Mornings in New York

We emerge from the air-conditioned lobby of our apartment building on this warm August morning, pulled along by two anxious dogs. The humidity slips over and around us like a sweaty embrace. The faint scent of garbage, flowering shrubs, and dog urine hangs in the still air.

We look both ways for other dogs before descending the steps, alert to the bedlam an encounter here at the edge of their estate would create. To the east, Madison Avenue, and, a few blocks further, the subway station at Lexington that will take us almost anywhere we want to go. To the west, Fifth Avenue and Central Park.

This is one of New York’s most affluent neighborhoods, where a basic apartment on this street fetches $4 million. We could never afford to live here, but we can scrape together the rent for a season.

We walk toward the park along the quiet street of brownstones and high-rise apartments. We arrived too late to catch the spring blossoms of the Callery pear trees that line the street, but we are thankful for their shade and greenery. Uniformed doormen wave as we pass. We slip across the street to avoid a lady with two high-strung Poodles.

As we wait for the light on Fifth Avenue, we take in the scene: the taxi cabs, the food delivery bicyclists, the moving trucks, the runners, the tourists, the city buses filled with office workers heading downtown, the old, the young, the black, the white, the men and women clad in business attire talking on headphones, gesturing as they fill their walk with calls to the office, the poor, the edgy, the mothers pushing strollers.

Where we’re standing, a well-known actress recently stooped to pet one of our dogs, her million-dollar face dangerously close to Preston, our unpredictable rescue. Another time, we turned away as a homeless woman defecated on the sidewalk just across from us.

Along the stone wall of the park entrance, two older men sit at opposite ends of a bench, turned toward each other in banter, probably dear friends exchanging insults.

Santayana once said: “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” This endless variety must be making us very wise indeed. We’ll see more diversity and strangeness in the span of a single traffic light than in an entire month back home.

We cross and turn into Central Park. Dogs are everywhere, many running off leash, but there is no trouble. The rules are different here. There is a secret dog code that makes this a safe zone, a sanctuary. Ours become angels, unrecognizable with their toothy smiles and chill behavior, no matter what other dog swings into their vision.

We say hello to a few people we see most mornings. Franklin smells the air in search of a lady who carries special treats in her purse, waiting just for him, it seems. When he finally spots her, there is no stopping his enthusiastic pull to her side.

We steer for a grassy meadow where the dogs relieve themselves. A million and a half dogs visit the park every year, though I rarely see abandoned dog waste. This surprised me at first because there aren’t that many trash cans in the park, and I’ve yet to find a single dog poop bag station. It’s nice to see how much New Yorkers care about the park, fondly known as their 843-acre backyard.

We take a slow ambling loop through the winding paths to enjoy the tranquility of this massive oasis walled in by concrete and buildings. The wildlife is plentiful and tame — squirrels approach, unfazed by humans or dogs; pigeons flap and hop on the paths so close you worry about stepping on them. The dogs were shocked at first when these birds failed to run away at their approach. Now, they accept this as normal. Live and let live might as well be the motto for all of this city.

As we near the park exit, we say hello to another regular couple with two older fluffy white dogs. The woman, perhaps seventy, pushes the dogs in a baby carriage while they look on like royals. Her husband trails behind with a picker-upper stick and a garbage bag. He fills a bag of trash every morning. He never smiles at our greeting. He is perennially grumpy, yet his pride in the park is evident and heartwarming.

I am still getting used to the outward gruffness of these everyday encounters. A New Yorker won’t meet your eye on the street, but they will sneak a grin at your dog. Each walks in a practiced bubble of indifference, yet ask for directions or help, and the barrier instantly dissolves. Beneath the gruff, New Yorkers are some of the friendliest people in the world.

Franklin slows his pace as we retrace our steps to the apartment and stops about twenty yards from the entrance. He loves these morning walks and would prefer to carry on, perhaps a leisurely saunter uptown, or a quick dart beneath the turnstiles to catch a downtown train. I keep a tight grip on this wanderer’s leash.

As I wait out his stubbornness, I think about why we decided to drive across country and rent an apartment in New York City for five months … in the summer.

A couple of reasons seem almost practical: for one, we wanted to escape the hottest months in Arizona. We figured the humidity in New York would be easier to tolerate than 110-degree afternoons (this, we’re discovering, is debatable). And, I lived for a short time in New York in the 1990s. Lisa and I began our courtship here. It’s a common ailment in later life to revisit those places of our youth, to peel back the years looking for the unscathed, happy-go-lucky version of ourselves.

But the truth is, we came here to shake up a pair of retired lives that had gotten too settled, too predictable, too easy. Our perspectives on the state of the world and our ambitions for the future had become narrow-minded and meager. We didn’t need more and more of the same. We required the shock treatment of an entirely new way of life … and a new way of thinking.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond, turning away from society to find his truth in the wilderness. Twenty-three years on a rural island in Washington state taught me the spiritual value of nature and seclusion. I have never been more at peace than while walking the quiet trails of an island forest or losing myself in the cosmos on a clear night from the cockpit of a sailboat. And the last three years I’ve spent in the Arizona desert, removed from all familiarity, felt like a blanching of my spirit, a stripping down of my very identity, as I suffered through a time of intense grief.

But in the back of my mind, New York beckoned with its gritty flood of humanity electrified by creativity and moxie and unlimited possibility. A city that celebrates audacity and the human compulsion to stretch far beyond themselves, scrabbling ever upwards, hammering a dent in the universe before falling back to earth. New York City is the tale of Icarus on a repeating loop.

If there was ever a place to dream up new beginnings, this is it. Lisa, who has mostly recovered from her health scare when we first arrived, paints landscapes in Central Park and studies art at the Met. I write and nibble at the edges of the sprawling literary life of the city: the author talks, the bookstores, the incredible libraries and reading rooms. Together, we have explored almost every part of New York, the sketchy and the sublime, mastering subways and buses like locals. There’s a pang as we imagine the life we might have in some of the neighborhoods we visit: the rows of tree-lined brownstones in Brooklyn, the fabled streets of the West Village.

I’ll admit to scribbling rough calculations in the margins of my journal to figure out if we could move here. Between the real estate costs, the taxes, and, well, the cost of everything else, it doesn’t pencil, not by a long shot. Still, there’s a part of me, the irrational part, that says screw it. No one comes here because it makes sense. Dreams rarely make sense.

We finally coax the dogs up the building steps. This first walk of the day is done. Now coffee, breakfast over the folds of the New York Times, and then? We’ll be back on these streets with a bounce in our steps toward the next discovery, our eyes bright with the promise of an unfolding story.

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