Bohemians are useless at saying goodbye; and they never want anyone else to leave. So, they don’t say goodbye; they vanish, or they cease to be bohemian, suddenly or gradually assuming responsibilities they have for a long time postponed.
—Inigo Thomas, “Leaving New York“No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge… when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
—Colson Whitehead

Just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
—Paul Simon

Departure is permissive. As it draws close you get to say the unsaid and try on wishes for size. I love its carnival intensity, and maybe that’s why I’ve done so much leaving. But in spite of all that practice— or because of it—I am useless at goodbyes. After a fortnight of cake and beer, and with a week left in New York, I excused myself. I spent my last Friday night not with old friends but on a first date, scaring the bejesus out of the guy by announcing that from here on in I was only in the business of hellos. Well, I thought I meant it.

That Sunday I put on my snorkel jacket and took the 1 train to 215th Street at nine in the morning. Broadway slices skinny Manhattan top to bottom on the diagonal, and I wanted to walk its length in tribute to the place I’ve loved. The moving boxes were still stacked, not packed, in the hallway, and my to-do list lay undone. I carried a print-out of Inigo Jones’s recent Slate piece for vague directions on how to cut across to Fort Tryon Park to begin my pilgrimage.

It was the best of New York February: crisp and brilliant, and warming towards a balmy thirty after too many frozen weeks. The winter trees stretched like models and I made a little prayer to the Olmsteads for their grace in planting gardens for generations they’d never meet. Below the Cloisters museum, middle-aged firemen played volleyball, showing off a little for a passing audience.

On happy days, when you need it least, everyone wishes you more joy. “Baby, you have a beautiful day now, y’hear?” yelled the flower stall guy, and I did, helloing my way down Broadway. In Washington Heights, the, the Spanish signs were formal: COAT $10! GRAN ESPECIALIDAD CON MOTIVO DE “SAN VALENTIN.” I thought about a pupusa stop, but it was too early, and I could count on San Francisco to provide Salvadoran food, if nothing else. And I was too early, as always, for services at the United Church of Reverend Ike All Welcome, but that was okay. It’s important to leave a city unfinished so that you come back.

Outside the Hispanic Society of New York—another Inigo Thomas tip—a man sitting on the steps groused while I petted his dog. “Oh yeah, that’s it. Pay attention to the dog. That fucking dog gets more attention from females than I ever did or ever will. And it’s a girl!”

I jotted down a Toni Morrison quote in a Morningside Heights bookstore: “In this country, American means white. Everyone else has to hyphenate.” Around 115th Street, near Columbia University, Broadway un-hyphenates briefly and drearily. “Those women are so hostile,” someone said outside Starbucks. Her friend mentioned his soy intolerance, and she reminded him of her lactose difficulties. Barnard College was running a production of The Vagina Monologues, as if they were in short supply.

Then a detour to Amsterdam Avenue to visit the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, still in progress after more than a century. I like the notion of house of faith that stays unfinished. It seems more flawed and more alive that way, like its worshippers.

At the northwest entrance, I found that Christo had gift-wrapped Central Park as a going-away present. His saffron flags flapped and glowed like monastery robes drying in the sun. A man rapped on a saffron gate post. “Ple-astic? Ya think it’s ple-astic?” It’s vinyl, someone said. “Voi-nyl, thank you.” Bikers reached up to bat at the flags. So did a three-year-old on his father’s shoulders, mad with joy.
“And there’s another flag! Oh, Daddy! I missed that one. But there’s another one!”

I felt mad with joy, too, at The Gates flaming on the snow and the thousands of open faces looking up. The Gates taught that the fleeting deserves as much—or more—attention as the fixed. At first I wished I had a camera; then it was enough to smile for strangers’ photos. On the East Drive a pearly limo glided north. “That’s Christo and Jeanne-Claude,” someone said, “They’ve come to see the reactions.” I imagined a second installation: The Reactions. The crowd cheered the smoked windows. “Thank you! Thank you, Christo!” And Jeanne-Claude.

Below the park, I stopped at Prada to touch the bags, and became the owner of patent-leather silver sneakers that seemed both daft and comfortable enough for a journey to a new life. They were shiny as mirrors. I made a note not to wear them with a skirt. “I see Paris, I see France…”

Around the corner, on 55th and 5th, I visited the apartment I’d lived in my first four years in the city. I hadn’t been back since. The Manolo Blahnik store on the ground floor had moved; it was another Italian restaurant now. I walked past twice, very quickly, glancing into the lobby and hoping not to see the Colombian doormen or the old lady next-door I’d never said goodbye to. Darker and shabbier than I remembered it, and hard to look at now.

The lobby of the Algonquin Hotel has discovered wireless internet access, but the service is still surly and slow. I waited and waited for five-buck coffee: “Is coming. Is brewing the new coffee.” When it came at last, it tasted as though it had been on the boil since I first stayed there, fresh off the plane.

Then down, down Broadway—galloping now, ten miles of rhythm in the strides. I wasn’t seeing the February people any more, or paying attention to the shading from discount cameras to designer furniture as the block decades dropped. I was back with the moments that had stitched together my time in the city; ducking left and right in sidestreet pilgrimages. My first New York job at Times Square. The old Vindigo office on 25th Street. The theater where I’d seen Andrew’s play. The school where I’d done bootcamp training for my volunteer job. Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Union Square, where I’d learned to file and grudge. My first bowl of pho. A final, blistered pause on the corner of Broadway and Houston to wave up at the office I’d left the week before.

