The portrait

This morning I watched a man on the subway surreptitiously steal glances at the woman next to him as he sketched her face. He was talented, his lines alternately smooth, light, confident and firm. He wasn't obvious about drawing her, he couldn't have been. Instead he looked up, arcing his vision, and as he brought his eyes back towards his paper he glimpsed her face, her impeccable pink lipstick, eyelashes tangled in bangs. His sketch took up a space the size of a clementine on his page, and he drew quickly, outlining her eyes and her chin. I blinked and she had bangs, cheeks.

I wonder if he knew that she was watching him as he took her portrait, if he noticed that she cooperatively held her face in profile, only moving her head up and down to skip a song on her MP3 player. 

When the train stopped at a big station, they both got up, he slid his sketchbook into his backpack, she stared at it a few seconds longer as they both exited the train and went about their days. 

Afternoon baking

In a city where the taco trucks and the Michelin-starred restaurants have equally devoted followings, home cooking can seem superfluous. And yet I persist: mostly ill-fated baking, where cookies turn puffy and cake-like, as happened with these whole wheat chocolate chip cookies. Oh well, a girl can try. 

On the subway

A college professor once pointed out to me that the New York City subway is one of the world's great equalizers. As simply the fastest way to get around city, and at under $3.00 a ride, its accessibility is matchless. The bankers, well-coiffed and fresh from their lunchtime shave, unburdened with bags (maybe an occasional ipad) share seats with dental hygienists and medical administrators, program assistants; hoisting purses, reusable grocery totes filled with lunchtime tupperware, gym duffels for the disciplined. The indigent, abandoned by the city's services, ask us for change, for a meal, for eye contact. A man practicing his vocals for the musical parody of a certain shocking(ly popular) erotic trilogy; no fewer than three devout worshipers following prayers with their fingers the next morning.

Then there are the moments when the boundaries between us - headphoned, noses in books, asleep - flake away, and those are the small moments when we are alike one another, closer. Maybe it's a small kindness, picking up a child's shoe. Maybe it's simply that the towheaded, professorial fellow who is almost finished reading Freedom, and who is holding onto a bar above my head, actually doesn't mind that his body has assumed a shape of holding mine on a crowded train.

Tom Wolfe said that "One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years." Perhaps this is no truer than on the subway, when we all smush together, literally supported by the bodies of other people, belonging to the tedium of a commute and secretly glad for the company of others.

With sincerest apologies to Walt Whitman, who wrote the words from which I take the title of this blog, I am challenging myself with this writing venture. As of this moment, two years into my relationship with the great city of New York, this pin-cushioned spit of land, thrumming with creativity, I find myself feeling rather expectant. Waiting to see whether I'll celebrate this anniversary with paper (jury duty?) or with cotton (a found vintage t-shirt at the consignment shop?). Waiting for a leap forward in my job (more research projects, please!), or maybe just a move to an office with a view.

And, of course, waiting, with that deepest of aches, to meet someone. With a close friend moved away last month, the loneliness drummed up by this most social of cities feels deeper now.

But after two years here, I feel different, too. I'm starting this blog to finally give voice to the tremendous love I feel for the people of this city, to share the outrageous encounters and the small terrors (a shovel on the subway tracks, early morning rat encounters), a welcome hazard of life in this city. And to chart the strong drive I feel to mitigate the inequality on display here in New York, as clear and striking as the rushing traffic and stunning shop windows. In the rest of his poem, Mannahatta, Whitman writes about the many thousand immigrants arriving in New York by the week - though Whitman's New York and mine certainly have their differences - (fewer Citibikes, at least) the crucial role immigrants play in building the character of the city has not changed. And ensuring the civil rights and social needs of immigrant communities speaks to my heart and inspires my work.

So my writing might meander from personal reflections, to political questions, to poetic wanderings. I hope all will focus somewhat on New York, a not-so-quiet force in my life these last two years. I wonder often how I have changed from living in this absurd place and where it might take me. With that, I embolden myself to try to write again - and see what flows forth.