My Element

“…Mike is totally in his element here (NYC).”

-Shani Fecht (excerpt from journal 7/25/03)

I’m headed to New York tomorrow morning for a week of couch crashing with old friends, connections with new ones and a bit of exploration and self discovery.  I’ve always been drawn to that city in some strange, cosmic way. I was the only Yankees fan I knew growing up in Sterling, IL, except for my uncle who turned me onto them as a 6-year-old. A couple of years ago, I asked him why he was a Yankees fan, having been raised in the same small town.

“When I was growing up, the game of the week on Saturday afternoon was the only game we got to see,” he said, “and back then it was the Yankees and whoever they were playing.  Those were the Mickey Mantle years, and he was my favorite player.”

So there’s my answer. I am a Yankees fan because of an uncle who loved Mickey Mantle as a kid. Strangely enough, I never visited the city until 1999 when my dad and I drove up for Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium. I’d seen the Yankees play in Fort Lauderdale and Tampa during Spring Training, and I used to catch at least a game a year with my Dad in Chicago at old Comiskey Park against the White Sox. I had even seen them in The World Series against the Braves in Atlanta, but I had never actually been to the city until that summer, and I never could have imagined then that Shani and I would be living in Lower Manhattan just three short years later any more than I might have predicted the events of the last 15 months.

Until the opportunity to actually live there came about, I always loved movies and music about New York where the location was an essential piece of the story or song. I thought the people were interesting and found the energy to be enticing beyond measure. The diversity and culture I saw on screen that didn’t exist in my surroundings was something I had to experience, and I have.

I’m headed back for the first time since Shani died.

Oh, New York! The anonymity…the trains…the people…the smiles… the tears…the laughs and the screaming. The horns and the music and the smells…Oh God, the smells…the coated peanuts and the piss and the trash… the delis and breakfasts…coffee and pretty girls. Energy! Energy! Energy! And what’s so great is that you can experience this massive rush on all five of your senses in a matter of seconds. All of it. I could be in Chattanooga for a year and still not experience what New York offers in just a blink of the eye. It’s intoxicating.

“Is the power out where you are?”

-text from Shani to me minutes after the blackout happened, 8/14/2003

The unknown. That’s what NYC has to offer and if you’re going to make it there, as Frank sang, you better get used to quickly adapting to the unexpected. You either embrace the adventure or get crushed under the uncomfortable feelings of a fast-paced, competitive and ever-evolving environment. There is probably no place in the world that runs on the clock yet is so completely unpredictable. It’s like the perfectly orchestrated ballet of complete dysfunction and chaos channeled into the most powerful collective energy in the world. If I’ve learned one thing over the last 15 months, it’s that you can’t predict the future. You make your plans and then you go at it, taking the biggest and best swing you can every day. Sometimes you hit a home run and get your ass kicked at other times. This is the nature of the city, and something I’m more than accustomed to at this point in my life.

I’ve waited for this trip for a reason. If I would have gone a year ago, I’m pretty sure that someone would have had to save me. You can find and lose yourself in the same day there. Everything, and I mean everything, is available to you with nothing more than a phone call, and considering where I was last year, I may have ordered all of the above and checked out completely. While I may not have had my best head on at all times during this ordeal, I have done my best not to base my decisions on my emotions, because I knew that I couldn’t trust them. Waiting on this trip wasn’t an easy one, but the need to go now is more important than anyone could ever know. It means a lot of things to me, and I’m sure I won’t even know exactly what all of them are until I’m back home.

I’m off to my element…