Day 321: Sometimes the Bad is the Good

When I think over my life, what I find most amusing are the things I miss. There are the obvious of course, my Mother, family gatherings when I was a child, eating whatever I want without gaining a pound, but I’m talking about the more frivolous. I found myself in New York City and it is the place I feel most at home in the world. It’s true it can be a hard place to live, but there is joy and comfort in the most unexpected of places. Most often, I find that I miss the oddities and eccentricities that once seemed so foreign and now feel like home.

Today there was an article in the Times about the looming threat of a doorman strike in the city. To most of us, that probably sounds fairly benign and I suppose in some ways it is, but it’s also a potential disaster for anyone that lives in a doorman building. They don’t just hold the doors open. They accept deliveries, run the elevators, admit guests, remove trash, operate freight elevators and storage areas, provide security and help load and unload your parcels. Doormen in the city are essential and if they walk, a part of the city stops.

A few years back, when I still lived in New York, we experienced an MTA strike. All the trains and busses were shut down, prevented from moving along with substitute operators by union laws. Jeff was in Afghanistan that winter and it pretty much sucked, except that the strike did something that made me fall in love with my city again, it gave me a community. Taxis began operating with a four passenger rule, meaning they would stop to pick up up to four separate riders, charging a flat fee for each. It was a hell of a lot easier to get a cab that week. Everyone worked together to make it palatable and as we rode together, complete strangers squished three across in the backseat, we were kind. The unspoken rule became that whoever was running late got dropped off first and we worked together in a way people who lived outside of the city would not understand.

I miss that people talking to themselves did not faze me, that street performers were routine, that every walk down the city streets was a fashion show of every kind. 9/11, the blackout, the transit strike, trash mountains on the street, 95 degree subway cars, bad attitudes, exploding manhole covers, cranes that fall off skyscrapers and kill passers by, and now possibly a doorman strike. New York City is a place of great tragedy and incredible surprises and I love and miss every single one of them. We lived in a doorman building; it was fantastic. Still, if the strike had happened then, we would have trudged forward, residents taking turns acting as doormen, chipping in to accept one another’s packages, possibly even talking to one another.

I miss what some people might consider the downsides to life in the city. To me, every day there was a gift and a possible surprise. For a girl who hates surprises, it’s the least likely conclusion and the one I cannot escape. I miss the noise, the crazy, the danger, the rats, the roaches, the trash, the subways, the heat, the cold, and that incredible energy that makes a concrete jungle come to life. I never thought the potential for a doorman strike would make me long for the city, but I wish I were there, because I miss all the bad that came with the tremendous good New York gave to me.