Friday, December 3, 2010

Gypsy Cab


This is my 'hood. I see it only in passing these days, from the window of a car as I head to work or back. Most days I travel above ground, unwilling to confront the hectic human surge underground coming and going on the subways. It takes too much attention, too much hypervigilance so early in the morning. When I was  younger, it pumped me up with adrenaline, but now I find it frantic and overstimulating. It fries my circuits and makes me want to run and hide. Of course, I can't do that. So I meditate from inside a gypsy cab instead, watching the stores along Broadway opening up, setting up for another hopeful day.




I sail by that traffic signal with the missing points of light, outside the pizza place where my son and his friends used to hang out in till late in the afternoons during middle school. They would sit in that parlor making noisy nuisances of themselves until their parents began calling their cell phones to chase them home. Those days seem so innocent and long ago. I used to work from home two days a week then.

Now, most of my waking hours are spent huddled inside the glass and concrete walls of a midtown office, devising more stories than we have heads or hands to execute. We have to keep reminding ourselves to breathe. In the midst of all this, we have to get used to a new way of doing things, which I choose to see merely as another challenge that will stretch and teach me, force me to develop new approaches and add to my repertoire. All that to say, I'm dancing as fast as I can. Wasn't that the title of a book I once read? I think it was about a woman whose life became unglued. But that is not my story. Not today.


10 comments:

  1. awww...home is always lovely, even when it's often a blur.

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  2. Such different places we live in, such similiar hearts we have.

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  3. dear angella,
    (i writhed in humiliation that i misspelled yr name on my first entry!) you make me ache for my beloved NY. i think you are my only NYC bloggette, so i am double/triply pleased to have found you. feed me morsels of my city...
    thank you!
    susan

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  4. Candice, you know!

    Ms. Moon, I have been meditating on the wonder of this. This blog world is a rather magical place. I might do a post on this if I ever a moment to formulate a coherent thought!

    susan, no worries at all about the name thing. i myself spell it both ways depending on my mood. and yes, new york does have its charms.

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  5. I just read your comment on Deb's blog and it moved me to come over and say hello. I was born in NYC and raised there for the first decade of my life. After that, we moved twenty minutes out of the city to Rockland County, but I went back often. We live in CA now.

    How often we become so used to our own "hoods" that we forget to look up! Your words are so true. I am glad I found you and I will be back:)

    Hugs,
    Debbie

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  6. I love that we share a city! Good to know you are near giving off your positive and loving energy.

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  7. Nice seeing a glimpse of your 'hood... how different from where we each grew up! I enjoyed the 2 years I lived in NYC, I do miss it sometimes. And again, how different from the 'burbs I now live in.

    Just keep on being you and I know you'll dance in perfect time.

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  8. Gary, i enjoy thinking of you nearby too. i imagine we will pass each other on the street someday, and we will recognize each other! Would be fun.

    Deborah, it's funny, even though the subways are more hectic than i ever want to deal with, the city itself is invigorating. Strange for an island girl, isn't it? Still, I'm sure we do sometimes miss the blue idyll of back home, which itself may be largely an invention of our minds! or not.

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  9. Loved seeing your marvelous neck of the woods!

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  10. Debra W, welcome! I had a lovely visit to your blog and am so glad to see you in my hood.

    Tess, it's a busy, crowded city for sure, but that's part of it charm somehow.

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