as we are
Hello. I’m writing from New York City, where I can assure you that the reports of our collective metropolitan death are greatly exaggerated.
Recently my husband and I traveled to Manhattan to see Central Park in her autumn finery. Much was different; much was the same. We took the ferry, not the subway (different). On the way home, tired and with aching feet, we were met with travel delays and garbled announcements over the loudspeaker (same as it ever was, just on the water instead of underground).
The park was teeming with people as it is every sunny autumn weekend, which felt familiar and reassuring, if a touch too crowded. But while it’s impossible to say for sure, it seemed–bizarrely–as though there were nary a tourist in sight. And instead of the lazy-afternoon-in-the-park atmosphere one might expect, there was a palpable “smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em” freneticism in the air: how many crisp, clear-skied days with 1%-positive Covid numbers would we be allotted this fall? (Precious few, as it turns out; as of today’s writing, the numbers are nearly 3%–and rising–and new lockdown measures are being considered.)
News of a 90% effective vaccine and (hallelujah!) a new president bring glimmers of hope to the final months of this grim year. But cases are skyrocketing throughout the country. The mutual contempt on both sides of the political aisle is depressing and exhausting. By any measure, a return to anything resembling “normal” life is a long way off.
Nevertheless, New York City is alive–occasionally bustling, even. She is neither a ghost town nor an “anarchist jurisdiction,” and while it is true that too many storefronts are boarded up and the marquees are all dark, it is also true that children’s music classes are taking place on Brooklyn stoops, clarinets and recorders squeaking merrily. Every Saturday morning, the farmers’ market offers its bounty of Renaissance painting-worthy lacinato kale, fat pumpkins, and darkly glowing eggplants. Jazz musicians perform ad hoc concerts in the park and even schlep their instruments to Smalls Jazz Club (just one set a night, for an audience of fifteen, but still!).
Anaïs Nin famously said, “We see things not as they are, but as we are,” and I suppose that’s true. Like the city I love, I too am plugging along as best I can in spite of all the fear and loss and worry. I do part time administrative work for a music school here in Brooklyn; my office is the kitchen table. The choral job I was so thrilled to land last winter has gone fully remote, so every week brings new music to learn and the ever-challenging task of making an iPhone video of myself singing alto lines without the intrusion of car horns, sirens, or construction noise. While I mourn the loss of my performing and touring career (and its attendant income), I am grateful to my bones for the work that remains, and duly chastened by the privilege of being able to work from home when so many brave and dedicated souls are reporting to work at grocery stores, hospitals, public transit, and other essential services.
Long runs (dodging the mask-less) and YouTube yoga classes keep my body moving and my mind off the headlines. Seasonal rituals have assumed new emotional significance: for the first time in years, we carved a jack-o’lantern this Halloween and it delighted us beyond all expectation. The evening meal–the planning, preparation, eating (natch)–sustains and soothes, acting as both anchor and buoy. Curiously, I’m in touch more regularly with friends than I was pre-Covid, thanks to bi-weekly play readings over Zoom and long, chatty email correspondences. One footfall at a time, one meal at a time, one connection at a time, we are making our way through this bewildering period.
I’ve just started reading Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiography, with an introduction by Gore Vidal. I haven’t gotten very far in the book yet, but I can’t stop thinking about what Vidal wrote about his younger days and the Greenwich Village party where he first met Guggenheim (and which he attended as a guest of Anaïs Nin):
“I still think that somewhere, even now, in a side street of New York City, that party is still going on and Anaïs is still alive and young and chéri is very young indeed, and James Agee is drinking too much and Laurence Vail is showing off some bottles that he has painted having first emptied them into himself as part of the creative process and André Breton is magisterial and Léger looks as if he himself could have made one of those bits of machinery that he liked to paint; and a world of color and humor is still going on–could be entered again if only one had not mislaid the address.”
Even as I type, somewhere, in a side street of the Village, a few jazz musicians are eating burgers at Corner Bistro, drunk on music and camaraderie and bourbon. Patrician Upper East Siders are “declining a Charlotte Russe, accepting a fig” at an elegant bistro. Tourists and broke young aspiring performers are queuing up at TKTS in Times Square for reduced-price Broadway tickets. Teenagers are hawking candy bars in a crowded subway car. The Metropolitan Opera is packed with patrons sipping champagne at intermission. Fans are cheering at Yankee Stadium.
Hear me, and know that this is true: this city is not “over.” New York City is very much alive. The party is still going on. We have simply–and temporarily–mislaid the address.