Joy of the Day, Day 4: New York City

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IFIH9kmUd-k&feature=youtu.be [video credit: Jason Hackett, dear friend and lifelong New Yorker]

We hear a lot about the transformative power of art—usually in terms of a piece of visual or written work, such as a painting, play or book. Typically, tagging something as transformative is paying it a high compliment, and often signals a rave review: If you watch this, or read this, you will be enlightened, changed forever—for the much better—you will be transformed! And who wouldn’t jump at the chance to transform into their into better self? It’s a process leading to an outcome with the potential to deliver real growth, happiness, and joy. So then we go look at the painting, watch the play, or read the book, just as fast as we can manage it.

During his press conference yesterday morning, and then again today, Governor Cuomo spoke into being the following prophesy about the future of New York, and of NYC in particular, in the wake of Covid-19: “This,” said Cuomo with his straight-shooting brand of authority, “will be a transformative experience.” Then he stopped, considered his own statement for a breath, and said it again. “This. Will. Be. A. Transformative. Experience.”

I grew up in a suburb of northern New Jersey, right across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. All of us called New York “The City” and I still, sitting here now, think of it in that singular way. My sister and I were both born in the same New York City hospital. My Mom was born and raised there. Both sets of my grandparents lived there for the majority of their lives, and my Dad has commuted, and continues to commute, across the bridge to work each day. New York is where I went to college, where I became a lawyer, and where I met my husband. Some of my very dearest people in the world call it home.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel an underlying sense of connectedness to the Big Apple, the people in it, and the energy throbbing though it. I feel it still, despite living thousands of miles away, and get antsy if I don’t get a fix of it at least a couple times a year. And yet, for all my visits to Manhattan since we moved to Bainbridge, there hasn’t been a single time that I’ve not felt disoriented by the lack of the two tall twin towers that once stood together, like a magnet in a compass, on the island’s very southern tip.

On September 11, 2001, I had already become suburbanite and a Mom, but Stephen still took the train into the city daily for work. I will never forget the details of his journey home from midtown that day, nor of the day in general. Of course we all have our permanent memories of that day, along with the jagged emotional scars left by the deep wounds 9/11 wrought.

But what I’m thinking about now, in the midst of Covid-19, as I watch Governor Cuomo’s update each day, is not 9/11 itself, but it’s aftermath. Almost immediately after the twin towers fell, an incredibly beautiful, even joyful, thing happened in the city of New York. The people, millions of them, showed up for one another in the most astonishingly automatic, selfless way. Without skipping a beat they consoled each other, healed each other, served each other, saved each other. New Yorkers, in the face of extreme adversity, rose up and revealed themselves to be a fiercely connected tribe, dead set not just on eventual survival but on becoming something stronger, better. New York became a city transformed.

No one connected to New York City can help but compare the Coronavirus pandemic to 9/11. Today the city faces, as it did almost twenty years ago, an intensely tragic and costly crisis coupled with an impossible array of challenges and uncertainties. Emotionally, what the city has already endured as a result of the virus, what it is dealing with daily, and what it’s bracing for next, has a familiar, wrenching tug. But now, having already once witnessed New York rise spectacularly from the ashes, I watch again as New Yorkers roll up their sleeves and prove their unmatched heroism, compassion, and grit. Once again, I watch, all choked up and with great expectation, as the greatest city in the world works its way toward its new normal—there is no going back—and I know for sure that there will be incredible, visceral joy in that transformation. Today, New York City is my joy. #joyinplace