Through panes of glass...

One of the many windows in the city from the old Custom House, now the Smithsonian's NYC Branch of the National Museum of the American Indian.

My oldest sister, Sariah, had a fascination with windows and the world outside of them. From the time she was a baby, she was attracted to the things on the other side. There is a yellowed photograph from an old battered album documenting the brief history of the (remarkably dull) events that occurred in my family during the few years before I was born (a remarkable event which illuminated their drab little lives). The image in the photo was Sariah as a baby, climbing up to the window in a shanty farm house my parents lived in for a brief time, and she was staring ever so majestically into the sunlight, looking as wise and as noble as an 18 month old can. She began her existence already enamored by life on the other side of the glass, and she never quite grew out of it. While she was always looking at the world outside of the windows, I often found myself taking the alternate approach from the outside looking in...

In the City of New York, there is no shortage of windows. On sunny days, much of the city shines as if tiny jewels have been embedded into the masses of stone that aim toward the sky, full of busy hives of people all trying to stay one step ahead of impending poverty. In this way, the city can be reminiscent of a really colossal ant farm, if all the ants had smart phones and caffeine addictions. Most of the people milling about in the buildings of midtown are so busy trying to get through the tasks of their day, they hardly have a chance to look up or follow Sariah's lead and peek out a window every now and again. I make it a point to look out of windows every chance I get, but generally, I just find myself looking into other windows as a result.

My office is situated in a very "no-frills" district of midtown Manhattan, just below Pennsylvania Station. Although there are several windows in the room, they all have a fantastic views of the rear-facing brick walls of the surrounding buildings. There is enough of a view to at least clearly see four or five floors of the buildings to the side and the back of my own, and during the moments I need to avoid the insanity of my job the most, I escape into the views of the other offices around us. Directly across from me there is an office full of clean looking thirty-somethings, sharply dressed in smart business casuals, and different members of the group meet at least once a day, sitting around a table facing a large flatscreen, where I assume they either do video conferencing or else they just really like to actively talk back to television programs for sport. Their workspace is brightly, but not TOO brightly, colored in a sort of "retro-mod" motif and there are always bagels (I wish my office had bagels). There are certain members of the group I have singled out as my favorites, and I periodically look out my window to see if they've entered the meeting. There is one man, tall-ish and balding with a cocky face - always wearing some sort of tasseled footwear, and I've decided I don't care for him. He's probably one of those people with a name like "Preston" or "Dayton" who drinks brandy out of a gold-rimmed snifter discussing his salary with members of his prep school alumni association while making jovial guffaws about his subordinates. When I get to the point where I begin fancying him to be a womanizer who has broken the hearts of all the female members of my office window soap opera, I know it is time to stop and get back to whatever task I've been avoiding by spying on my neighbors.

In the floors above and below the office full of young active people are two very dull views that rarely provide more than a momentary distraction. One window, the office above, peers into a room piled high with disorganized books on sagging shelves, where a very uninteresting old man sits in front of a computer all day, occasionally visited by a secretary of some sort who brings in beige folders full of what appear to be multi-colored forms (I like to call her "Helen"). He often eats his lunch out of a brown bag, prepared by some wife called "Marge" or "Barb," no doubt, and then he leaves every day, promptly at 4:30. In the office below, there sits a middle aged man with bushy peppered hair who seems to do little more than read magazines or the New York Post all day with his feet up on the desk. One time I saw him take a swig from a flask. I always try to see if I can catch him do it again. The only other point of interest in the views I have available to me is into a building directly behind mine. There is an office occupied by two uptight women who do not seem to get along. The sit, all day long at their computers, not speaking, one often pulling her hair back tighter and tighter as the day progresses. At least once a week, the tight-haired lady has to sit and listen to a paunchy older man, who has nose hairs that are visible from a building away, angrily talk at her for fifteen to thirty minutes while making severe hand gestures. I imagine he has bad breath. She then tightens her hair some more and furiously pecks at her keyboard until she leaves.

