Esprit de Core

The “core”of the Big Apple, that is. I’m here to tell you: it’s alive!!

Of course we haven’t been in New York City since February 2020. It’s only about 1hr 40 minutes away from us, but for the past year it might as well have been Timbuktu. The bright lights of the big city were snuffed; no light but the twilight of terror as we saw this summer when denizens who weren’t allowed to dine or worship together gathered in the dark to shout obscenities and trash police cars.

No restaurants, no theater? Why would we, or anybody else, go there? New York was dead.

Or so we thought….

Yesterday we had to go to Manhattan to take care of some unpleasant tasks. We spent the day checking on a family member’s storage units, so: caroming around in cold, fluorescent-lit warehouses with endless padlocked aisles, mausoleums of people’s lives. It’s not their moldering bodies, but their pasts, the suddenly burdensome memorabilia and accoutrements of their outgrown passions and choices, that ere entombéd there…well, what can you do if you don’t have a barn?

But here’s my point. It was a Monday, and the second day of Passover.

Yet the streets were full! At TimesSquare huge electronic billboards soared and morphed above the street musicians and gymnasts, the costumed Disney characters and league of justice characters.

And we found an open restaurant, an Italian place we’d never heard of at 44th and 10th, which turned out to be decorated with gleaming gilt inside, and to possess a Mexican chef who delivered perfectly prepared Italian delicacies, including their last piece of tiramisu, which we split.

it was just what I needed to counter the chill of the morgue-like vaults. We, took a long walk around Broadway after dinner. It’s still there, still alight, the Great White Way, even though individual theaters are dark.

The great city lives. And it will be fine, as soon as DiBlasio and Cuomo get their knees off its neck.

Viva Manhattan!

Y