Travels with Grumpus

I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places

Grumpus and my other New York City activities have been documented here, here, and of course here. On our off hours we returned to some of our old haunts, starting with the Seventh Avenue (between West 13th and West 14th Streets) branch of the superfantastic Boston ice cream joint Emack and Bolio’s. Their “Serious Chocolate Addiction” - which we’d been dreaming of for 3 years - is of course joy in a cone, a fact that escaped neither the proprietor nor my husband.

We also did our best to broaden our cultural horizons by visiting the newest tourist attraction on 5th avenue. We have it on good authority that this is also the ultra-secret hiding place of the holy grail.

Twenty-odd blocks north, we whiled away a pleasant morning at the museum by the park. Before our camera battery died, Mickey pondered a column and I wrapped my arms around a large Egyptian statue.

We also caught up with the Mickey and Mayas of the ancient and early modern worlds: Egyptian, dead Egyptian, Sapphic and Mythological By Way of Renaissance Italy

Fourteen blocks uptown and three blocks east was where it all started. Here’s the old apartment on 96th and Lexington, where Bro and I lived when we first moved to New York. This is where Rickey slept on the Ikea futon in the living room, where we’d haul groceries and laundry up three flights of steps, where Mickey first said the L word when we went down for a beer run (awww).

The neighborhood’s a lot prettier now. That used to be a checks cashing place where the chemist is. My old bedroom window is at the back facing what used to be a construction site. One day I woke up to men’s voices literally right outside my window - construction had reached the third floor while I slept, and the workers were about three or four feet from my fire escape. Good thing I sleep with the blinds drawn. That building is now a luxury highrise apartment - you can see a bit of it over the top of our old building.

So Mickey and I had come full circle. New York to Hong Kong and back again. I wasn’t quite sure what I felt. A bit nostalgic, to be sure. But for what? I know I met the love of my life in New York and part of my nostalgia may have been for those heady first days, before I knew anything about him except that somehow things felt right, and I dared entertain the thought that I might spend the rest of my life with this person.

Maybe another part was the feeling, in my first few months in school, that I was exactly where I wanted to be at that exact moment. That at least in one part of my life, I was perfectly happy and perfectly placed to do anything I wanted.

But I wasn’t was missing the younger me, nor was I hankering for a more innocent and carefree time. I’ve actually grown into a happier and more relaxed person in the years since I left New York. Maybe what I left behind was a little bit of fearlessness. I feel a little less daring now.

Personal ruminations aside though, New York is the one place where I felt instantly at home the first time I visited. It takes you in, wherever you’re from, and doesn’t ask questions. It’s as big or as small as you want it to be. You can carve out your own space and meet any sort of people you want. You’re a minority of one person in New York. I know a lot of people who say they can never move back once they’ve left. I’m not sure if I could live New York again, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s enough for me that the city is there.

(Sing it) I’ve been so many places in my life and time (free Elliott plug) but New York is the greatest fucking city in the world.