The Persistence of Memory

The view from my first bedroom window in New York.

When I was a teenager, I would look out to the mountains holding my small hometown in place and I wondered what my life would be like beyond them one day. I imagined big moments and monumental events in a “grown-up” fantasy that would play out somewhere else. My life experience was measured out in weighty milestones, like school years, driving tests, unrequited loves, summer jobs and college applications. Foolishly, I thought those were the things that would stand out in my memory and define the epoch of my adolescence. After all, everyone around me was placing such a high value on them.

Now at 30 years old, I can’t remember who spoke at my high school or university graduations. I don’t remember what scores I received on my college entrance exams, nor do I remember which awards were doled out at assemblies or who wore what to the prom. I do remember the purple silhouette of the mountains as the sun came up in the early mornings on my way to school. I remember the albums I listened to and how I felt when I heard them. I remember the posters on the wall and the placement of the furniture in my best friend’s bedroom, even the smell of the candles her mother would burn. The memories easiest to access are made up of all the little things that were just ordinary pieces of life, things that didn’t draw attention to themselves at the time.

After living in New York for more than half a decade, my mind has simmered things down to a similarly nuanced reduction of memories that bring together the essential flavors of my life here so far. Of the jobs, apartments, friendships, triumphs and tragedies that the city has rolled out before me, it’s the “insignificant” moments that have stayed with me more than the bigger ones. As one chapter of my life in New York recently came to a close and a new one began, my mind has gone back to many of these tiny threads that have woven themselves into my consciousness. 

• • • 

My first bedroom in the city was a nameless polygon shape which had one window that looked out at an angle to the air shaft between my building and the next. There wasn’t much to see aside from the bricks of the other buildings around me, and a gangly little tree that poked out of the concrete ground below. My first summer in that room was hot and humid, and being new to the city without a steady income, I couldn’t afford the luxury of air conditioning. By necessity, that window was opened as wide as possible all the time, which did little to cool the room, but it occasionally welcomed a hot sweaty breeze that did little to cool anything. What the room was lacking in terms of the view, it made up for with its colorful soundscape. Every night I would hear varied combinations of arguments in Spanish, scratchy salsa music playing from a blown-out radio, an aspiring opera singer practicing his baritone melodies, the college girl one floor below calling her boyfriend across the country (and the inevitable break-up that ensued), and a violinist repeating his musical progressions late into the evening. Sometimes I felt lonely, missing friends in far off places, but the chorus of neighbors who I never saw would make me feel less alone. Often, I’d play my guitar and look out into the air shaft, never seeing their faces. Now I wonder if my contribution to the soundscape meant as much to anyone else as theirs meant to me, or if it just became noise in the background.

• • • 

There is a quiet winding street that hugs the western perimeter of Morningside Park, perched on the top of a steep cliff that looks out over Central Harlem and the narrow park below. This rocky precipice is one of the few natural features in Manhattan that never bent to the will of greedy developers. There is a stone wall alongside the path with look-out balconies every so often, each offering a different vantage point of the cityscape beyond. At night, a series of street lamps cast a warm glow through the tree branches which transfigures the pathway into a theater of light and shadows. I’d walk along this route as often as possible, seeing how the shadows would change as the year progressed. I memorized the placement of the trees and the names carved into the stones of the stately apartment buildings across the road. Most often, I’d walk this path alone, but occasionally I would share the experience with worthy companions. It was a wonderful place to go if I was sad or anxious. For a while, it was a connecting line between various pieces of my life, many of which I can’t recall specifically now. It is a place frozen in time, in a dreamy quiet way that makes one feel timeless along with it. I’ve moved three times since then; experienced the charms of other neighborhoods, but that little street in Morningside Heights has stayed with me. 

