Free My First New York by New York Magazine Page B

complete.
    I saw her from a distance halfway down the block. She was already bent into the day. She wore a headscarf. Her coat was old enough to have once been fashionable. She was pushing along a silver frame. Her walk was crude, slow, laborious. With her frame, she took the whole width of the alley. There was no space to pass her.
    There is always a part of New York that must keep moving—as if breath itself depends on being frantic, hectic, overwhelmed. I thought to myself that I should just clamber over the snowbank and walk down the other side of the street. But I waited and watched. Snow still fell on the shoveled walkway. Her silver frame slipped and slid. She looked up, caught my eye, gazed down again. There was the quality of the immigrant about her: something dutiful, sad, brave. A certain saudade , a longing for another place.
    As she got closer, I noticed her gloves were beautifully stenciled with little jewels. Her headscarf waspulled tight around her lined face. She shoved the silver frame over a small ridge of ice, walked the final few feet, and stopped in front of me.
    The silence of strangers.
    But then she leaned forward and said in a whisper: “Shall we dance?”
    She took off one glove and reached her hand out, and with the silver frame between us, we met on the pavement. Then she let go of my hand. I bent to one knee and bowed slightly to her. She grinned and put her glove back on, said nothing more, took a hold of her silver frame, and moved on, a little quicker now, along the corridor of snow and around the corner.
    I knew nothing of her, nothing at all, and yet she had made the day unforgettable.
    She was my New York.
    Still is.

D AVID R AKOFF
    writer
arrived: 1982
    M y mother’s purse was stolen about an hour before my parents left me in New York to start my freshman year of college. She noticed it missing from the back of her café chair just as we were finishing up our lunch at an outdoor table at a long-disappeared Italian place at 111th and Broadway. The handbag had probably been gone for a while, but like cartooncharacters who wander off of cliffs but only fall once they realize they have done so, I felt the solid ground disappear from under my feet and my life in New York begin.
    Truthfully, I found the theft thrilling, even as it sharpened whatever anxiety my folks must have been feeling. The robbery conferred a modicum of street cred with zero injury, and I needed all the help I could get. I was a sophisticated sissy, having grown up near the center of Toronto, a cosmopolitan city of three million people. But displaying cultural literacy and knowing the difference between shit and Shinola are two distinctly separate realms. Being able to quote entire scenes of The Philadelphia Story from memory or paint a good facsimile of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (Large. On my dorm room wall) won’t do you a bit of good in the real world. At seventeen, I knew nothing, and I looked it. A whelp of barely five and a half feet, I was markedly shorter and less developed than the boys I saw unloading boxes and suitcases. Compared to most of them, I was a tentatively pubescent cherub, encased in puppy fat with a face open to experience that seemed to beg: Please hurt me .
    I looked at the purse-snatching as an early andpainless inoculation from violence, no small matter in the city back when the prospect was still real enough. New York in 1982 was only beginning to shake off the traces of its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” near bankruptcy. Infrastructure was still crumbling, the subways were still covered in graffiti. The term yuppie would not be commonplace for another few years (and it would be at least that amount of time before the city opened its first Banana Republic or Cajun restaurant to clothe and feed them). Coffee still meant a paper cupful from Chock Full o’Nuts. There was a remaining franchise at 116th Street and Broadway, probably unchanged since 1961, still boasting