Some Far Rockaway of the heart
So many others are giving such expert attention to the recovery from Sandy — and its implications for preparedness and response — that I have not found much to add. It’s too soon to tell what will actually happen, but much that is being said strikes me as prudent, wise, even prophetic.
Reading the Times, Observer, New Yorker, Daily News, and even the Post — talking with friends and colleagues on return visits — I have been reminded how rough realism and real romanticism are coequals in most New Yorkers. They know the City must constantly change, they are proud of their ability to navigate the constant turmoil, and they embrace most improvements with weary regret.
Some of that attitude — both resilient and adaptive, it seems to me — is captured in this poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. New York, here’s wishing you a Happy 2013.
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A native-born New Yorker I was from the Lower Inside a part of town much favored by addicts of the subjective (a subversive group always being investigated) as well as buddhists and their lower chakras and others seeking salvations from various realities virtual or actual And losing track of where I was coming from with the amnesia of an immigrant I traveled over the extrovert face of America But no matter where I wandered off the chart I still would love to find again that lost locality Where I might catch once more a Sunday subway for some Far Rockaway of the heart–+–
January 1, 2013 Update: There is a great companion piece to the Ferlinghetti poem — and a wonderful bit of post-Sandy reporting — by Michael Greenberg in the just published New York Review of Books. Please see Occupy the Rockaways!
