new-york-city

Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.

The alchemy of diamonds from the rough is to mine every moment.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

New insights from being present are a gift.

Experiment with grounding yourself with who you are, not what you do.

New York City is legendary for sleeping around. There's hot tail everywhere and it's such a big city that two-timing and even three-timing is very doable, if you plan it right."From "My Worst Valentine's Day.Ever. (a Short Story)

Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.

Though I have not lived in New York City for more than two decades, these storytellers _ from the United States, Britain and Canada _ have touched my heart with their openness, inspired me with their joie de vivre and deepened my appreciation for my hometown as a worldwide phenomenon. Welcome to our New York.

Let the park live in you until it sings you a song.

We took our food order to go, in greasy paper bags, and walked across Columbus Circle to Central Park. He helped me up the giant prehistoric-looking rock just off the playground.

The rest is just slow diminution and loss. A waning of the full and effulgent moon of my youth. Not that the bright light of my youth was anything to be proud of. I was a terrible person. I did unkind and sometimes illegal things. I treated women abominably. The remembrance of it causes me to flush with shame and to feel a tightening in my groin.It was a radiance without warmth, and I thought of nothing but myself in the brightness of the light. Now I try never to think of myself. I try not to think at all, not to dwell, but, sometimes, late at night, it all comes back to me, and I lose myself in the life that might have been, the wife of twenty years, her comforts and distractions. The fractious children, raucous at the holidays, with their tattoos you asked them not to get and their lacrosse sticks they play with in the house, stringing and restringing them, the trips to Paris to stay at the Lutetia. Photograph albums of a life that never quite came to be. It doesn__ last long when it comes, but it is vivid, and I am there, not here, not here where I belong. When you lose everything, you don__ die. You just continue in ordinary pants with nothing in your pockets.

No map? No problem. Let commitment and determination lead the way.

His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.

When you look for beauty, you usually end up finding it.From Central Park Song (A Screenplay)

Be courageous: be still.

Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.

From the depths of your well, tap your will.

Did you go to the the theatre last time you were here?'No, it's too expensive.''What did you do?''What tourists always do in New York City. Empire State, Statue of and all the galleries. There's a million galleries.''Where'd you stay?''The first two nights, I slept in an abandoned car. A Pontiac Grand Am.' Weren't you scared?''Not really. It had a doorman.