The Homecoming

Lower Manhattan, late afternoon.

After the fragrance houses, two doorways. In parting, New York showed me something else — as it always does.

I walked first to 265 Lafayette Street. The first apartment I lived in when I moved to New York from Washington, D.C. in August 1993. The neighborhood was Italian then, edged with what passed for grit in those days — boarded-up bodegas running as Mafia candy shops, John Gotti around the corner, the kind of safety that came with the unwritten order of the place. I had come from Baltimore and Washington. This city, by comparison, felt easy to me. It was alive with people and places and purpose. I was excited to explore.

Thirty-three years later, 265 has an awning. The building is painted, and the Buffa's Café is now a different kind of restaurant. The whole block has been polished into something else entirely.

Then I walked to 123 Avenue A. The last apartment I lived in before I left New York in 2016. St. Mark's and Avenue A, thriving in the way the East Village was thriving back then.

Today the building is graffitied. The restaurant next to it is abandoned. Things look like they have been run down, but I'm sure there's a resurrection coming right around the corner. It always does in New York City.

Two doorways. Twenty-three years between them. And somehow, between the trip from 1993 to now and the trip from 2016 to now, the polish and the grit had quietly switched places. Lafayette had become elegant. Avenue A had loosened back into some grit. I stood on the sidewalk in front of each one and just took it in.

That is the city. It moves. You can't catch it. You can only love what it shows you while you're there. Enjoy the ride.

I caught the train out of Penn Station to Baltimore the next morning. The list of names my new friend had given me at breakfast was in my notes. The bottle of Tubereuse 40 was in my bag. The doorways were behind me — both of them, both of those parts of my life — and I felt the strange, clean feeling of having returned and been recognized in the way I needed to recognize myself.

What I came home to Sonoma County with — what the trip clarified — was less a strategy than a calling. The pull forward. The next thing I am being made for, even when I cannot yet see its shape. Listening, presence, community, connection — the values I had been living by, affirmed by every room I had walked into.

The trip didn't tell me anything I didn't already know.

It told me again.

Presence · Ritual · Beauty

Stephanie