Walking Across The Brooklyn Bridge At Sunset

Drenched in the evening sun, we walk east of the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall subway station towards that debris-filled body of water that separates Manhattan from Long Island. Standing on the bridge we see the sometimes intimidating, towering skyline that people have come to associate with New York City and the quaint brownstones of Brooklyn Heights. As we start to cross the East River, another busy day is settling in for the night. Couples walk hand in hand, families, friends, all of them wander down with backpacks, purses and cameras hanging off their bodies walking across the splintered wood marked with a chalk-white running man. Through the metal grating on each side we can watch the cars zoom past below. The air has the soft warmth of August as it blows across our faces. We take a photo at the tower like so many others do, smiles captured in photographic eternity. We continue on foot, reaching Brooklyn some minutes later. As we walk through Brooklyn Heights, we see the lineup for Grimaldi’s snaking around the block, people willing to wait hours for a taste of the most New York of New York Pizza. We turn to look back at the tiny strip of land that I used to call home when it occurs to me that this small space, besides being the inspiration for all those little squares on the monopoly board, contains things that have become household names worldwide – Central Park, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Radio City Music Hall, and Broadway among others. It is the home of everything one can imagine – business, film, theater, art – you name it and you can find it within the five boroughs of New York City.

Starting Over

I walk down the streets of the city so alien and yet so strangely familiar. My eyes are heavy from sleep deprivation, my mind racing in a million directions with things that I have to do to re-establish myself here. In Toronto. My new home for now.

Four hours after landing I have a cell phone and a new bank account. When filling out the forms for the new account it hit me – the U word: “UNEMPLOYED”. Although it’s been all of two weeks since I have officially been unemployed, and it was my choice to do so, and all of this happened in a different country and I do have interviews lined up, there is always that nagging insecurity that six months down the road I’ll be without work. There is the nagging insecurity now that I have no more money coming into my bank account so my credit card bills are getting higher and my bank balances are getting lower. Not a pretty situation. That is always the risk with moving I suppose.

I navigate the subway system with reasonable success, watching the tin-can like trains pulling in and out of stations. They all seem uniform unlike New York where they come in a variety of shapes, sizes and inevitably marked with some colorful expression. I ride the Yonge-University-Spadina line at rush hour and see something akin to what I’m used to: the crowds, the multi-ethnic mix, the I-pods. Nothing quite compares to those flushing bound 7 trains though. The announcements are clearly articulated, never mumbled. There is no local or express. The whole thing is geared to be user friendly. Which is weird. To me at least.

Everyone seems friendlier. Really friendly. In fact, when en-route to an interview this morning I found myself at Yorkdale subway station with no clue of which direction I was going, a helpful bus driver wrote down the address and dropped me right across the street. They smile, they say thank you, and I notice their accents ten times more. I do miss the harsh gruffness of New Yorkers but this is a nice change. They’re not overly friendly to the point where it’s uncomfortable, but you may have the occasional person actually speak to you in an elevator.

Overall it’s been a good two days. On Sunday I move into my sublet for the summer which is in Kensington Market. I’ve heard good things but this is kind of like the first time I moved to New York. So many familiar names but no meaning attached to them. I am looking forward to discovering more and associating names with memories and meaning. I am looking forward to the next few months.

For My Friends...

It has been a long time since I last posted - exactly a month! So much has happened, and in a way a previous post of mine fore-shadowed the whole thing. In seven days I am leaving New York. Wow.

This is a place that has given me such wonderful things and surrounded me with some of the best friends I've ever had. They say a city like this grows on you, gets it's claws deep into you and before you know it you can't remember why living anywhere else was so great. Yet when I look back four years ago, to when I first found out I was moving down here, I remember being surprisingly numb about the whole experience. Absence makes the heart grow fonder but as my memories of a place grow weaker will I forget? I have forgotten much of what held me in Montreal, and maybe I'll forget much of what held me here.

But here was different, here was alive, here was full of life. I have met people here that I really care about and that really care about me. I've met people that will let me pour my heart out to them at any opportune moment, and know when a hug or comforting words is the right thing to say or do. I've met people that are sad to see me leave and I'm sad to leave. In a way, it is the greatest gift one could ever ask for. To love and be loved, not only in the romantic sense of the word but to find people who truly understand who you are and what you need.

I am grateful for the friendship and the good times, and to those I'm leaving I say only this - nothing in life is permanent or absolute; you never know what the future might hold. I will miss you all, but I'm not going that far nor am I intending to stay there the rest of my life. But this is what is best for right here and right now and I'm so happy that you understand that so well. Thank you for giving me a fantastic four years.

Thoughts of Toronto and other distant places

Sitting in the Taxi at 1am this morning, approaching Downtown Toronto I was pensive. This is the city of my birth, and has followed me on every visa application, every immigration form and a large number of different forms I've had to fill out over the course of time. I only lived here till l I was 3 (which is when we moved back to India), and when I returned to Canada many years later, I moved instead to Montreal. Toronto has never held that much meaning for me personally. It never could hold as much for me as for my parents who lived here for 8 years during the 1970s.

At one point last year, I considered moving to Toronto to work. I had a few interviews, but nothing ever panned out. I got to walk around the city a bit, but didn't have much of a feel of the city even then. I often wonder what it would be like...to move again. Could Toronto be a place I would grow to love? Would I grow to learn every nook, every cranny? Up till this point, I have never felt very emotionally connected to the place. It granted me Canadian Citizenship, it was a place my parents were very fond of, but other than that it was not somewhere I thought about. Then again, I had no emotional connect to New York when I moved, and I grew to love it. New York has been very good to me, much better than Montreal, a city that I loved at first sight. Toronto could be the same way. Slow to warm to me.

Not that I am planning a move any time soon. But it definitely got me thinking. What about people that will never move out of their county? Or off their street? The thing for me was my lack of choices, especially being a Canadian in the United States. To get a good job, I was willing to move to Texas, to Ohio or to Oregon for the right position. I had to be open, I was forced to be open. But then, is that such a bad thing? I hear people say they would not live in place X or place Y, or they would DEFINITELY never want to live in place Z. Sometimes I doubt these people have even visited the places they look at with such disdain. I guess you make a choice - to be open or not. You make a choice as to how open you are. But is it really such a good idea to deny something you have never tried? And is it bad to choose not to try?

I don't know the answer. But I do know this...I want to be open. I want to feel free to make choices, and not scorn that which I do not understand. It's the best way to learn, and in some circumstances the only way. I learned more about who I was in a foreign country than I ever did at home. Distance gives you perspective and a different kind of wisdom. It gives you something much deeper than that. It gives you truth.