drafted three months in, published fifty months in

I haven't been able to sleep well all throughout the summer. Perhaps it's my impending move — a potential solution to my dissatisfaction, pessimism, and alienation. I am grateful, at this dead hour of a dead day of the week, for the time to reflect on four years in New York, where I confronted the upper and lower limits of my own and others' generosity more often than I could take. Perhaps some "content quilting" will help me understand the past, just as stitching got me through the worst days of this otherwise semi-charmed life.

For context:

• “A fatherless girl thinks all things are possible, and nothing is safe.” - Mary Gordon c/o Gloria Vanderbilt c/o Kate Beckinsale. (I'm not.)
• "I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you're a New Yorker? The world doesn't owe you a damn thing." - Lauren Bacall, in her seventies. 

Enter excerpts from Here is New York, by E. B. White, saved on Blogger when I was a fresh-faced summertime transplant, testing out a hypothesis. Ironically, I never had time to write in the city.

"Although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness, it seldom seems dead or unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location ten blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation."
No better place to do both than in Brighton Beach. (With lovely Ashley in January.)

"The terrain of New York is such that a resident sometimes travels farther, in the end, than a commuter. Irving Berlin's journey from Cherry Street in the lower East Side to an apartment uptown was through an alley and was only three or four miles in length; but it was like going three times around the world." (Crossing Atlantic Ave., changing neighborhoods.)

"New Yorkers seem always to escape [mass hysteria] by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit—a sort of perpetual muddling through. Every facility is inadequate... But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin—the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled."
Does this mean a bad day in NYC is still > a good day elsewhere? (Along the 7.)

"Behind me (eighteen inches again) a young intellectual is trying to persuade a girl to come live with him... Then he has to go to the men's room and she has to go to the ladies' room, and when they return, the argument has lost its tone. And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little dinners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin." A misty stroll down 57th late on a summer night, my favorite two-way street, ⇾ cat.
(Home, laundering carpet around Memorial Day.)

"I visit my office on a Saturday afternoon. No phone rings, no one feeds the hungry IN-baskets, no one disturbs the papers; it is a building of the dead, a time of awesome suspension. The whole city is honeycombed with abandoned cells... This is the pit of loneliness, in an office on a summer Saturday." I used to love doing this during those precious months that I genuinely loved my work, but also needed a place to pee.
(Monday night digestion ritual.)

A short tribute for now. By the powers of memory and imagination, it will not all have been a waste.