When I was a relatively new freelancer, I was able to live in Manhattan by writing regularly for second-string publications—Income Opportunities, for example, rather than Forbes--that paid quickly if not overly well, and were also staffed by pleasant people. One of my editors at Income Opportunities knew John D. MacDonald. I think they had worked together when they were young. Or were in the Army together. Or something.
Anyway, after long months staring out my 17th floor windows and banging out articles as fast as my clients could take them, I decided I needed some chill time before I could return full tilt to churning out stories about diners made from old yellow school buses, and turning your home on a upstate New York trout stream into headquarters of a smoked eel business. It was mid-summer, and the weather was beautiful. So I decided to take my dog, a black Labrador named Daisy, and a book, and walk from my apartment in on Eighth Avenue at 53rd Street on the West Side to the model boat lake in Central Park, above 72nd Street on the East Side.
It was quite a hike, including the long crosstown blocks, which I avoided by meandering eastward through the park's paths. But when I got to the 72nd street crossing, I knew coffee and an ice cream cone awaited at the kiosk, and there were benches beside the lake or under the trees. There, I would share ice cream with Daisy and sit and read for an hour, I thought.
Whenever I looked up from my book, it seemed, there was something to catch my eye. I thought I saw, on a path some distance away, my literary agent walking arm in arm with a woman who was not his wife.
I talked with a young man who had rescued four puppies that had been tied to a tree in the sun.
I noted two little girls in matching outfits having ice cream with their father, who was instructing them in the proper way to eat an ice cream cone and not make a mess.
I saw the usual contingent of people talking to themselves, or engaging in swiping away flies that were not there. I smelled a few of them.
I watched a few boys sailing their boats on the lake, a few older couples walking arm in arm around it.
The day wore on and I had more coffee. Then I found I really COULD use a public toilet in Central Park, despite my mother's oft-repeated contention that merely entering one would kill you in minutes. Not a mugger, by the way; germs.
At length, we got past the carriages and horses on Central Park South, waiting for some out-of-towners to spend the better part of 100 bucks for a half-hour ride through the park. We got through the buskers on the park side of Columbus Circle. We got across the bevy of streets defining the circle and onto Eighth Avenue. The sun was sinking into the Hudson by then; it sinks early—or so it seems—because the horizon is actually a few hundred feet above where it is anyplace else on earth, anyplace that doesn't have north-south streets lined east and west with high-rise buildings.
It was good to get home and out of heat that had become oppressive as the earlier breeze disappeared, to say hello to Jimmy, the night doorman. To cook dinner. To look down 53rd Street's gap toward the Hudson River and New Jersey as night fell. All New Yorkers are happy to look at New Jersey; we just don't want to go there. My favorite waiter in my favorite NYC restaurant, Monte's in Greenwich Village, swore his dog cried when he drove over the George Washington Bridge to see his brother in Newark, and jumped for joy crossing it back to go home.
There are lots of wry stories about Manhattanites, some true, some not. But one thing is for certain. If one has lived in Manhattan for any length of time, and for me, it was about 15 years, one is always a Manhattanite. There is no place like it. None. It is a unique combination of commercial and residential, rich and poor, urban and country. There are parts of Central Park in which, at times, one might be in the deep woods of upstate New York, except for the smell of Sabrett hot dogs carried on the breeze from the vendor cart at the 72nd Street crossing.
Whether that day sticks with me because it was so completely New York, or because it did restore me so that I was able to continue churning out minor articles for minor publications often enough to live in a Manhattan high rise, or because of the page-turning greatness of The Last One Left, I will never know.
It doesn't matter. It was a balm for my soul, that day, and it still is.