A Lovely Lady

A few years back I was home from school on Christmas break, enjoying the freedom of having no responsibilities and generally being a nuisance wherever I could. I was sleeping in to the wee hours of the afternoon and tossing the idea around of driving to Colorado a week before school and checking out the law school. It must have been the idea of having a lawyer son that pushed my dad into action, because one night he came home from work and told me he had set me up for a date with a coworker's neice. It has been a great ride since that first tentative date at Dave and Busters coming to a head when we married last January 27th, and every minute I spend with her is a blessing. Thank God for meddling relatives.

Thoughtless Commuting

Surprisingly one of the easiest adjustments I made was learning to live without a car. People ask if it is difficult to get places, if I miss the freedom of driving, if I feel trapped in the city with no easy manner for escape? No, not really. Like many others I loathed the daily struggle with traffic each day. I would scream and laugh and inch my way forward and arrive at work pissed off at the whole city. I was never one to anticipate a drive, my wife and I almost begging each other to take the wheel on trips of varying distance. A quick pop in to the dry cleaners or the grocery store or the increasingly rare trips to the gym were ok, but any hint of traffic jams or monotonous highway driving were sure to ruin a pleasant mood.

Living in the country's largest triumph of public transportation has been spoiling, to say the least. Each morning I stand amongst the flood of workers, peering down subway tunnels as we wait and pushing our way into cramped quarters. Arms are intermixed like a game of twister in the morning commute, feeling out poles and doors for a place to steady oneself. And despite how uncormfortable this could be it is unbothering. Each day I sit or stand with a book in tow and attempt to lose myself in the fiction. Between Peter Mayle and Richard Russo and the host of authors I have been reading lately there has been little chance to pause for worry. The time passes by and in about the same time as my previous commute I arrive, close up my book and start the day. Evenings are about the same, with heavy doses of people watching mixed in for good measure.

The Starting of a Blog

I have been poised to write this blog for sometime. For whatever reasons various peices of life aligned to keep me from it, and to focus the few moments I have for writing on other stories and other subjects. My wife and I have been in the city for 6 months now, half a year of eating and walking and observing on the upper west side. I can't say that I will ever be at ease here, but there is an unspoken beauty about the city. It's a subtle feeling that you overlook at first, overpowered by constant changing thoughts of "Oh my God what am I doing here?" and "I think I just saw Some Minor Celebrity!" The feeling builds inside and then one day I am walking through the park discussing the finer points of navigating Times Square tourist and panhandler obstacles. (Shuffle your feet!) And I've thought maybe I should write something about this crazy culture we are experiencing. I don't know if it needs stating here but I enjoy writing, at least in the free wheeling write whatever I feel like and it matters not if it makes sense or reads well manner. Someday I have hopes of writing something others might find worthy of reading or dare I dream it publishing. As I type this between glances over my shoulder at work to ensure I am not caught out, I know those dreams are far away. For now I can't pass up the opportunity to write about these experiences feeling out the city, however terrible my prose may be. I don't want to look back and remember with the heavy haze of years passed what it was like to live as a stranger in a strange land. So I have my challenge for this space, to record all the drama and going ons and what have yous of living in Gotham, and the experiences that come with it. And hopefully in taking up this challenge I will free the my inner novelist. I guess we'll find out.