In two hundred blocks I’d traced another layer on the palimpsest of my New York, which is not the same as yours.

Even in Kyoto
Hearing the cuckoo’s cry
I long for Kyoto
—Basho

“In Mexico the family seems to be a centripetal force; in the US it is a centrifugal force.”
—Carolo and Marcelo Suárez Orozco, Transformations: Immigration, family life, and achievement motivation among Latino adolescents Stanford UP 1995

On her visit from New York last weekend, Kit had joked with Jake’s brother, her host, while we sat in Mission-Dolores Park. “Are we those relatives?” she said. She meant the ones who take over your guest room or sofa instead of booking a hotel room; the ones who impose. They told of the codes they use to tell out-of-town family they’re welcome but not that welcome: “I’m not sure if you’d be comfortable here, just because there’s a little drug action on my block sometimes…” Someone else said it was kind of sad to have your parents still crashing at your place once they got to sixty. You—or they—should be able to afford a hotel room by then.

As a child I memorized books about English boarding schools and American summer camps, and latched on to independence as a high ideal. I don’t think it was prized in Ireland, especially, but my parents indulged me anyway. (At least until I confused independence with geographical distance so thoroughly that they switched tack with my younger sisters, hoping to keep at least one of us at home.) I was sent on French exchanges and grim au pair summers; let off to London the day I turned 18; allowed to go to college in Dublin and not call home as much as I should have. At twenty I spent a year living in Valencia’s thriving drug district. The Spaniards I knew made it clear that no loving family should let a daughter roam like that, and I looked down on them in turn. Their own kids lived at home until marriage, but I was an adult.

Maybe that’s why I can still push west with a few boxes of books, at an age when my friends are bound more deeply to their places. But now I wonder—I’m a late developer—what’s so great about this Anglo-Saxon cult of individualism? I decided to move to San Francisco when I realized that for all I loved New York, I couldn’t pass the Chemo Test: though my pals filled a room for a surprise goodbye party, I wasn’t sure who I’d call if I got sick. I think of Caitriona’s son, Liam, and am wrenched at the thought of him ever joking about his embarrassing Irish ma wanting to stay at his apartment.

On Sunday I went to a birthday party for a three-year-old friend, where the guests were a mix of Irish and American. The rowdier smallies mauled cupcakes and rear-ended plastic trucks into the kitchen walls, and the placid ones sat on their nappies and supervised the backyard vegetation.

I talked to a Cork woman whose five-year-old son was a hit with the girls at the party. After years in the Bay Area, she was trying to move back to Ireland. It was too hard here as a single parent, she said, and she felt there might be more support at home. You could rely on basic health care, and probably still count on decent free public education. But since she had a good job, those weren’t biggest factors that pushed her home. What wore her down was the lack of community here, the lack of a set of friends and neighbors that the kids could run in and out to, and whom you could call when they were sick. People are friendly here, she said, but still you have to arrange the playdate at a set time and place. It’s always about the kid’s social development, never about giving each other a bit of a break.

I’ve watched my Irish friends with children, and that web of casual support is still there, at least among the ones who aren’t wealthy. “We’re bringing our lads to the park,” Joy might say, “and sure why don’t you send Maya along with us so you can get a few things done?” I thought this was how it worked everywhere. But in San Francisco, Noreen says, she knows one single father in her apartment complex with whom she can trade babysitting from time to time. The kids have no chemistry, and the father regards the time as a bartered commodity to be precisely measured, rather than a way to look out for one another. In itself, the calculation becomes exhausting.

I don’t know how her experience fits with the spirit of the party, which seemed free of the high-impact “parenting” that defines upper-middle-class families. These relaxed parents seemed happy to be nouns, not verbs, and I felt you could drop a snotty-nosed child or two at any of their houses, in a pinch. Tonight I’m going for drinks with a pair of sisters who just bought a three-unit house with their partners and a friend. Laura’s baby is a month old, and Dorothy is due soon. Their lucky babies will grow up with family in a common backyard.

Still, it’s true that American cities have started to price and market many services here that are part of the social contract elsewhere, at least for now. Places like New York and San Francisco, where so many of us live far from our families, are turning to trained and paid doulas for the pregnancy wisdom they no longer get from the community. Human mammals now seek advice from “lactation consultants.” Childcare is bought and paid for, even for a run to the shops. Adult children don’t give up their beds in tribute to the parents who reared them; they show their love and success by buying them a hotel room—and preserving that precious independence.

But “I can do it by myself!” is a line for a three-year-old, not an adult.

Further reading: Doug Rushkoff, intellectual imp, on the American childrearing experience:

Nothing like having a kid to turn you into either a communist or a capitalist.The long radio silence has been due to the intensity of parenting an infant. Sure, it’d be intense under any circumstances, but I can’t help but believe that the difficulty attending to the 24/7 needs of a baby are compounded by the dissolution of both the extended family and community of days past. Indeed, I’m beginning to believe that the fact that human females pretty much require assistance in giving birth might be a way for nature to enforce a bit of community on our species. Human beings do better in groups. Read the rest