New York City Trip

I’m currently decompressing from my week long trip to New York. I hardly wrote anything while I was there, but as soon as I sat down and started to reflect on my visit, a rush of memories from the past week came flooding in.

Man, did I do this trip right! I ran about 23 miles over three runs in Central Park, Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. I did yoga twice in Soho and trained one day at a New York Health and Racquet Club in midtown. I stayed with friends on the Upper East Side, the Financial District and Brooklyn Heights. I went to San Gennaro, the annual 10 day Italian Festival on Mulberry St. in Little Italy, hung with friends in the East Village and explored the biggest and most interesting street festival I’ve ever seen in Brooklyn, full of music, food, and diverse vendors representing all kinds of world cultures. I reconnected with old friends and co-workers I hadn’t seen in years and established new relationships over great food and conversation at restaurants all over the city. I went to the Bronx for two baseball games, one against Tampa on my wedding anniversary and the other against the Red Sox, with whom the Yankees share arguably the greatest rivalry in sports. I attended a concert in Madison Square Garden, “The Most Famous Arena in the World.” I slept on air mattresses, a lounge chair and even a couple of beds, and I did all of this over the course of 7 days.

I felt alive. I smiled, I laughed, and at times, I cried. On one of my runs, I jogged by mine and Shani’s old apartment building in Lower Manhattan. I looked through the window and noticed that our doorman Sammy, this tough Russian guy, was still working there. Shani loved him. When she would speak of our time in the city, she always brought up how much he loved our dog, and she would mimic his thick Russian accent doing her best impersonation of his petting Bizkit’s wrinkled, black and thick shar pei coat saying, “Now THAT is a dog!”

I stood outside the building for a few moments trying to decide if I wanted to go in and say hi, but decided against it. I didn’t see the need to bring him down if he was having a good day. If he remembered Shani and our time there in any way, I wanted it to remain what it was. Sometimes things are better left alone.

New York is not an easy place to live. To simply call it expensive and overcrowded would be the understatement of the century. A 600 square foot studio apartment will set you back the equivalent of a mortgage on a mansion in Tennessee. Everything costs more there. Everything. As Kanye West pointed out, “Don’t you know you got to be rich just to be poor there?”

The winters are harsh and you are constantly exposed to the elements. When the sun goes down behind the skyscrapers as darkness settles over the city at 5:00 in the evening and the harsh winds blow through the canyons of buildings, it truly does feel like Gotham City. Using the trains as your primary source of transportation as most New Yorkers do, you better have a warm winter coat, and an umbrella is your most valued possession on rainy days. It can be dreary at times.

So why would anyone ever want to live there?

The people. And it was the people that I connected with that made the trip so amazing. I have so many friends and contacts from so many places with different backgrounds and life experiences all doing their best to make it in the most competitive city in the world and most of them doing a pretty good job of it. I was inspired.

It was my first time in the city in over 2 years and also my first time back without Shani. And this time, I saw the city with a completely new perspective. I put this trip off for a while for a number of reasons. I’d been so sensitive to outside energy for so long that I just didn’t know how I would handle exposing myself to the craziness that can be that city. I was afraid that I might get up there and completely break down. I didn’t know how I would handle myself without Shani. As soon as I landed though, I found myself walking through the streets of New York with a newfound sense of confidence that I have never felt before. In a city that breaks people every day, I realized that there is absolutely nothing that anyone, including this city, could throw at me that I hadn’t already seen before. If I could make it through what I have, I knew I could do anything.

It was a good trip.