"Living in the present," said one friend. "Finding some quiet alone time," said another. Because I've borrowed them both and melted them together, I guess I own them now. (Not the friends, the resolutions).
Finding quiet in New York isn't easy. But the loudest places can be quiet too. If you walk under the Manhattan Bridge, you hear the roar of subway trains above, like a hundred man chain gang all dropping sledgehammers in unison, over and over, can drown out the non-stop brain hum, then the smooth blurring of their fury fades into a uniform echo. The white noise of car traffic returns, broken by the occasional trundling of a loud truck. You watch, as the wrinkled water, like a letter recovered, flattened then threatened once again by a rough wind, quietly laps the rocks.
And if you actually ride the train, you can try to block out the noise with a good book, a very good book. Or you can put the book away and try to hear all the voices at once, rising and falling, male and female, along with the grumble of the tracks, an urban symphony. You can look down from another bridge notice that red bridge isn't quite red, and the barren baseball fields, warmed only by field lights, give you the same feeling as an empty chapel.
On the other side, you can hear the sirens below, and you notice for the first time thre are numbers on their roofs. You can see the bright splashes of color inside of other people's homes, paintings, furniture, clothing. You might see a face, a person there inside an apartment, a man cooking dinner over the stove--pasta you think-- a couple watching television on the couch--are they happy? You see them only for a second. A snapshot, a frozen slice of time.
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About Me
- Hummingirl
- Brooklyn, New York, United States
- Things you should know. I like to write, box, nap, read and be read to--mostly fiction, the kind of books that play like movies in your head, whether awake or asleep. I need at least a couple spoonfuls of organic crunchy peanut butter each day to function. Every, every day. And to answer your question(s): half-full, dogs, mornings, summers, and more than one. I write for findingDulcinea. (Header photo: pixonomy Flickr photostream/CC)
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1 comment:
This is a terrific post. It used to be that when you sat at a restaurant bar waiting for your dinner companion, you'd make small talk with others waiting for theirs. Or with the staff. Or look out the window at the foot traffic. Or at everyone who came in and wondered who they were, why there were here, where they were going. And you'd smile at people in elevators, say hello, ask them about the book in their arm. And you'd walk down the avenues of the city and marvel at the buildings, at the faces of the passersby, of the peddlers and the beggars just trying to get through the day. And yes, when you rode the elevated subway, you stared down at the rooftops below and wondered about their lives they sheltered. It's almost a fair trade-off to miss all of this for a good book. But for a blackberry screen? In the early days of cell phones, if you had one, you made a show of it - it was a status symbol that conveyed your importance. Now "smart" phones are like blinkers on a plough horse, keeping your nose down and eyes focused straight ahead on the task in front of you, and robbing you of all that you could see if only you could get your nose out of the metaphorical book, turn your head, and take in the world around you.
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