This Is This

I can’t tell you how much this pleases me. I like to go every few years and I must have been to New York dozens of times. I have friends there from when I was a kid and the city feels like a friend.

You know how when you love someone, little things reminds you of that person? Maybe it’s better to say that lots of things don’t let you forget them. Well, lots of things are reminding me of New York at the moment.

I watched Annie Hall last night and all the jokes and scenes and the way Woody Allen looks like a New Yorker when he’s hanging out at Paul Simon’s character’s house in LA. As if Woody Allen could hang out.

There’s an office building in New York, and you might know it, where there’s a statue right outside the door, metal and lifesize, of a guy in a suit, holding a breifcase, hailing a cab. It’s realistic, like the one of Roosevelt and Churchill on the bench in Bond Street in London, if you know that one.

Anyway, the taxi guy’s arm is out and he’s frozen in a hurried step towards the street, suit labels hanging in a timesless gust of wind and he’s shouting like Han Solo at the beginning of Empire Strikes back. You know, right before he gets defrosted? “Someone who loves you“? Wait. Come back.

I was across the street from that building in New York one day, watching the people going to work, just seeing the city do its thing, and this office worker rushes up to the building and as he passes the statue he walks by every morning, he pats the guy’s metal face without breaking his stride and goes into the building.

I like the way it’s familiar. Watching Annie Hall, which was made in the mid-seventies, you could see New York and it’s the same feeling then that it has now. Watch a film set in London in the 1970’s and it’s completely different. London in the past is like a cartoon.

I like the way New York changes but stays the same. I like the way it’s an island, so it’s always going to be the same size with roughly the same streets. I like the book stores, camera shops and the breakfasts.

And I like how the days are made up of moments.

Like the time my dad was in Grand Central Station with his wife and he walked up to the ticket office and said, with typical English non-intrusion: “Philadelphia?”

And the guy behind the grilled till says: “What about it?”

It’s so familiar but with enchantments. And that’s what magic is - when you expect one thing and get something better.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 8:27 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.