• • • 

The Hotel Fane is a dirty run-down brownstone on 135th Street with a rusty red sign displaying the establishment's name, hanging precariously one floor above the street. It is three or four doors down from an apartment I lived in for two years, and I’d pass by it almost daily. If you happen to look inside as the front door swings open, you’ll notice a tired wooden staircase that is well-worn and in need of repair. Outside, on the concrete stoop of the building, there are always several fatigued women, usually smoking cigarettes, and often recounting the struggles of their days to anyone around to listen. Their faces are strained with worry and their laughter is infectious. Each day that I lived on that street brought a new crop of these ladies, but each day was the same. Weary women in transition were the only guests of the hotel, which I later found out was a halfway house for folks getting their lives back together after whatever struggle had come before. There was something comforting about knowing they’d always be there, even though they were always different. The smells of their cigarettes and the sounds of their chatter were something I could always count on, and I loved them for it, especially during times when my life seemed anything but stable. I regret to admit that I never took the time to know any of these people, but even still, they were important to me. The residents of the Hotel Fane, though ephemeral individually, as a group made my little stretch of 135th Street special. It’s funny how people you never speak to and see for only a few seconds at a time can become part of your identity, but that’s how it was. Someday soon, when all of Harlem is nothing but high-rent condos and boutique hotels (as the rest of Manhattan has become), I’m sure the Hotel Fane will be another casualty of gentrification, lost to memory, but I’m grateful that it will always be part of mine. 

• • • 

Jones Street is a mostly un-noticed street that only extends one block between Bleecker and West 4th Streets in Greenwich Village. It’s usually very quiet and is home to some of the last remnants of the old Beatnik New York, which has otherwise been consumed by Starbucks franchises and Chase Banks in the rest of the neighborhood. It was the backdrop to Bob Dylan’s album cover for “The Freewheelin’” in 1963, and the backdrop to many days in my life for a couple of years a few decades later. It’s a wonderful street to walk down early in the mornings, shortly after the sun rises. On one end, you’ll pass by Caffe Vivaldi and see the chairs neatly stacked up on top of the tables and the glasses all collected behind the cozy bar in the back. Even though the musicians have all gone home, you can almost hear the tones of their nightly performances, still hanging in the air around the piano off to one shadowy corner hidden from the morning light shining through the windows. Across, you’ll see the bottles glistening in the windows of Jones Street Wines, and subsequently, many empty discards from that point of origin already stacked up in the trashcans of buildings along the street. A little further down, a combination dry cleaning and consignment clothing store is perched above a narrow green staircase, with displays in the windows that harken back to a bygone era. A bit further down, you’ll hear the noise coming from the Florence Prime Meat Market as the trucks are unloaded with ominous packages of frozen animal parts being carried into the basement. Old timers in the neighborhood will tell you that Jackie O. used to buy her Sunday roasts there every week, but there are few left who would have witnessed it. And just next door is a window full of 33rpm Album Covers, showing off copies from bands like The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols or the Talking Heads. Although the exact nights I spent on that street with someone dear to me for a while all blur together in a haze of memories, those morning walks to the subway along the uneven pavement of Jones Street were a pleasure of their own. It represents a time in my life that brought many happy moments. Sometimes, when I'm in the neighborhood, I'll take a detour through Jones Street and transport myself back to those mornings which have since been tucked away in my mind.

• • •

As I look back on these things, I wonder which of the innocuous moments of my life now will make the grade and become part of my future history, and which things will fade away.

A collection of momentary romances...

The Harlem sky from my bedroom window.

It is true that I fall in love at least a dozen times a day, sometimes more depending on how many subway rides I might take. Some of these little romances take place for 30, 60, even 90 seconds. Some can last as long as an entire commute if I'm lucky, but they all end in relatively the same way. One moment I'll be sitting (or more often standing and bracing myself against a pole, trying to avoid the sharp elbows and shoulders of others around me) with my nose in a book, and then I'll look up as I turn the page and catch my eye on a person for whom my heart melts like hot butter. Almost as quickly as they appear, they just as easily disappear and then the day continues on...