I realize at times that I may get a little too carried away with my imagination when escaping into the ambiguous scenes of the lives progressing around me through panes of glass, but I feel it's generally a way to connect with a much larger reality that is so easy to feel excluded from. Leading up to my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, there are several little cafés that attract neighborhood residents and their visitors each night. Often when I'm walking home, and especially on cold nights, I like to look in the windows at the people sharing their evenings together over warm food and cool drinks and I like to pretend I know them and I can hear what they're saying. Often I'll see someone I recognize from the subway platform or the market or one of the apartment buildings on my block, and I feel glad, as though I've seen a friend (when in reality I rarely ever talk to my neighbors unless absolutely necessary). For a split second, in my glance, I've shared a moment in time with a familiar face, and in a city of eight million little ants running around behind glass, it is a comfort to feel human every now and again.

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The view from the middle...

The view from my office window (à la my phone)

I'm pretty sure the tallest building in my rural hometown in Colorado was the hospital, which stood a whopping 4 stories in one of its small "wings." It was always exciting to visit sick or injured friends because of the rare opportunity to ride in an elevator, which was quite a novelty in a town full of staircases that only reached the second floor. I had heard rumors that if you jumped up and down while the elevator was descending, you could achieve weightlessness for a split second, but sadly, there was always some sort of "grown-up" around to thwart my plans of testing out this theory. I remember riding my bicycle past the towering structure, looking up to the very top and admiring its majesty. I wondered what it would be like to see the world from such great heights, in a room of one's own...

Structures like the Empire State Building were things only conceivable in films or the books I would read. I remember watching An Affair to Remember as a child, seeing Cary Grant wait and wait for Deborah Kerr on the observation deck while she lay crippled in the street down below, not knowing until the very end that she had tried to meet him until a car mangled her plans, as well as her legs. The thought of being high enough away from the street in a building that an event as big as a car accident could go unseen was unfathomable to my 5 year old brain. Sure, my hippie parents had dragged me up to steep mountain tops and pushed me off the sides of cliffs dangling from ropes, but the view of the endless San Juan mountains was vastly different than the cityscape of Midtown Manhattan. Had Deborah Kerr agreed to meet her clandestine lover on the top of Mount Sneffels, I'm certain she would not have been hit by that car, but something tells me that good ol' Debbie wasn't really the rugged type.

 A few weeks ago I began working in an office just a couple of blocks from Herald Square, with a great view of the Empire State Building right out the window. If you look really closely in the afternoons, you can see all of the tiny little people moving about on the observation deck, hopefully not waiting for injured lovers to whom they've made unrealistic promises. I see the world from a little perch on the 15th floor of an old brick office building whose 24 stories pale in comparison with many of the other mightier skyscrapers around it. The endless sirens and car horns from 6th Avenue act as an unsettling backdrop to my days, but never cease to keep me awake when my coffee buzz begins to fade away. Sometimes, when talking to clients on the phone, they ask if some catastrophic event is occurring just outside, and I simply explain that it's just a normal weekday in Midtown.

There are days when I pull myself out of my work coma and ponder what my 5 year old self would think about my life and my daily routine now. Waking up early, catching the express train in Harlem and coming up from the ground outside of Bryant Park is now just a way to get from point A to point B, but to a child would have seemed like a daily adventure. When I see children on the train, watching eagerly as the doors open and close at every stop, the contagious sense of amazement can make it through my impermeable exterior, if I allow it to. Most of the time my only amazement with the subway occurs when track maintenance or garbage fires stop the train underground, in the dark, for extended and unannounced periods of time. Perhaps I ought to search for my inner-child, or at least buy him an ice cream cone every now and then. Sometimes I still have the urge to test out the elevator theory while speeding down 15 floors, but now that I'm a grown up myself, I've become rather dull and predictable.

The world I inhabit now is one I'd never have imagined was tangible while watching classic films on our old black and white TV set (my parents were proud Luddites in their own right). Things seem so different when elevated so high above the ground, and I've only made it to the 15th floor. Although the view from the middle is grand, I'll be anxious to one day see the view from the top.