EPISODE 941: UPPER WEST

How do you start over?

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

When I started looking for my first apartment not quite two years ago, the one thing I wanted more than anything was to stay in lower Manhattan. I had spent the last two years living in Chelsea just north of Greenwich Village. It was young and full of life and close to my favorite places. But living in Chelsea and the Village are not cheap, and I quickly realized I had to broaden my search.

At one point I looked at a ground floor place on the Upper West Side. While the idea of having to keep my shades drawn all the time for fear of people peering inside left me cold, there was something about the neighborhood that was unexpected. Whether high rise or brownstones, renovated or untouched, the buildings shared a sense of having been here a very long time. There was a certain almost-sleepiness to the world up here, a sense of stepping back in time. The colors even felt a little desaturated.

I wasn’t taking a leave from the Jesuits to nap a lot. But eventually that’s the neighborhood in which I ended up. Not exactly by choice: If you don’t have a lot of money, where you live in New York is as much a function of chance as anything. I found a studio on the Upper West Side; the broker fee was only one month’s rent, as compared to 15% of the year’s rent from other brokers. And I got my bid in fastest. So here I am.

For most of the first year, I didn’t spend much time up here, though. My life was in other parts of the city. And after a lot of years spent worrying about whether I was home enough, at dinner enough, present in community enough, to suddenly be in a situation where that wasn’t a factor anymore was unexpected. I reveled in the freedom of that.

At some point there came a weekend where I stayed home. And it was kind of incredible in its own right to simply sit in my little apartment, watch the world go by out my windows, make myself dinner, catch up on some TV. It gave me a sense of the ground under my feet, of me living in one place rather than somehow in a whole city.  

From time to time now I take walks around my neighborhood. Sometimes I go down to Central Park or Riverside Park, which lie on either side of the Upper Side. Sometimes I just wander the postcard-like side streets, every building intriguing in its own way, suggestive of some unknown story or origin.

The more I walk around up here, the more relieved I feel, like I’ve been given an incredible gift. Somehow the age of the buildings and the trees and the relative peace and quiet up here feels like a kindness, like a place that was created for recovery.

I was walking through the part of Central Park near my house over the weekend; most of the trees continue to hold their leaves. Though the colors have started to fade, they’re still quite pretty. Acorns drop with a crack here and there as people wander, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather, the peep and chirrup of unseen birds, the mellow stillness of the trees.

When I lived in California I occasionally made it up to the redwood forests in the northern part of the state. There’s something about those woods, a sense of presence and life to the trees themselves that’s palpable. I have to believe there must be something comparable in England that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of the Ents.

That sense of gravitas is nowhere near so clear amongst the elms and honeylocusts of the Upper West, nor in nearby Central Park. They’re children compared to the redwoods, small and spread out and full of fire. Still, I wonder if they’re not part of what makes the neighborhood so livable, if their presence, too, doesn’t quietly add something important to our existence.

How do we find our place? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself in different ways for the last 18 months, and on every level, from work to people to location. Maybe others have been asking themselves the same about me as well. Someone said to me recently, a propros of nothing and entirely well-intentioned, You’ve still got an act left in you.

I was like, Thank you?

(It actually scared the crap out of me. Being 55 has never felt closer to death and/or a life on the streets.)

(Yes, I realize this would be hilarious in a sitcom.)

I’m still figuring out how exactly to make a life for myself now. As much as I loved the giddy freedom of my early days in my own place, living on the Upper West Side is slowly teaching me that the best version of whatever that life might look like begins with having something beyond the hustle and adventures, a quiet little place with trees and light that I call home.

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Take care of yourself. We need you!

I’ll be back later this week.