The City Meant for You

You:

   Tennis-ball walker

   and red cap, “New

   York, New York”,

     struggling to make your way

     onto the sidewalk. “Have you

     lived here all your life?” asks

      a woman; you reply a half-hearted yes.

      Your city has long been lost, laid to rest

      beneath the timely rubble, the 40s, 50s,

         60s, 70s on top of your 30s, the years when the

         Cranberry Street Tunnel had just opened. The

         Queens-Midtown Tunnel is not a tunnel in your

                 city, it is a part of the 40s’ peoples’ cities, and to them the Pan Am Building

                 (the Metlife Building to the 90s’ cities, you see) is just as outlandish as it is to

                 you. Perhaps for a while you adjusted to this newfangled New York (once

                 New Amsterdam), but the part of your mind rooted in the present has strolled

                 off to Alf Hymer’s restaurant (surely not a part of your city), leaving only the

                 part of your mind that is bound to the past. So you are moving with tennis-ball

                 walker and red cap, “New York, New York”, desperately searching for your

                 buried 30s city as that woman tries to be compassionate, but can’t look past

                 the growing anachronism on your body. Even street names you once new as

                 part of your 30s city are now foreign…Lexing…Lexing-what?�"oh! yes,

                 Lexingson Street and 59^th Avenue. The 30s’ New York City is fading, fading

                 fading; you are searching, searching, searching with cataract eyes and arthritis

                 bones. If I could, I would go to Alf Hymer’s restaurant, find your dear friend

                 sitting in that dimly lit booth with a Corona, and bring him back to you. He

                 would stroll you off to Central Park, sit beside you on the bench near the

                 107^th Infantry Memorial (20s’ city), explain to you what has happened to the

                 Big Apple (now becoming the Apple in Decay to 2000s’ cities) since his

                 departure, and hold your hand as you wept tears over the forgotten city meant for you.