A good friend of mine who works here in New York has been threatening to move back to Atlanta. Well, "threatening" is not really the right word. I say that because I would hate to see him leave. He has lived here for five years now, and he has been thinking that his time in New York was about done.
I have heard this line of thinking many times since moving here. For a lot of people, New York is a place to which you can make only incremental time commitments. Like a trip to the holy land for some religions, it is a place where many people want to live "at some point in their life." Those people usually only see New York on vacations, or when traveling for work, when all aspects of the City can be pretty amazing. They don't see, for example, my co-worker having to carve a third bedroom out of his living room to make way for a second baby, or the daily grind of dealing with getting around the city when taxis and car services aren't in the budget.
As of today, I have been a New Yorker for six months. Not a lot of time, and it is far too early to tell whether this is just a stop along my own journey, or something more permanent. Life is definitely very different here for me. Like everything, there are trade-offs, but just when you feel like you have had enough, you have one of those Saturdays when you wake up and within thirty minutes, you are staring at a Monet or Picasso at MOMA, then you stumble on some new cuisine for lunch, followed by a reading of a cutting edge poet, a stroll along the Hudson River, and topping it all off with a Broadway play that evening.
Of course, that wasn't my Saturday. But it could have been. And that is, I believe, a big part of what makes people stay in New York long after their self-imposed commitment to the City has ended.
My Saturday was spent at Village Tavern for this same friend's birthday celebration. With the admitted influence of a promotion at work, he announced to the guests that he has decided to stay. He told us --all current New Yorkers--that he "just can't seem to leave this City." Everyone around me just nodded in silent understanding.
