A belated answer
Part of the hiring process in the English Department at UMB is going out to lunch with a group of students so they can check you out and pass along their impressions to the faculty. Yesterday, I was one of these student representatives, and the complimentary buffet isn’t the only thing I’ve chewing on since. (Sorry, that set up is unforgivable, but…forgive me.)
The candidate yesterday was a young guy with a newly minted Ph.D from City College in New York. He looked 18, and his clothes were self-consciously hip in a way that I’ve gotten less used to these months in Boston, but I’m sure he was 30 or so. He was trying to get a feel for how the student demographic at UMB compared to CCNY, and when he figured out that I had lived in New York for enough time to make it count, the conversation changed completely. At first, we were just talking about favorite spots and “It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You” coffee cups. Finally, someone with some idea of what it might mean to teach middle school in Bushwick! Oh, street cred, how I’ve missed you.
But then: “So what’s it like to live up here after New York?”
The question I don’t want to answer, don’t know how to answer. And what I said almost surely didn’t make any sense to him. In fact, I’m not even sure exactly what I meant, but I’ll try to make some sense here.
It’s a trade-off. The things you come to think are going to be hard in New York (and, yes, that list is long), like dealing with any institution, not getting the benefit of the doubt from your landlord, having to live in a dirty din (even if people tell you that you live in a “nice” area), those things aren’t hard in Boston. It’s clean. People can be eccentric but mostly reflect the friendliness of those who aren’t embattled, who haven’t been screwed over or inconvenienced one time too many. Boston does not breed an unspoken contempt for authority, or distrust, or ill will.
But the things you come to expect to be no big deal in New York are hard in Boston. Heading over to a party, you might reasonably think that you can stop at the ATM and pick up a six-pack or a bottle of something. Maybe. But maybe your simple little errand will lead you around a dizzying circle of dark residential streets, leaving you, if you didn’t get lost, trying to rationalize the faux pas of showing up empty-handed. You probably won’t get anything to eat, anywhere, after 11:00 pm, and definitely not after midnight. And if it’s midnight, you should probably be heading home anyway–the assertion that the T runs until 1:00 is just a lie. The T almost never goes exactly where you need it to, so you’ll have to get a bus or take a hike. On a clear, mild night, that walk can be a sweet finish to an evening out. But this is New England, and the weather doesn’t usually cooperate. So, you’re stuck in that no man’s land between the last T and the last bus, which can last for nearly an hour (at Harvard Sq, anyway). So basically, you just left a party (where hopefully your friends with cars were understanding about the empty-handedness) at midnight to get home at 2:00 anyway.
Dark thoughts emerge. Is it even worth trying to go out when there’s Facebook chat and DiGiorno? Has it come to that?
This is turning into a rant, and I’m going to get it under control, but it felt good. There are deeper, more important things in a city than how easy is to stay out late, of course, but I’m building to a metaphor…
New York is both the party and the hangover. Whatever it promises, it resolutely refuses to be all one thing or the other. Boston is constant: medium-sized, medium-paced. For a soul accustomed to the cycle of being elevated by sights and sounds, then ground down, then elevated, then crushed again, Boston doesn’t, on the surface at least, seem to offer much to fight against or fight for.
Maybe it’s a little crazy to want to live that way, anyway. And maybe Boston has a spirit I just haven’t been let in on yet. So, the answer is: I don’t know. I await.
“New York is both the party and the hangover.”
I don’t know enough about NYC to know if this is even true, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing I’d written it!
All this relates, in a general way, to a conversation we had a week or so ago about ethnicity. We are a distinct breed in northern New England. I’m ready to assert that that in itself is ethnicity. You ARE something, just the way you are.