taught remedial reading classes in a hallway with students sitting on file cabinets because there was no classroom available. A place where I sat at the feet of professors from one of the country’s best universities but did most of my learning wading into the lives of the city’s young people as they attended some of the country’s most failing schools. A place where my marriage flourished in its first three years but where my much-hoped-for first child wasn’t born.

Now that she has been born, I (and my dh, of course) have paid the city the highest tribute we possibly can: we’ve named our daughter after the New York neighborhood we came to love while we lived there: Astoria.