The violinist:

One evening while changing trains in the labyrinth of tunnels that are tangled beneath the 42nd Street (Times Square) subway station, I took the immense transverse that runs beneath 7th and 8th Avenues. There are times of the day when the maze of tiled passages contain streams of tens of thousands of people all scurrying about rapidly in different directions like ants coming up out of a crack in the earth. There is always the distinct smell of ancient grime, mechanical exhaust and fried food that expands and contracts depending on the weather. Within this vast network of chutes and ladders one can find a wide variety of entertainment from performers to evangelists hoping to make any sort of dent in this ceaseless rumble of footsteps and voices echoing below the city's surface.

At one point there is a very long and steep ramp that runs between the number 7 Train and the A Train. It is lined with mosaics and often with large posters advertising current Broadway shows that can be seen on the streets just above. On this particular evening, I had run out of batteries on my iPod, and as a result, I was unusually more attentive to the sounds around me than I would be otherwise. From the bottom of the great ramp, I could hear something in the distance which was sweet and melodic cutting through the thunder of stampeding humans bounding down the tunnel ahead. It was the faint sound of a violin, singing a sadly beautiful theme. There are often musicians and beggars who frequent this corridor, but rarely do any sound quite as gracefully as what I was vaguely hearing from afar. My pace quickened as I headed forward with curiosity into the great crowd around me. My heartbeat began to hasten as I recognized the tune playing was Chopin's Nocturne. As I drew closer, it echoed through the walls of the tunnel, transforming it into a concert hall rather than a dirty metro station. The tune was being performed with such intimate familiarity that it sounded mournfully sublime. Finally, I was close enough to catch a glimpse of the musician.

He was a smallish man, probably in his mid 30's. He was clean and simple looking. His eyes were closed and his expression was fixed somewhere inside of his mind. He had a black violin case lined with red velvet opened in front of him, and passersby had dropped a few small bills and coins inside. For the most part, he was passed by without a great deal of attention, for after all, a subway station is not a place one generally goes to doddle. Although I had somewhere to go and a train to get to, I stopped for several minutes and listened as he continued to play. If he would have asked me at that moment, I would have surely agreed to marry him, but his eyes never really opened and his awareness of anything but his music didn't seem to falter. Reluctantly, I left after depositing into the velvet-lined case all the change I could find in my pockets (probably amounting to about $1.25). As I turned the corner and the sound of his music faded into the sea of strangers passing by, I made my way to the Uptown A Train with a smile on my face and song that repeated in my head throughout my journey home.

The artist:

There is a section of the A Train that runs express (without stopping) from 59th Street Columbus Circle to 125th Street in Harlem. It is one of the longest singular uninterrupted runs one can take on the New York City Subway. If things are running smoothly, which is often a gamble, from stop to stop it takes about 8 or 9 minutes. This gives one enough time to get involved in some sort of diversion that can make the trip more pleasant, if not interrupted by preachers, political activists, performers or starving mothers begging for change. After a long day of work and running around the city, it's a little treat I often look forward to. I've seen so many peculiar and noteworthy things during this special ride that I could expound for volumes, but at the moment one particular story stands out.

It was one night when I had met a friend for a beer after work at one of those chintzy little Irish pubs that line the streets outside of Penn Station. Was it the Molly Wee Pub, The Blarney Stone or perhaps the Tempest? I'm not quite sure. All I remember is that I had a couple of good stouts in me and I was feeling hopeful about the world. I got on the uptown A Train at 34th Street and by 42nd Street, a group of fashionable young girls got on in my car and took a seat across from me. They all had thick Boston accents, and in their "foreign" dialect, they chattered about nothing of consequence, but the sounds and phrases they used were quite entertaining to me. One of the girls had a particularly flashy pair of boots on, something one would probably find in a mall somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, complete with all sorts of dazzle that made a sure statement of taste. Despite this, and perhaps because of the warm glow I was feeling from the Guinness I had been sipping just moments before, I decided I'd withhold judgment and observe the entertainment before me without expending the unnecessary energy required to mock silently in my own stream of consciousness (or at least I kept it to a bare minimum).

