Old Loves, New Lives

God, I love New York City.  I’m back here in the city of my birth just for the day to complete the apostillization of my birth certificate, one more piece of the residency visa puzzle that needs to be completed this week.

Although I used to visit NYC several times a year as a child because my extended family lived here, I’ve never been to the part of lower Manhattan where I am today, where the NY County Court and NY Department of State reside.  As I walk the streets, I marvel – as I always do  – not only at the continuously shifting kaleidoscope of humanity I encounter in every possible form, state of dress, ethnicity, and language but also at the variety and beauty of the architecture, old like the Woolworth Building, a grand elegant skyscraper and many other historic landmark buildings, all very imposing and majestic, and boldly new like the Freedom Tower being built at the World Trade Center site.

As I walk from lower Manhattan up through the noisy tumult of Broadway and then west through some of the quiet elegant streets of Greenwich Village, I appreciate the oases of green beauty, small and large, tucked in here and there, that humanize this great city.  Not to mention the olfactory and visual delight of  eateries at every turn of the head.  [Fun factoid – there are so many restaurants in the five boroughs that comprise New York City that you could eat in a different restaurant every hour of every day for your whole life (assuming an average length life) and still not run out of new places to eat!].

Yep,  New York City is in my blood.

Now that our embarkation to a new life in Ecuador is rapidly growing imminent, I find myself pondering Thomas Wolfe’s classic title, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and wondering if not wishing that weren’t true, despite decades of experience to the contrary.

While I know it’s inevitable with partings that one experiences a heightened sense of what has been good, true, and even precious about that which one is leaving behind, nonetheless I feel some wistfulness about this leaving, thus bringing Wolfe’s words to mind.

This particular state of mind was catalyzed by the recent Boston Marathon bombing.  Although I was born in New York, Boston is my hometown.  As Boston friends posted real-time bulletins on Facebook both the day of the bombing and in the days that followed as the suspects were killed and captured,  not only did I became keenly aware of my love for this great city in which I was fortunate to be raised, but I felt connected to the event, to the city, and to my friends and family there.  Part of me even wished briefly that I were there going through and sharing the experience with them.

Yes, I will always be a Bostonian.

As someone who lives more in the future and the present than the past, I can too easily minimize the value and affection that is so deeply embedded in those relationships I’ve had going back decades, some as far as childhood.  It is quite striking to me that as I now get ready to start another new chapter – if not a new life – I see once again there is nothing comparable to these old loves.

Being in contact with my Boston friends during and after the bombing, I had once again a palpable experience of the power of one’s cohort as part of one’s identity.  (The last time I experienced this was while visiting Hamburg, Germany in 2006 when I met a German man my same age and both of us were able to delight in how similar our cognitive and emotional frameworks were based on our particular shared experience of history.)  Mine is characterized by sharing a set of deeply progressive social values, coming of age in the 60’s knowing we all saw the Beatles first appearance in the U.S. on the  Ed Sullivan Show (not to mention all the other great classic rock, R & B, and folk performers of that era), sitting in our 8^th grade classrooms hearing the principal announce John F. Kennedy’s assassination followed so closely by those of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the social and political unrest we most likely participated in on our college campuses, protesting the Vietnam War, some of us venturing into the psycho-spiritual and personal growth movement, and even if we didn’t being quite aware of that dimension of life.

Fifty years later, I can look back and fully appreciate in a way I didn’t back then just how bonding and connecting are those shared experiences, memories and influences.  I wonder if I can create or find anew that sense of unspoken understanding, knowing, and the comfort that resides therein.  Will I at some point also experience myself as Ecuadorian?

When I’m hypnotized by my personality tendencies to worry and “glass half-empty” thinking, I lose sight of my old loves, and the richness with which they have endowed my life.  The great irony being, of course, that I wouldn’t appreciate them as fully were I not moving into the unknown.  You may not need this reminder but if you do, strengthen or refresh your connections, let people past and present know how much you treasure their friendships, and that you want to keep them in your life and consciousness even as you move into new realms.

That being said, who do you still want to become?

Tagged as: Boston, Cohorts, Connection, Identity, New York City, Pioneering