Walking to Wholeness

I am not a New Yorker, but I spent three months there transitioning from Florida to Maine. I was trying to find my way further up north to Portland by applying for work, looking for an apartment in classified ads online, and preparing myself to start a new life.  In the meantime, I stayed with my sister in her Upper West Side studio (more like a room with bugs, outdated plumbing, and small and smelly appliances.)  Even so, I  quickly adapted to my new living arrangements, taking showers when my sister left for work, throwing all the toilet paper in the garbage instead of flushing it down the toilet, which was always backed up, and taking out the trash as soon as it was collected to avoid visits from the rodents. But, this city is not about your apartment; it's about walking its sidewalks, riding its trains, and taking it in - all the time.

 At first, I could not take the constant stimulation of NYC, as if every morning a firecracker went off in my face, and all I could do for the rest of the day was try to recuperate from the blinding flash. I was always distracted: fascinated by the young blind Asian woman who every morning and evening carefully and slowly navigated the sidewalks with a very long walking stick: Where was she going or coming from?; or the mother who looked through the garbage pails every evening for recyclable cans while her young daughter, who had down syndrome, whistled, skipped, and swung from every apartment building railing she walked by; or the same people who ate their hearty dinners alone at the Broadway Diner while staring with longing or disdain at the coupled others who walked the sidewalks outside; or the conversation I overhead on the train between the young man and a beautiful blonde who admitted that lately she found herself talking out loud. She said her solo conversations were more natural and heartfelt than those she had with others. She admitted they were getting louder and more interesting, and she was perfectly comfortable with it..  And she said this while her companion laughed nervously  

Maybe if I had been born in this metropolis I would belong to it. I would know how to focus (I recently read that this year's noble laureate  came from the same Bronx high school which produced nine other laureates in science).  I would not be bothered by the high-storey buildings stacked with people and living arrangements like dishes in a cabinet. Or, the sky that looked like it was smuggled its way between sides of buildings and edges of roofs. Or the bucketful of people poured every morning onto the streets, trains, buses, buildings, etc.
Even so, NYC has been my balm, an oasis after 10 years of raising kids on my own, working day and night-and all the hours in- between-dealing with hurricanes, a demanding mother and students who needed for me resolve this or that.  I was exhausted when I arrived, and I never thought that walking it off would be the answer. But, there was something about the speed of New York, akin to the speed of magic, where surprises and synchronicities fit naturally into the mundane and normal (the things I thought  and saw and wished for were announced to me in books I saw on stands on the streets, billboards in the trains...).  Because the city never stopped, it pulled me into its fury, madness, and purpose.

In New York, I walked 8 hours a days until I was no longer exhausted by the emotional and physical leftovers of my old life; or heartbroken from an amazing relationship that vanished; or fearful and anxious of starting a new life in Maine; or desirous of being rescued by another relationship; or avoiding the task of making sense of my own life; or worried about the thirty extra pounds I could never seem to lose.

I walked to Chinatown for dim sum, to the libraries to work on my online classes, to Sinatra's favorite Italian restaurant Patsy's for chicken parmigana, to pubs to try the Brooklyn beers, to see plays on and off Broadway, to all the museums on Park Avenue. I read 5 books in Central Park and walked every morning in Riverside Park. And, I didn't stop walking until I was whole again. Memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TT5DDWO