We had passed 59th street, making our way on the long uninterrupted express journey to Harlem, just as one of the girls started talking about something related to Baseball that began to derail my interest. I noticed a hand moving ever so quickly across a page out of the corner of my eye. I discovered a dark thin man in shabby jeans with ink-stained fingers sitting a few seats away from me on the same side of the train car. He had a head full of curly black hair that was pulled back into a little pony tail, revealing a square jaw and a long angular neck. I looked down and saw that he had also made notice of the ridiculous boots of the Bostonian girl in front of us, and he was quickly trying to capture them in a drawing with his pen. He had written some sort of caption above, which I was not close enough to see, but I hoped it said something like "Boston Bedazzled." From what I could see, his line quality and style were reminiscent of Egon Schiele (one of my favorite artists) and for the next 4 minutes I had fallen in love. In my head, Franz Liszt's Liebestraum played, and the rest of the ride was a joy until, inevitably, I had to get off at 125th street and head home to my apartment with visions of the curly haired artist accompanying me along the way. I never saw him again, nor the girls from Boston, but just the same, I'd fallen in love for a good several minutes of my commute which is more than most can hope for in a week.

The Google lackey:

Manhattan decidedly has now joined the world of the tech industry with several large Silicon Valley entities setting up sad little East Coast satellites in old industrial buildings that had seen much better days long ago. It wasn't enough that we in New York had to control publishing, news media, the stock market, the fashion industry, the art world and a number of other trades, but now we've got our fingers in the ever expanding world of the intangible "tech bubble." Situated in Chelsea, in the old Port Authority of New York building, the fortress of Google looks out over the Hudson river, developing new ways to add the woes of New Yorkers to a collection of monetizable analytics. In this relatively new fortress exists an army of awkwardly intelligent minions that can be often recognized without a great deal of effort. They're generally a shade or two more pale than the average person, with insect-like reflexes, a style of dress that reminds one of the folks seen waiting in line at the last Star Wars premiere, and then there's the unmistakable Google lanyard many of them forget to conceal when they leave the building (although I think that some of them purposefully display it as a badge of honor).

One morning, as I stumbled upon the train to work, bleary from an eventful night before, I happened to get squished quite compactly into a very full car. Some insufferable old woman demanded to change seats after the train had already begun moving, which stirred the condensed soup of people into new directions of consolidation. As a general understood rule of train etiquette, once the train begins moving, wherever you have found yourself, you will remain until at least the next stop. The only people who are exempt from this rule are the elderly and Eastern Europeans who just can't seem to get it together on rapid transit. In all the commotion I found myself pushed up against a tall thin man with glasses and a backpack with a water pouch built in. He had the first three signs of Google: the pallid skin, the Lord of the Rings T Shirt and the most definitive - the multicolored and iridescent Google lanyard! My face suddenly found a great smirk growing across it, although I knew not why. I thought to myself, "What about this person makes me chuckle? Sure, he was probably a member of his High School's Audio Visual Club and he probably has a collection of Babylon Five DVD's in his apartment, but how is that so different than me? After all, I was in my school's Lunchtime Library Book Group (which had about 5 members) and I have a whole collection of Woody Allen films in my own apartment that I've memorized forward and backward..."

As I had this little existential debate in my own head regarding which person's brand of nerdiness was more noble, I noticed that Google boy had a pair of very beautiful green eyes behind his glasses. In fact, with less hair gel and perhaps a more neutral T Shirt, Google boy would have been very handsome. Then I looked down and saw that he was reading a biography of Beethoven which made me think of my favorite Beethoven piece, the 2nd movement from Sonata Number 8 (the Pathetique). In realizing that our mutual brands of nerd-dom had found a middle ground, I found Google boy to be quite loveable. For the next two minutes, I debated whether or not backpacks with water reservoirs inside were really so aesthetically bad. As the crowd expanded and contracted at the next stop, he was wrenched from my sight, but throughout the rest of that day, bleary as I may have been, I had a new appreciation for Google.

