New York: Everyone's City

My family and immediate area was lucky to escape most of Hurricane Sandy's wrath, but I've been reading about and looking at pictures from New York and New Jersey with a sense of such pain and loss. And that has me thinking about why I feel this heartache so deeply--why the images in the paper and on TV feel like the images of my town, not some place hundreds of miles away. Of course there are people I love in New York City and its surrounding suburbs, and I've visited the city enough in childhood and adulthood to know many of the streets I now see flooded and overrun with debris. But there's something more there--something that I think the country experience on 9/11, too. New York feels like our city, all of our city...or anyway it feels like my city in some way that I can't quite define but surely experience. I spoke last Sunday at our Remembrance Day platform service about places, and how they can remind us of the people we've lost. Now I'm thinking about places we've lost, and the way that we can lose places we've never even been: places that we meant to visit, or that hold a place in our own or in our culture's imagination. How many songs are about New York City, how many plays or movies are set there? Somehow we've all been to New York, whether our feet have ever touched ground or not. And then there's a piece too, I think, about the humanity there...the sheer numbers of people in New York City and its environs, the humanness in all its messy, diverse glory. We can all find ourselves in the faces of New York, if only because there are so many faces to look at. And that, too, tugs on our heartstrings. I don't have any questions today, just the musings of someone who is thinking of my human family north of here. And I bet that, whoever you are and wherever you live, you are too.