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National Geographic : 2015 Dec
Contents
New New York 87 ridges of Brooklyn. On that foggy day in July 1945 when a B-25 bomber crashed into the Em- pire State Building, Tom and I rode the subway to 34th Street to see it. In the years ahead I fell in love with walking, comics, drawing, the Dodgers, reading, and stick- ball, along with the music of Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, and above all, Frank Sinatra. Like every- body else in that time and place, I had no mon- ey. But from the kitchen radio, I had the songs, humming their music as I walked the streets to school or the library or the park. Sometimes on weekends in my teens, I would take the subway and get off at a stop where I had never been and just start to walk. I’d look at the houses, the ten- ements, the playgrounds, the schools, the shops, the churches, the synagogues. I’d try to imagine the lives of these people I didn’t know. Each new neighborhood was at once familiar and obscure. Without yet knowing it, of course, I was training to become a writer, finding stories about this immense city and its people. All of them were living in neighborhoods too. I’m no longer eight, or eighteen. I’m eighty. And if that sense of New York wonder now seems more elusive than ever in the city that gave me my life, this is not because of the glib seductions of nostalgia. We New Yorkers know that we live in a dynamic city, always changing, evolving, building. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The city’s enduring slogan could be: Get on with it, my friend. Long ago my now shrinking generation of native New Yorkers learned how to lose. Par- ticularly we Dodger fans. Yes, even the great- est hitters in the history of baseball failed six times out of ten, and thus baseball had much to
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