There are so many stages of getting settled into a place. And so many places into which to settle in New York. While my mother was here last week, we toured through the lower part of the island, and took a boat around the waterways. I was on vacation for those few days and although I've yet to begin any serious work, I'm back at the "desk," practicing, brainstorming my life and what to make of it in this new place. There is no orchestra to give me a purpose. I have a part-time teaching job on the horizon about which I'm excited and healthily intimidated. There are some music education training courses in which I'd like to enroll, perhaps a choir. But I'm far from settled. And New York seems to defy settling. The dust is always drifting, even if it is quite close to the surface, even if it is in a whirlwind.
Yesterday we ventured to Koreatown where there are many Korean people, many Korean restaurants, and a grocery store perfect in its mix of Korean delicacies as well as catering to the cheese and Oreo cookie needs of the western diet. Our Korean dinner was perfect in that we could read the menu, but didn't know what to do with the whole fried fish, raw egg, and hot sauce that they hurriedly set at our table. It was comforting to be culturally uncomfortable. We then walked through the streets of mid-town and decided to go through Times Square dazzled and amazed by the lights and the sheer number of people from all over the world, even super heroes and muppets.
After being a tourist with my mother, these were still two more parts of the city, extreme experiences, that we had not had. And how many more are there? It seems impossible to take it all in. There are free Shakespeare plays int he park, free opera screenings, free yoga classes, and everywhere is the free sighting of incredible diversity and humanity. There are so many kinds of people in this place, so much so that there is no higher or lower, no fear of judgement. Whatever you might be, there is likely someone who is more of that, or less of that, and so likely nobody will really notice or care as long as it doesn't concern them. And maybe even if it does.
And so there is a blank slate upon which I am beginning to walk. Yet I find that I am already defined as being within some section of New York living. If nothing else, where one lives means something about them. An I'm settling in to a very nice part of the city, a place where it is quiet and green and there is a doorman who takes deliveries to my door, and workers that make the garbage disappear when we set it outside the back door of our apartment. It is a very nice place to be living, though it feels a little foreign, certainly something worthy of finding a new grounding.
I wonder what it will be like to live in this sort of place for three years. Will I ever feel entitled to all the things I'm being given? Can I be grateful enough for what I have? There is a burden of privilege that I feel upon me and I wonder how that will change in the coming years. Will I own it? Will I live up to it? Can I shake it in any other way?
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