Vacation Hangover (the good kind)

If there's a good kind of hangover, this is it. The dreamy, all's right with the world sort of hangover that comes from a great vacation, not too much work, and living in a place where anything seems possible.

I haven't had too much work since I got back from my break, and that has been the greatest contributor to my unusually positive outlook on life these past few weeks. (Well, that, plus going for a run a couple times a week, probably. Exercise: It Works!)

Tonight I walked home from work at around 9 pm, and saw people spilling out of bars, sitting outside restaurants, and I felt that sense of romance about New York -- about life, really -- that I felt when I was younger and greener and less bitter. That boy with the English accent sitting on that bar stool, laughing with that black woman in athletic gear; that French restaurant full of patrons drinking and eating; that tall, thin man in the apartment directly across the street from me, taking out his garbage; that woman walking with a slice of pizza on a paper plate; that doorman staring out into the street -- I wonder about each of them: Who are you? What brought you here? How do you feel and how do you live? What dreams do you have, and will they come true? Will they break? Have they already been broken? Have you?

Romance! It's so much more than love between two people. So much more than flowers, or wining and dining, or the multi-thousand dollar platinum and diamond engagement ring that a co-worker of mine just bought for his soon-to-be fiancée. It's that feeling that everything and everyone is a story full of joy, tragedy, rapture, suffering, heroism, adventure, each waiting to be discovered and treasured.

Yesterday, man plummeted past Camp Bella’s window and met his death 9 stories below, just a few hours before I came over to see the newest addition to Camp Bella, little 9-month-old Bellito. He had almost undoubtedly jumped, since the windows in Camp Bella’s building are next to impossible to fall out of. Mr. Bella heard a wail after the body hit the ground, a wail that rendered the silence and then stopped. What unbearable anguish was extinguished by that fall? And what terrible, silent anguish began with it?

After meeting Bellito, I went on to see another newborn, the first son of another college friend, and after paying the usual kind of homage that an infant and its parents require, I walked through Central Park, that Vaux and Olmstead marvel. The Central Park Dance Skaters Association was having a fundraiser, selling CDs and t-shirts as association members, most sporting four-wheeled rollerskates rather than the more modern in-line version, skated and danced around skate-less dozens boogying to the club music pumping out of the middle of a fenced off area. A man dressed in a Batman costume did the white guy shuffle. Men, women, black, white, gay, straight, skated round and round -- in pairs, in fours, while balancing a water bottle on the head, spinning, executing crossovers, graceful and not so graceful, being watched by at least a hundred non-skating passers-by.

Half an hour later, I moved on and found myself walking down the Mall, the grand promenade in the heart of Central Park, the location of hundreds of movie scenes. Shielded from the sun by the elm trees bordering each side, a young woman in a pastel dress sat alone on one of the benches along the path, concentrating on her flashcards. In front of a statue of the now-obscure poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, a curly-haired young man plucked the strings of his bass while a black man in a shabby brown suit quavered through an equally shabby sax rendition of the Miles classic So What. Sir Walter Scott looked down sadly as his dog tried to solace him. A young boy beat three bongos frenetically as his father (?) played guitar behind him.

Faint with hunger, I moved on and out of the Park, but not before passing by the Dairy, originally intended to sell milk at reasonable prices to children, and the Lake, and the carousel, in operation since 1871.

Life! Death! Possibilities! History fore and aft, directing all activity and being created by it at the same time. This is the New York one dreams of living in, the city where everyone and everything has a story pulsing just below the surface.