• • •
There are many other stories I could tell, but these give a small sprinkling of what awaits passengers on the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York. I'm not sure what the moral of the story may be, or if there really ought to be one, but suffice it to say that the older I become, the less I can control my own ability to fall madly in and out of love within the duration of a train ride. Some of these little experiences offer me insights into myself, others offer me warnings about myself, but mostly they are a good source of entertainment that I couldn't imagine finding anywhere else.

"White people really DO eat fried chicken..."

"Harlem Grandmothers" circa 1910, a decoration in the 125th St. & St. Nicholas Ave. subway station.

Harlem is a world unto itself, a world that is slowly becoming more and more familiar to me. I live just on the cusp of Harlem, in a strange little bubble that is created by and surrounds Columbia University. My street is rather quiet, mostly full of Columbia students or retirees, but a mere two blocks away lies 125th street, which is where Columbia ends and Harlem officially begins, at least west of Morningside Park.

Coming from my rather sheltered upbringing in my tiny mountain town, 125th street is still quite a novelty to me. For example, growing up in Colorado, I had never seen a sew-in weave shop, and on this one street, there are at least 20 of them that all offer affordable miracles in the matter of an afternoon. The ladies who come out of these establishments seem to glow as they walk out into the world, admiring their new lovely styles in store window reflections as they pass. The world on the street, aside from being filled with fashionable Harlem ladies, is a confluence of so many sounds, sights and smells that it can be a little overwhelming. For as many weave shops exist, there is an equivalent number of soul food restaurants and fried chicken cafés that offer hearty aromas as you pass by.

A few days ago, while running some errands on 125th, I decided to stop in one such establishment and sample the local cuisine. As is true most of the time when I'm out and about in this neighborhood, I walked in the restaurant and looked like some sort of albino in comparison to all the other people around me (I blame all of my ancestors for being from cloudy places and having no reason for pigmentation). One thing that applies to most situations in Harlem, is that rarely is anyone ever quiet or reserved in public. Everyone just shouts their business to everyone else in full voice, and that's just the way it is. Over the rumble of the crowd, I ordered my small box of chicken strips and went happily on my way. Everything in the world seemed pleasant enough; I had finished my errands, I now had a hot box of fried food to eat and while in line at the chicken place, I had just heard a very juicy story about a man named Terrell and some woman with a name that sounded like the combination of several small countries, all slurred together.

As I walked back toward my apartment, a man on a street corner, sitting with some of his friends, started to point at me and laugh. My first instinct was to look down and make sure my fly wasn't unzipped. All clear there. I then licked the inside of my mouth to make sure I didn't have a hunk of biscuit wedged in between any of my teeth, it wasn't that either. I wondered what it could possibly be. All sorts of strange emotions and junior high school flashbacks started flooding into my head; memories of embarrassing traumas from gym class or awkward social situations (of which I had many). Why was this man pointing at me and why were all of his friends laughing? Finally, he stopped laughing long enough to utter a few words, motioned to his friends and said "See, I told you. White people really DO eat fried chicken..." As they continued laughing, I walked on holding my box of chicken and breathing a sigh of relief, having avoided any embarrassment other than being quite noticeably white.

Although I often stand out here, I enjoy the neighborhood. I love seeing ladies in colorful flowing dresses wearing beads and cloth head dresses majestically gliding down the sidewalks. I love the little carts on the street selling coco helado on hot days, and all the little kids with their pocket change swarming around them. I love the park on the way to the subway that has the same little group of old ladies socializing each afternoon. I've picked out a favorite old lady of the group, she is always wearing a fancy hat of some sort. I look for her, specifically, every time I walk by, hoping to see which hat she decided to wear that day. I wonder if eventually I will become a routine part of the little neighborhood scene that people will see as a familiar piece of their day. All I know is that, so far, I have at least been able to confirm one man's theory about the dietary habits of my own people.