Los Nuyores

I can understand why Puerto Ricans migrating to New York City called this place Los Nuyores, in plural. The city is so vast and so majestic that only a plural rightly describes its scope and its feel.

In many ways, New York feels like another kind of "home" to me. When we were children, we visited often and we would walk all over the city, whose grid-like layout - so much more logical than Boston's cow-ploughed streets - I never did learn.

But I did learn to fully appreciate its city-ness, its buildings that reach for the blue sky and the sun that streams unevenly through the corridors of avenues and streets, illuminating some structures while keeping others in shadow. It was here that I learned to love the faraway sound of horns honking and police officers whistling and emergency vehicles wailing in the distance. Those sounds, oddly enough, mean "home" to me.

When my husband and I first moved to the Ohio suburbs, I had trouble acclimating to the utter silence of the nights. When a few years ago we moved to a small city near the capital, I knew it was a good decision for many reasons, but one of them included that I could hear the distant roar of the cars sailing through the expressway and the faint wail of the sirens in the nighttime. Those, to me, are the sounds of the city.

This morning, my "tree" friend and I took a nice walk on a sunny cool spring day on Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center and back to where we're staying. I was a little kid again, pointing at the Cathedral and ooing and aahing over every interesting thing I saw on the way. I probably annoyed my very patient and kind friend but she didn't let on at all.

I wanted to kick myself for failing to listen to the sage advice of Dr. S, who said I should bring my little digital camera with me to NYC. I didn't and I regret it because there's thousands of pictures that went untaken even if they remain in my mind's eye as vivid prints of the city's uniqueness. The next time the camera comes with me, for sure.

Last night, I had dinner at Sueños in Chelsea - which I highly recommend since the food was exquisite - with another group of women friends (some brand new to that evening). Although the night concluded with the unexpected illness of one of the new fascinating women I had met, up until that moment we were all delighting in the company of smart, hardworking women with lots of interesting things to say and share.

Tomorrow, it's back home to Ohio. But for today, I'm drinking in Los Nuyores like there was no tomorrow.