This column ran today,May 25, 2006 in the Albuquerque
Tribune:
MEMORY LANE
New York is an exciting city to meander through, but Albuquerque offers relief for tired legs.
By Arthur Alpert
I’ve just flown home after five days in New York City and boy, are my legs tired.
Raised in Brooklyn, later a Manhattanite, I know the Big Apple is for walking - just forgot.
I join my hostess in her routine stroll around the Central Park reservoir - is this, I wonder, where Jerry Apodaca got mugged? – and drink in the runners, green trees and, higher still, skylines East and West.
One morning I take the subway "B" train (called the Brighton Line when I was a kid) to Brooklyn and walk to my old apartment house at 1862 East 14th Street. In the 1940s-50s, we were Jewish, Italian and Irish. Now the names near the buzzers are mostly Russian, with one Ramos and one Chan. Signs on stores sport Cyrillic characters.
Later, a Manhattan doorman who lives in that neighborhood says Russians are moving out and up to Long Island, swarms of Mexicans and Asians replacing them. Swarms?.
I spare him the lecture on permanent change – the neighborhood’s name, Kings Highway, came from the English, who displaced the Dutch, who displaced the American Indians… you know the story.
So does Sarah Jones, author and star of "Bridge and Tunnel" on Broadway. Imagine a poetry slam. The emcee, who’s Pakistani-American, welcomes to the stage competitors of all ages and genders from Russia, Latin America, Asia and Africa, plus an aspiring rapper, schoolgirl, Jewish matron. A virtuoso of voice, accents and movement, Jones plays all of them.
The American Dream lives, she’s saying, let’s value each other. How generous! How unusual! It’s easier to scapegoat immigrants
Manhattan is mellow. A bus driver greets my friend with "Happy Mother’s Day" and helps a wheelchair-bound passenger descend. A subway tollbooth clerk waxes nostalgic about New York’s safe, good old days. A cabbie listens to what I surmise are love songs, Arabic or Asian. "Pretty," I say. "Bengali," he replies, excitedly. "Beautiful words, too. If only we had time, I would tell you what they mean."
I subway to the World Trade Center and feel 9/11/01 intestinally.
Walking around, I get lost, disoriented by new buildings - on the periphery, that is, not on the site. Maybe they shouldn’t fill the hole.
Visitors, many foreign tourists, gawk and take photos. African and Asian entrepreneurs hawk mementos of 9/11 and "I Live New York" t-shirts. I disapprove, then shrug – it’s human to make a buck wherever, whenever. And if exploiting tragedy is the game, these vendors are pikers compared to the pros in the White House.
On the subway uptown, a guy, late teens, Chinese, with spiky hair and a Chicago Bulls shirt, wears a cord in his ear. Maybe we don’t melt but that big American Pot sure re-fashions us.
I attend a brilliant revival "Of Thee I Sing" first seen Dec. 26, 1931, wherein the Gershwins lob softballs at government idiocy, corruption and – mostly - the Vice-President’s invisibility. How dated. Innocent, too.
And I walk to the Museum of Natural History where they say the cosmos is ancient and – horrors! - evolving.
Flying back, I find the turbulence over the Sandias almost comforting. Although New York City is wildly stimulating (or because it is), I’m thankful to be home. Next – green chile stew at Garcia’s, huevos with red at Duran’s Central Pharmacy.
And I’ll never walk again.
Alpert is a semi-retired Albuquerque newsman. Reach him at ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column appears the fourth Thursday of each month.