I had visited New York City before. It irrevocably felt that way.

Movies and television shows shot, fiction set, in New York City. The East Village, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Coney Island, the Bronx, Brighton Beach, Harlem. Fifth Avenue, Broadway, 42nd Street. Central Park. Grand Central Station. Yankee Stadium. Greenwich Village. The L Train. The IRT.

I had visited New York City before. I felt that I knew my way around.

New York is urban. New York is steel and sounds. The entire island of Manhattan is so densely populated, areas of the city are continual skyscrapers, block after block of buildings with boutiques at ground level, people walking continually against the light, row after row of yellow taxis, transit buses, an intricate weave of subway lines, their entrances at street level, cars on streets six lanes wide changing lanes.

New York is inhabited. People live downtown, with wrought iron fire escape after fire escape, both red and black, on every building. I saw mass apartment buildings in Harlem from the subway. Four story walkups on the Upper West Side. Lofts in the East Village. Predominantly, I did not see luxury. I saw grit. Drug deals in Washington Square, tens of thousands of the homeless on the streets, a tired atmosphere in the subways, a New York that was humid and heavy in the summer. Construction and pedestrian walkways. I saw speed, a city in a perpetual rush. I sat on the steps of a church along Madison, downtown, and watched people go by. The well-dressed from work, the fashionable, young, professional. Walking quick.

I did not see supermarkets that people drove to. I hardly saw any department stores. There is one K-Mart in all of Manhatten. I saw local cafes and small shops. Street markets, walls of public sound enveloping you, strorefront wares and spanish street signs. Bagels. Krispy Kreme donuts. Delis.

People are not rude there. They are visible and direct. They stride confidently through a crowd, inoculated against the shocks of sound and smell. They feel that they have seen it all. Yet people talk to each other. Perhaps it is the pace of urbanity in the city that leads people to not talk about the weather, but about a recent police scandal, about politics, should you engage them on a bus, at a corner. They don’t have time for anything else. People know that the next stop might be yours, or you might be swept away with the masses.

Part of my purpose in going to NYC was to meet one of these people: Hanna Grol-Prokopczyk.

Hanna’s mother and the mother of a good friend from high school, Ariel Brink, know each other from forty years back. Hanna corresponds, infrequently as I found out, with Ariel, and Ariel felt that she would make a good penpal for me. Or perhaps that I would make a good penpal for her. More likely both. Ariel decides these kinds of things occasionally. I need to read a certain self-help book. We need to write poetry in Edward’s Gardens. I have found that it is easier just to accept these twists and turns and roll with them rather than fight him. Trust is part of what friendship is all about.

Hanna and I had exchanged two letters each leading up to my visit. In her writing, she seemed very contained. Each sentence of Hanna’s was its own statement. Each word seemed to say something. Perhaps this is a skill that develops when one writes a great deal, of fiction, of non-fiction, in letters from Central Park, selected rooms at the Met, of from courtyards with running water. The value of each word expressed to make the space on the page count. Perhaps it was due to her letters being handwritten, that there was no editing, rewriting, or deletion allowed. I was looking forward to seeing if her manner carried over into how we would relate with each other.

I talked with Hanna halfway through Friday afternoon. We made plans to see an installation at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) with her friend Carol that evening. I would meet her later at work. I settled down at Café Riviera in Greenwich Village to read a book and drink a Rolling Rock. The book, "Kafka was the Rage," told of post-WWII Greenwich Village, the bohemian scene, courses in philosophy at NYU taught by displaced German professors, sex, desire and relationships. It tried to illustrate how the city felt fifty years ago, flushed with the aftermath of the war, thinking everything was possible.

I finished my beer and walked south to Houston past a competitive street basketball game, through after-work sidewalk traffic, past shops and restaurants, east across Houston to Broadway, past some tall apartments. I felt more of the area’s history after reading part of the book. I thought of all the changes in the last fifty years and what still remained the same.

I rode her building’s elevator to the tenth floor. When Hanna wrote that she was part of a firm designing web pages on the Internet, I immediately presumed that I would encounter a small number of people struggling to keep an underground organization afloat, using the Internet to fight "The Man." I have a tendency to idealize concepts and issues in life. Either that, or I have seen the film "Wargames" a few too many times. I found a firm with leather couches, spacious hallways, designer air ducts, twenty colleagues, and a reception area with carved wood panels and a twelve-foot tall suit of armour.

In her letters, Hanna seemed to outline a creative tension in her life between analytical order at work and creative play (with letters and paper mache art) in private. I expected Hanna to look as she wrote, that is, someone who would be visually direct and precise, with sharper angles and contrasts. I was thinking fashion with bursts of colour, short and perhaps a bit punky hair. I was wrong in this regard as well. She was dressed in basic black, with flowing brown-hair and soft features. I insisted on taking a picture of her beside the twelve-foot tall suit of armour. It seemed like the obvious thing to do.

We then embarked for the subway. She spent some time thinking about how to most effectively get to MOMA, sometimes intensely peering at a subway map. In contrast to her work clothes, I was in a t-shirt and shorts, wearing a ballcap, with my camera and zoom lens, and a black imitation-leather backpack. We must have looked a rather eccentric pair.

Enroute, I read her an excerpt from the "Kafka" book, and we talked about what you can tell about a person’s personality from their artistic production. Hanna talks much as she writes. I think that she is precise in what she says and how she says it. It just manifests itself more in her writing.

I guess getting one of three preconceived things (her firm, her appearance and her manner) correct is not bad. Well, not bad for a pro ball player’s batting average, rather poor for an air traffic controller.

At MOMA, we saw the photographs of Cindy Sherman, an artist who focuses on the plastic nature of identity. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Sherman took a series of black-and-white photographs of herself, almost as if she was playing a variety of roles, of different women from her childhood. I found it interesting that the exhibit was sponsored by Madonna, an artist who has built her career out of a continual refashioning and redefining of her femininity.

New York seems an ideal place for such an installation. It is a city wherein you can play at who you are, a city in which each moment is important. A city that knows it is the model, for good and bad. A city of extremes, of power and homelessness, health and sickness, wealth and poverty. You are among nine million people, among communities of activism, culture, wealth, religion, and sexuality. It is a challenge to live in such a city. You need to know yourself or be able to carve an identity for yourself out of all the activity that you can call your own.

Hanna and I joined Carol, and some of Carol’s friends, for part of a classical music concert in MOMA’s courtyard. Often, during the evening, Hanna seemed deep in thought, perhaps about a trip to Eastern Europe with her mother the next morning. By the time the concert started, she was tired and still needed to pack.

It seemed that we were tentative in saying goodbye. We are only beginning to get to know each other. We can write each other about types of artists who "riff" or "weave," about our personal divides between work and love, about her going to Harvard or myself living in Riverdale for a year. But in the end, we have only been corresponding for seven weeks. Perhaps it was too early for us to meet. Perhaps not.

I had visited New York City before. And now I have visited it on my terms.

I will go back as soon as I can. There is a conference on "Media and Democracy" there in mid-October that has relevance to my studies in graduate school at York University. I plan to see Hanna again. I will try and see parts of the city (Harlem, the United Nations, Brooklyn) that I did not see the first time.

My friend Lesley says that living too long in NYC makes you hard. I would correct this by saying that living there might make you tempered. tempered (noun), to strengthen or toughen by heat treatment, as by heating or quenching. I perceive that New York is a city that draws you in with its contradictions, its vibrancy. You can’t help but want to be part of its flow.


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