You can take the girl out of New York but ...

I am a proud New Yorker. By that I mean that I am a resident of the great N-Y-C, the Big Apple, one of the best and most visited cities in the world... New York City. I have lived in "The City" as we New Yorkers like to call it, for over 15 years now and, like any relationship that goes on for that long, The City and I have had our ups and downs. After all these years, I am still passionately in love with New York even if I am exhausted by the constant energy that it requires of me. It is like an abusive lover with whom you have great make-up sex; no matter how bad The City sometimes treats me, I know that I will always be lured back once again. The lows of New York can be REALLY low, but the highs... well, let's just say there is nothing like it anywhere on earth. There is a palpable energy in the everyday hustle and flow of the city streets. Yes, it can be dirty and loud and rude, but it can also be beautiful and euphoric and inspirational. Better people than I have written so many countless songs, poems, and tributes to this remarkable place (not to mention all the important movies that would never have been half as memorable without this City's landscape as its most vital character) that it feels pointless and unnecessary to espouse all of its virtues here. New York truly is a living breathing entity full of personality and faults and emotions. She is a bold chica with whom most people feel strongly about one way or another. There is very little room for middle ground or passive feelings while in New York City.

Like most of us living in New York City, calling myself a New Yorker has been a large part of my identity. I have felt more proud to say I was a New Yorker than I ever did to say I was an American. We New Yorkers take pride in our status as people living in the country's most unique and often photographed city. It is a currency that pays dividends anywhere we go and say where we are from. Being a New Yorker means having weathered extreme circumstances as if they were the most mundane everyday occurrences. For example, most of us New Yorkers have at some time:

-watched rats eat out of a city garbage can
-had someone steal our cab
-waited for over an hour for a much needed subway to arrive
-found a cockroach the size of a small bird in our bathtub
-fought a landlord over heat, hot water, rent or the like
-watched numerous "crazy" people talk to themselves on the street
-been flashed by some guy on the subway late at night
-lived in an apartment the size of a large walk in closet
-been sung or danced to in a subway car and asked repeatedly for money
-listened to two people scream profanities at each other on the street for all to hear
-packed ourselves into a subway car so tight that we have had numerous people we did not know touching us in places we wouldn't let someone we did know touch us
-witnessed or been a part of a violent crime

The list goes on and on. Yes, most of us have been through a whole hell of a lot in New York. We wear our battle wounds with pride and a shrug as if to say, "Well, if I can make it here I really CAN make it anywhere." We know whatever didn't kill us here has made us stronger and we strut a little anywhere else we go knowing what it means to say we are from New York City and how what we have experienced has changed us in ways that others wouldn't or couldn't understand.

I vividly remember the day in my early 20's when it hit me, walking in midtown Manhattan, that I lived in one of the greatest cities on earth and how I much I loved it and how it had in some way spoiled me for anywhere else. Even in my later 20's, after traveling the country and visiting all the biggest cities: Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, D.C., LA, Atlanta and the like, I remember thinking that there was nowhere else I would want to live in this vast country of ours. And so continued my love affair into my mid-thirties and my marriage and right up to the birth of my son.

A child changes life fast in The City. The car alarms and the crazy people that used to be merely annoying become overwhelming and exhausting, and the apartment that was considered "cozy" before quickly becomes unbelievably small. Before you know it, the suburbs of Long Island don't seem quite so bad. For me, the important and difficult decision to move from this City I love so much didn't come easily and I would probably have never even considered it save for my son, Rainer, but with him I yearned for more space and my husband home more. (He is gone 11 hours a day with his commute to work on Long Island.)

The scope of this giant transition is not lost on me and it has called into question my New Yorker identity, an identity so enmeshed with my personality that I have been left way-laid at the thought of who I will be after this move. To the rest of the world moving from New York City to Long Island 45 miles away is not that big of a deal. To New Yorkers, Long Island might as well be Alaska. The "bridge and tunnel" folks, as those from Long Island and New Jersey are known, are a source of consternation and the butt of many jokes by City Dwellers. So the question now presents itself, "Who will I be when the joke is on me?"

New Yorkers are not unlike ex-prisoners or career military people for whom life on the outside is just a little less colorful or meaningful or vibrant. For these people there is always a way to get re-arrested or re-deployed so as to stay in that continually adrenalized state. Similarly, the heightened conditions of The City force some into a perpetual state of overdrive that makes it hard to live anywhere where the pace is even a hair slower or the people just a tad less colorful. So how does one live a life on "the outside?" I guess with the realization that there is in fact LIFE on the outside.

For me the identity change from New Yorker to Long Island Suburbanite and the down-shifting to a less harried life in what I will now call, in the last vestiges of my denial, the "outer-outer boroughs" is a recognition that maybe life doesn't always need to be so intense or so crazed. I have come to the realization that I don't need those giant highs and lows to feel alive anymore and that I don't have to feel like a sell-out just because I have a back-yard or a space to grow some tomato plants. And maybe after enough time has passed and I have sufficiently let go of my old lover NYC, I can find another lover in my new town of Bay Shore. Sure, the intensity of our passion might not be the same, but it might also feel good to not be so battered all the time.

And when all is said and done, I will always be the girl who lived and breathed and ate New York City in all its glory and all its flaws. And as the Brooklyn born Gershwin once wrote, "They can't take that away from me."