WHO LIES ABOUT ABANDONING NYC

I spoke to a woman recently who moved to Portland Oregon from Brooklyn New York, just casual conversation in a Safeway line.

We had something in common since I moved here from the same place, though she didn’t start in North Bend Oregon. She was big city all the way with no perspective on the charms of small towns.

To her, Portland was a small town, and she found it charming as hell. She loved Beaverton and Tigard, too, calling them “villages” instead of suburban sprawl and endless strip malls like New Jersey.

I knew she was the real thing after her Jersey smack.

“How long did you live there?” she asked.

“About a year in Brooklyn. I had two apartments, the first with an absentee roommate, the second on my own.”

“Did you work downtown?” she asked.

“Lower Manhattan, yes. Took the RR.”

“There’s no RR train anymore,” she said.

“No surprise. It seemed like a random name for a subway line.”

“You did office work?”

Good guess, but since there’s about a million offices on every freaking block of NYC it’s not a huge stretch.

“Purchase and Sales Department, 7th floor of One Battery Park Plaza. There was an older guy named DiMaggio in the office. We had a baseball team and he was on it, so I’ve played baseball with a DiMaggio in Brooklyn.”

“The real DiMaggio played in The Bronx, but still cool. You worked across the street from Battery Park,” she said.

It’s fun talking to someone who knew the city. She’d been to Prospect Park, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, visited the Statue of Liberty, all of the cheesy tourist stuff I didn’t do because I planned on living there the rest of my life and sharing tourist stuff with friends and family when they visited.

I told her my plan. She wasn’t impressed.

“I did take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry just for fun,” I said. It boarded near Battery Park, and crashed into the docks in heavy fog while I was there.

She nodded her head.

“And here we are. New York chews you up and you either like it or not. It takes so much time to do nothing, like grocery shopping, just going to a store for anything. It’s not so bad when you grow up like that, but I can’t imagine diving in cold like you did. It’s not like here.”

I asked if she missed her family. She said, “No, they come out all of the time.”

How do native New Yorkers fare out here in the wild? A guy from the office, Don, scouted LA as a place to move his family. He came back with an analysis that sounded like he had just been to Hungary.

Different language, different culture, not like home was the final consensus. He moved two months later.

“Well, I didn’t get chewed up,” I said as the line moved toward the conveyor belt and cashier. She put up a bar to show where her stuff stopped.

“Yeah, uh huh. That’s what I say, too. Have a good day,” she said in a voice straight out of Marisa Tomei’s mouth in My Cousin Vinny.

Abandoning NYC? Not me

I was settled in for the long haul until Don from the office moved. No one in the group I knew ever thought of moving, which is why I hung with them. Stability. Some of them had wives and kids, most single, but all loyal to Brooklyn.

Then Don reported in and made me realize the crap he talked about the west coast was how I felt about the east coast. No one was more shocked than me when I snapped out of it.

By the time I decided to abandon New York I’d had one visitor from Oregon, a lovely woman who decided to she needed to go where her heart led her.

She was the stuff of greatness. Me, not so much, but when I told her I was moving she invited me to live with her and a roommate while I looked for a place.

I moved to NW Portland after much Portland research. Either that or she kicked me out and that’s where I landed on short notice. I like the first one better.

And that’s the beginning of my continuing fascination with urban landscapes, and my new appreciation of Edward Hoppers’s work of quiet desperation and heart breaking loneliness.

After all, the big city has a million stories, and most of them start with lost love.

At least the good ones do.