Writing from our East Village bunker where I am trapped by a 43-pound six-year-old’s thousand-pound fear of what scariness may lie on the sidewalks of Manhattan.
After having lived here for well over twenty years, I associate “the dangers of the streets of New York” with young Al Pacino’s straight cop in a skanky 70s Manhattan (Serpico), or the subway riders’ lack of surprise that their train has been hijacked (Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3). When Dennis’s parents visited from Las Vegas they stayed in a Chinatown motel and were afraid to leave the building after 7pm, (Year of the Dragon?) I scoffed, rolled my eyes and became indignant, personally insulted for my city.
The yearning to walk among others, to feel life, commerce, conversation, romance, stories unfolding or ending, only expanded when I came to New York and multiplied tenfold when I became a mother. The freedom of the streets, the casual contact, the energy that sometimes is too much to take, but usually a necessity to my equilibrium… My social life barely exists on the phone except for faraway friends. It’s in chance meetings or semi arranged gatherings at Tompkins Square Park or the bagel shop or the restaurant on the corner.
In Dash’s daily mantra of wanting to live in the country, he’s too young to understand the tradeoff we would be making: his neurosis for my inevitable psychosis.
Life is not fair and being a child subject to parents’ choices is really unfair, but as I’ve heard one father say to his son, “In this movie, I have a better part than yours.” Perhaps there’s something missing in my makeup as a parent, for I can’t imagine sacrificing my love of New York for a quiet house with a yard in the suburbs in order to quell is worries.
So we work on his fear, and repeat again and again that this is much harder for him than it is for us.
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