Category: Observations

During my first year in New York, I packed my lunches in plastic grocery bags from Morton Williams. That is where I purchased cartons of frozen Shop Rite veggies, picked through Cortland apples, saw packages for matzoh ball soup, and overheard elderly women bicker with cashiers over the price of the deli pasta salad.

My lunches were simple: thin sandwiches, leftover pasta and vegetables, string cheese, fruit, nuts. If I wanted a treat, I’d slip in a few cookies.

Upon sitting down at the round table in the office next to the large windows overlooking the East River, I unwrapped my lunch. Several of the attending psychiatrists showed great interest in my food.[1. I have never before nor since experienced so much fascination from others about my lunches.]

“So… what did Dr. Yang bring for lunch today?

“What homemade goodness are you having?”

Sometimes they stood over me; sometimes they pulled a chair out and sat down, leaning forward to inspect the contents of my lunch.

“What’s in that? Eggplants? Tomatoes? I smell garlic.”

“What kind of apple is that?”

“Leftover pizza, right?”

As I confirmed or otherwise explained the ingredients in my lunch, sometimes they congratulated each other for their discernment. I nodded and resumed eating. They wandered away towards the door.

“So… diner?”

“It’ll be crowded. How about the cart out front?”

“The diner is always crowded, but they make good fries.”

“Okay, the diner it is.”

The team nurse often entered the office after the psychiatrists had left. She spoke with a Brooklyn accent, dressed with class, and carried herself with confidence. Though the wrinkles around her eyes and on her hands revealed her age, she argued with vigor when she disagreed with the director of the service. He would persist, though knew to relent: She was a strong woman.

Sometimes, upon finding me eating alone, she would sit down at the table. She shared history about the department, interesting developments in other parts of the hospital, and updates about patients I had seen.

She also shared her sadness about her son. He was killed while serving in the military a few years prior and the anniversary of his death had just passed. Though she was smiling, her eyes were already full of tears. Her voice cracked as she apologized for crying.

“I miss him so much,” she said, dabbing her eyes with a ball of tissue. As she pulled apart the ball, she murmured, “My mascara is starting to run, isn’t it.” More sad than annoyed, she motioned me to walk with her to her desk. Her computer wallpaper was a photo of her son in his military uniform.

She pulled out a compact and examined her eyes, wiping away the trails of diluted mascara on her cheeks. She was still crying.

The sky was dark. A storm was coming. The arcs of the grey clouds were descending upon the lines of the housing projects and warehouses across the river. Her screensaver began flashing photos of her dead son.

The office door opened; the psychiatrists were back from lunch. The nurse quickly wiped her nose and forced a smile.

“Time to get back to work,” she said, standing up.

---

I was standing on the south side of East 77th Street near York Avenue. It was late June and my first night living in New York City. Everything I owned—two bags full of clothes and shoes, travel-sized toiletries, two towels, a disassembled table, a bed, one pot, a laptop computer, and important documents—was in a pile on the sidewalk.

I hadn’t wanted to live that far from the hospital. The broker—tan, fit, and preoccupied—glanced at my documents[1. Formal brokers in New York City commonly want two pay stubs, your most recent tax return, and proof that you have a bank account before renting you an apartment.] and said, “You can’t afford to live near the hospital. But you could live on the Upper East Side. You could take the 6 or the M15 to work.”

Rents increased the closer the apartments were to the subway. I couldn’t afford anything beyond 1st Avenue.

My apartment was a “cozy” studio on the first floor. It was in a red brick tenement, built around 1940, that was four stories tall. White, vertical metal bars adorned the inside of the single window. Jutting out underneath was a rumbling window air conditioner.

There was also a small window in the bathroom that opened to a small, dark enclosure that was littered with cigarette butts and dented soda cans. When that window was open, the aromas of cooking food, the shouts and cursing of people watching football games, and the moaning of men and women having sex often floated in.

The kitchen had a two-burner stove, a miniature oven, and a short fridge. The sink was metal and shallow. There was no room for a table.

The main living space was just large enough for a full-sized bed and a small desk. I got the desk from the man I was dating. It was an old table, constructed of particle board, that he was going to throw out. The tabletop was white and visibly sagging; it resembled a hammock on four rusting legs. I eventually got a small bookshelf. To get to the window, I had to squeeze myself between the bookshelf and the foot of the bed.

The apartment was probably around 250 square feet. Rent was $1550 a month.

Before I learned that the heating pipe in the corner would often clang as the radiator overheated my apartment all winter, that, in this neighborhood, black women often pushed baby carriages holding white infants, that people would fish from the East River before 6am, that lights in the Empire State Building could change color, that up to 1000 people would pour out of Penn Station every 90 seconds[2. “… Penn Station, which is the busiest station in North America, funnelling 600,000 passengers through just 21 tracks, sometimes at the rate of 1,000 people every 90 seconds.”], that my then boyfriend and I would eventually get married in Central Park, before all that–

–I stood on the sidewalk on East 77th Street and looked around. People ignored me and walked around my pile of stuff. Yellow taxis, black Lincoln town cars, and men on bicycles delivering food rolled along York Avenue. Only a few stars dotted the indigo-charcoal sky.

I had a place to live, a new job that would start in a few days, and at least a year to learn about and live in New York City.

I grinned.

---

While organizing some files on my computer, I came across some of my old writings. The following was undated, but I suspect that I wrote it sometime during my first summer in New York City. I was living on the Upper East Side.

The first sentence of the piece describes the experience of running along the East River. The last sentence is still true.

---

The smells of salt water muck and car exhaust enveloped me. My nose crinkled involuntarily and I felt my diaphragm resist a full, deep breath: The air smelled noxious.

This will pass, I reminded myself. I had encountered into the same malodorous swirl during the first half of my run; Pig Pen’s cloud hadn’t accompanied me the entire way.

It was only 5:30am, but the temperature was already near 80 degrees. In addition to smelling like a polluted lake, the air was heavy and thick with moisture. I felt like I was breathing through a soggy, soiled wool sock. My running shirt and shorts, which had wicked sweat so effectively from my skin in Seattle, were now clinging to my damp skin like that last noodle lingering in the almost soupless bowl.

I was not sweating alone, though; other residents humans and dogs in New York were watching the sky alight with the morning sun. A few other runners plodded along; several couples walked hand in hand; cyclists sans helmets zipped past. Several individuals in various states of undress occupied benches. Some had slept there all night. Some were watching the sky, as if waiting for a celestial message.

Encouraging myself to actually smell the air, I took in a breath, timing my respirations with my footfalls. My eyes focused on a bench about thirty yards away: You can make it to that bench.

I had noticed him during the first half of my run. His arm was slung around the slender shoulders of the young woman leaning up against him.

Now, he had risen from the park bench, leaving his faceless sweetheart behind. I noticed him noticing me. He noticed me noticing him. I saw the impish smile form on his face.

When I passed him, he began to run and, within a few steps, was running alongside me. As he approached, I instinctively began to run faster out of alarm, though it was soon seemed that his intentions, though unclear, were probably not malicious.

(… though one never really knows for sure.)

“This is hard,” he commented in a Middle Eastern accent. His loose pant legs rustled against each other as he tried to maintain my pace.

“This is true,” I replied between breaths, playing along. A random stranger just started to run with me at 5:30am in New York City.

He smiled again and mumbled, “How do you do this?” before decelerating. He was soon walking and, presumably, returned to the park bench and the object of his previous affections.

I passed the bench that I had mentally marked earlier and selected the black gate that was about forty yards ahead.

I don’t know. Though I do know that none of this would have ever happened in Seattle.