Back To New York
A couple of months ago, I moved back to New York City after eleven years away. Like many things these days, the transition has had a certain dream-like quality, as though at any moment I might wake up to find myself back in my little room in Los Angeles, writing articles and waiting for the world to change.
It’s the trees, in part. I’m sure “horticulture” is not the first thing most people think when they hear the words “New York City,” but coming from a place of often-bleached-out sunshine, a state where the main form of arboreal vegetation looks as if it was designed by a child obsessed with giraffes, I’m dazzled to find myself walking down streets dappled in the shade of plane trees and oaks, ginkos and lindens. I had forgotten the world could be so cool or so green.
After more than a year of seeing so few people in person, to suddenly find myself amidst so many is also like stumbling onto an oasis in the desert. I have spent happy hours here just sitting and watching the world go by. St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, liked to invite retreatants to imagine scenes from Scripture. He believed God could speak to us in the things we saw there, the people we met, the moments we noticed. To me, living in New York is like having that chance every day.
One of the things that has always surprised me about the city is the way in which the passage of just a few blocks can bring with it the sense of entry into a radically different community. And yet being here during these last few months I more often feel a sense of something bigger that unites people. A few weeks ago, a local organization released a video of famous New Yorkers singing Billy Joel’s classic “New York State of Mind.” It captured precisely the combination of support and pride that I find in the city right now. As hard as living cheek by jowl here can be, when push comes to shove most New Yorkers seem to understand one another as family. They celebrate one another’s courage and grieve each other’s losses.
(Also, they are passionate about their shared community — a fact I realized once again as I was writing this article and wondered what specific kinds of trees grew in my neighborhood. It turns out the city has built an online map maintained by volunteers that not only provides details on every tree in every borough of New York but keeps track of anything that happens to them. I adore every single part of this.)
Moving back, I’ve discovered one other thing that all New Yorkers share is an opinion about Los Angeles: that is, they don’t like it. Most are very polite when I say I moved from there. “Oh really? What did you think of living there?” they respond warmly. But their own frustrations soon tumble out. Los Angeles is too superficial, they tell me, too spread out, too sunny. Plus, the traffic!
I get it: while I never found life in Los Angeles to be superficial, the never-ending sunshine during my first years there did make it feel at times as if I was trapped in Groundhog Day. (The city gets a lot more cloudy days now.) And it’s true, it can take you well over an hour to drive fifteen miles in Los Angeles. Not long after I arrived in New York someone told me they had a commute of thirty miles. My mind literally broke, until they pointed out it’s fifty minutes by train.
In general I liked Los Angeles. I loved the work and the friends I found there. But it did take six or seven years before I could say I actually loved the city itself. Los Angeles is the house cat of American urban environments: it does not come when called; it has no interest in entertaining you; it seems built to defeat any desire you might have to enjoy it. Learning to love it requires patience.
New York is just the opposite. Get off the plane, hop in a taxi or train into town, and you find yourself immediately seduced by its beauty, its life, its drama. The struggle here is not in finding New York but in trying to figure out how to navigate its constant stimuli. A city that never sleeps can make it hard to ever get to sleep (or want to sleep), either.
When I moved to New York the first time in 2004 to work as an editor for America Magazine, I knew pretty much no one, and nothing really about the city either. During those six years, I met so many people who spoke with a frankness that I found liberating, who had done so many things I had never considered, and who imagined futures for themselves far beyond what I had allowed myself. Their stories profoundly changed my sense of what was possible for me. Because of them I traveled to Rome for the first time, spent seven months working for the Jesuits in Australia, and eventually took the risk of moving to Hollywood to write screenplays.
It’s a story I keep hearing now from others since coming back: New York as the place that enabled people to discover themselves, the community where they found a sense of belonging, the city that’s been good to them. It’s a lot like what we hope church can be for people, really.
One experience keeps happening since I’ve come back. Each time it does, I’m suddenly lost for words (and occasionally a little choked up). And it pretty much encapsulates my feelings about being back in New York right now. I’ll meet a stranger, tell them I just moved here from Los Angeles—they stop and ask about life there, gamely fighting their desire to tell me how much they couldn’t stand it.
Then when I explain that I lived here before, they smile so broadly it’s as if they’re meeting a friend they’ve waited all pandemic to see. And they say to me, “Welcome home.”
