Leaving New York

The silence on this blog has not been for lack of activity in the life of the minister that writes it.

Beth and I are moving--from New York City, our home for the last decade, to Decatur, GA, a small town within the city of Atlanta. On November 1st, we will begin service as co-pastors of the North Decatur Presbyterian Church. Our daughter, Margaret, is scheduled to transfer to Egelston Children's Hospital sometime next week. Our son, James has been bounced around a lot the last few weeks, and in between bouts of fussiness, he seems generally pleased to be moving into a new house that is close to Beth's family in Nashville whom he knows and loves.

In the coming days, perhaps I'll write more of my new home. But for today, talk of the one I've left.

Uprooting is hard. The metaphor of transplanting a tree for moving to a new city feels more and more apt. A few days before we left the city for good, a tornado ripped through Brooklyn, not a mile from our apartment in Windsor Terrace. Walking through the streets, it was an awful thing to see street trees--decades old--uprooted and lying on their sides. It was unnatural, sickening.


Pulling up all of my roots in New York City to get them safely to a new place has been similarly painful. I never so much thought of myself as a "New Yorker," but after a decade in one place, it's hard to deny that a part of you belongs there. Even if I never transferred all of my emotional attachment to New York and never gave it my whole heart, my roots had worked their way into the cracks of the concrete there. And despite my misgivings about the city (especially its rootlessness, its culture of selfish striving, and the sheer cost of life there), my roots had found good soil somewhere down under the surface.

I will miss New York. Here are things I miss already:
1) intensely local culture (a full life that can be lived on foot, without a car)
2) great food (from every culture, lovingly and often affordably prepared and served)
3) human diversity (the subway is the most magical place I've ever been or will ever go)
4) openness (building on the diversity, the city is so vast as to be unmanageable--there can be no dogmatism, no orthodoxy, because of its cultural and ideological many-ness... or much-ness... or everything-ness)
5) water (New York has recently re-discovered its waterways and they are spectacular and everywhere in the city)

Mostly, I think I will miss New York City as a daily test of my character. The old song suggests that "if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere." The truth behind that phrase is that New York is a test of one's character, simply to survive. Its breadth and diversity exposes your parochialisms. It forces you to be both strong and self-sufficient, but also expressly civil to others. It is not a place where old ways and traditions can carry you along upon their shoulders. You have to invent yourself, almost anew, each day in New York. You have to ask who you are, what you stand for, where you are going. I know I sound like Whitman.

What's amazing is that Whitman's New York hasn't really changed that much.

So here's Whitman, a piece, from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry:

It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not; 20
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d; 25
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

I too many and many a time cross’d the river, the sun half an hour high;
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, 30
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.

I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water,
Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward, 35
Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars, 40
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening, 45
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

4

These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you; 50
I project myself a moment to tell you—also I return.

I loved well those cities;
I loved well the stately and rapid river;
The men and women I saw were all near to me;
Others the same—others who look back on me, because I look’d forward to them; 55
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

5

What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

6

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine; 60
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution; 65
I too had receiv’d identity by my Body;

That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.