More bad analogies

I'm standing up at Riverside Drive and 110th/Cathedral Parkway. The sun is filtering through the leafy trees, dappling the sidewalk. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as someone might say. Granted, it's not my neighborhood. But it might as well be. Bank Street School of (for?) Education sits around the corner. I walk to meet my friend there and a woman holding her child's hand stops another on the street. The single woman, bright shock of orange hair, stops, smiles and begins talking with the child who at first asks a question and now darts his head hither and yon looking at an imaginary moth flittering about. On the street corner, Kerry supporters are lobbying residents to work to beat Bush. I politely decline to help, not for lack of enthusiasm for the task, but for a set of previous commitments which have endeavored to envelop the rest of my time.

Darting up Sixth Avenue, chasing taxis and sprinting the length of Central Park on my bike, I am continually in awe of the city that I now call home. I understand how people can fall for a city, or an idea -- traipsing into love, I suppose. The sidewalk cafes, the preponderance of people, sheer masses that seem to somehow avoid being hit by my bicycle as effortlessly as I am able to navigate through the clumps of them. Even the drivers who seem oblivious to the bike paths, or the pedestrians who wander out in a death defying stumbling path -- I feel a warmth for them, too. This is the lifeblood of this city, the heart that pumps out the populace and the city streets like capillaries carrying each plasma-like person. Oh, but the analogy goes so far astray here. Regardless, it is easy to fall in love with a place, when it is golden lit by sun glinting skies and the grimy, gritty air still feels like a pumice cleanse.