LAYERS AND LIFETIMES AGO

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF NEW YORK YEARS in the same way we often refer to dog years. Like Fido and Spot and Shep, the greatest city on earth crams a lot of living into every page of every calendar. A year away from Manhattan is enough for what I call The Eternal Facelift to have razed millions of memories and paved them over with shiny new ones. Neighborhoods you admired as Up & Coming on your previous visit are now yesterday’s scenes, with the focus shifting to confer Hot District status on what were, just a breath ago, ruins. New York, where American theatre was birthed, is itself like some eternally running Broadway show that is perpetually in revival. Now appearing in the role of The Apple is… The Apple, Revisited.  Held over. Tickets still available at popular prices…..

As I write this, on Easter Sunday in the Year of Good Lord 2024, it has been nearly five years since I set foot on those streets, an insanely long sensory drought for a gent graced, for nearly two decades, with the chance to visit at least twice per year, sometimes more. Marrying into a family that called a place home that Midwestern, landlocked corncob me always regarded as an unattainable fantasy has gifted me with the privilege to see the place through the eyes of natives rather than from a double-decker tour bus, and that, as Robert Frost said, has made all the difference. Sadly, as it did for the locals, Covid-19 started the new decade off by turning us all into terrified house cats, scrubbing the cooties off our counters after the groceries were delivered by ghosts in hazmat suits, collapsing into cocoons of hoodies and p.j.s, waiting for the resurrection.

Perhaps this Easter Week has made me more conscious of transitions, as has the unfurling question of my immediate future, as Marian and I make preparation to leave our home of more then twenty years for a new perch in California, or about as far away from NYC as you can get without walking into the ocean. It’s sent me flipping through an endless trove of images collected by countless walks uptown, downtown, midtown, from towers, bridges, dark dank subway stations and bright, glistening new steel fingers jutting up into the sky. I don’t mind saying goodbye to my immediate environs in Arizona, but boy howdy how I’d like to spend just a fat weekend in, as the locals call it, The City, just to convince myself that it’s still there, still morphing and mutating, still living to defy the odds and confound the naysayers and hayseed haters. After all the places I’ve lived and visited, my heart tells me that America largely boils down to West and East Coast, with a vast vaporous something occupying the space in between them. I have read a lot of the books within the country’s library, and it’s still the bookends, the left and right bowers, that are most real to me, and to whatever eye I’ve acquired with a camera. It’s a strange truth to arrive at, but there it is. And so, toggling between two shores, am I.