A Hell of a Town

Forty five minutes early (unheard of) I arrived at Laguardia Airport and in short order was deep inside the cauldron that is New York.  It is a ‘hell of a town.’ as the song says.  The lyrics say ‘wonderful’ not ‘hell of’ but I bet you thought it was hell.  And it is, in both senses of the word.

Renewing my Palace of Memory

Have you heard of the “Palace of Memory?”  It is one version of a mnemonic practic in which you associate memories with visual things, in this case a vast palace.  But it can be any place.  For me, actual spots I know are where memories are most vivid.  Thus to return there is to remember what happened there.  I went back to New York to exercise my memory, which is quite truly a pilgrimage to my own past.

Going from the Q70 bus to the E line, I had plunged into my past, the 11 years I lived in this city during the height of my physical powers and the youth of my children.  Riding along, my legs got reacquainted with the literal rock and roll of the subway, a lullaby of sorts that brought back dreamy recollections of those days.

Hell is Mandatory, Heaven is Optional

But New York is not easy to love.  That’s one meaning of ‘hell of a town..’  To be in New York, especially Manhattan, is to be bathed in noise, dirt, crowds and confusion.  That is the bad hell part of it, and what visitors inevitably encounter.  Every city in America is different from the other, but New York is unique in its intensity – thanks to being on an archipelago – and that ramps up the hellacious parts.

My first morning I walked the perimeter of lower Manhattan from Battery Park to Castle Clinton to the Manhattan Bridge, then along Canal Street, back to my loft.  I slipped and fell on a frosty walkway, skinning my elbow, dodged tourists who park in mid sidewalk to take pictures, skirted moms with strollers, watched for dog leavings, all surrounded by the din of buses and trucks and cars.

That’s the helluva town part.  But there are compensations; only you have to go and get them.  The Met musuem is one, overwhelming in size and quality.  The Highline, an elevated park created from abandoned railtracks from the 19th century, is a tour de force of creativeurban beauty.  So also the walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn over the famous bridge.  These are unique and irrefutable heavenly moments.  But you have to go through ‘hell’ to get them.

Memories Live in Corners

Being the place where our kids grew up, most memories are of times with them here: the playground near our apartment, which still rings with kid laughs, and was a godsend on September 12, when the kids needed to play after that awful day. Smoke poured into the sky across the East River, a pall of gloom, but the kids laughed and played and saved us from despair.

The stone sidewalks where we went back and forth to school and church are still there.  Gone are many familiar businesses, which is the way of the city I know, but the upper floors of the enduring brownstones endure.  Here is where we used to eat out, I think, passing the place where a resstaurant used to be but is now gone.  There is the bagel store that opened soon after we arrived, busy as ever.  And yes, I bought one.

In my former church, the crannies have been repurposed, but seeing them repopulated my mind with what was there, and the people who were there and now mostly gone on to eternity.  And the evening I spent with a friend who was a parishioner, where I was almost exactly 20 years before after her husband died of a mean cancer and left her a widow in her mid forties with two teenagers.  I could see them clearly, though they now live far away.

Faithful Are the Wounds

Says the scripture.  Pain borne and endured seeps into the places like blood on a fabric.  It may fade but the outline remains.  September 11 and Brian’s untimely death are but two of the wounds that contain deep memories and deep meaning.

That’s why the hell of New York is as precious to me as the heaven.  I cannot help but wonder if they are – heaven and hell – not two things at all, but necessary to each other.

“Joy and woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine”

To live the Pilgrim Life is to accept the hell, the woe and pain, because in some mysterious way, it is heaven also.  I cannot explain it.  But

“It is right it should be so
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro the World we safely go”