It’s hard to not love New York City, even after your twenties are long gone. In the approaching autumn of that year I found myself there again and was transported back to post-college-graduation. The world as a proverbial oyster. Surely, NYC would come, but the job was at a newspaper, back home, in suburban North Carolina; just a step on the road to the Times and a loft in the Village. So, in that year, my early thirties, I found myself in New York again, ostensibly for a tennis tournament, and a few drinks with almost-lost friends. A storm was approaching up the coast, skirting the coast with a bump and then back out into the water, where it would build steam and head back inland. Thousands south of the city, including those in the town I then called home, were without power, many without homes. I found myself in NYC oblivious to the storm except the blips of it on cable TV news. In my mind, the city was covered in a protective seal that kept out such things as storms and locust infestations (the last of which could be correct).
My name is Moses Clower, or Mo as I like to be called – gets past the biblical implications which I have come to find problematic, and once made for an immediate launch in to the realm of the “academically gifted” as a child when I became the first in my class to know how to spell his name. I have been divorced for four years, six months ago I jumped from the sinking ship of newspapers (my passion; my blood – I thought) to a job in online journalism for a major 24-hour news network. I am 37 years old and have no dog, no children, and I do have a retirement portfolio that would turn no heads: women at the bar, financial advisers.
That weekend, as the storm approached, Labor Day weekend, I spent in NYC feeling like a kid again. It’s okay to say kid from this vantage point, because that is where the longing is – to be a kid again – but, what I really felt was like a young adult again (freedoms of an adult, no adult responsibilities) – what I would of called when I was actually a kid “an adult,” or simply “old” which makes me wonder what I would have thought as a kid of myself now. But that’s neither here nor there, or perhaps it is one or the other, but either way I was in NYC feeling like a “kid,” drinking with old college friends who I felt had somehow found the holy grail, but, as it turns out, were in similar positions as myself and my non-NYC friends, and it made the city seem smaller. And in making the city seem smaller, it made it more appealing to me, as I had long given up on the notion of making it there, and through giving up on the notion, had soon given up on the desire. A NYC that was not so overwhelming, didn’t feel like it could crush a person, alighted new fires of yearning in me – and those drinks, and those walks, and those views from that hotel room, and those women, all those different women, after these lonely past four years, seemed to sound the siren’s call.
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