My home's in Alabama

NYC reminds me of why

A tree grows in Brooklyn. April 20, 2024 in Williamsburg neighborhood

Hello fair readers. Forgive me for not sending out my weekly injustice news roundup. I’ve been on the road and time got away from me. I promise to be back next week.

My 16-year old daughter accompanied me to New York last week for an event, and we stayed in Brooklyn for a few days to enjoy the city, zipping into Manhattan on the subway, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Strand Bookstore and a massive flea market in Union Square Park.

We ate brioche donuts with maple glaze for breakfast and pizza slices the size of pennant flags for dinner. The energy in New York felt frenetic, as always, but also fresh with cherry blossoms and tulips in full bloom. I spotted lots of smiles, which is saying a lot.

I lived in New York from 1995-1997, but the city was a different place then, just like the whole world was different then, and I was too. In my early 20’s, I thought I had escaped Alabama for a more important, exciting life outside my tired hometown of Birmingham. Except I didn’t really know what that life was going to be, but I contained a powder keg of ambition and decades yawned ahead with possibility.

Maybe because I’m turning 50 this year, or maybe because I have a minor surgery scheduled for tomorrow, I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time, and the anniversary of my father’s death this month, and how quickly it all comes and goes.

I’ve been back to NY many times since I lived there, but seeing it through my daughter’s youthful eyes reminded me of how it used to be and what’s been lost, but also what is timeless about the places we know in our lives, and how it takes age and experience to know where we belong and why.

In 1995, my New York had no cell phones, no weed dispensaries, no eyebrow threading shops. We made calls on landlines, and city streets were lined with phone booths, newsstands that sold actual newspapers and magazines and real packs of cigarettes, not vapes.

There was no uber or lyft; hailing a cab was a learned skill that required flagging down a moving vehicle, then telling an in-person, live driver where you wanted to go. Instead of looking down at a screen, we studied paper maps. Instead of holding a phone to a pay screen, we dug a token out of our pocket to buy a subway ride.

But the subway stations still encapsulate the same wet cool of an underground tomb, the same whooshing burst of hair-blowing air as the train speeds into the station, the same metallic shriek of brakes, the same choreography of humans in every shape and size spilling out the open doors as soon as they split open.

When I was younger, my mother used to whisper excitedly to me, “Beth, all these men are staring at you!” We’d be in the mall, and I’d think she was bonkers, what the hell is she talking about? I would silently ask myself, rolling my eyes.

But now I know. I am now the middle-aged woman next to a lovely teenaged daughter, and I see them look at her while looking right past me. Men and women in New York gaped openly at my child, and I felt my fangs come out as I pulled her closer. No conspiratorial excited whispers from me, only protectiveness and suspicion. Maybe in some ways, women are safer, but it’s hard to navigate the onslaught of leering eyes.

Safety was not at the top of my list during my younger years in Manhattan. I didn’t know what I was good at back then, so drinking with wild friends became my special interest. We stumbled around the city, taught with desire, danger or death were not on our radars. Many mornings I woke, marveling that I had somehow made it back to my apartment with no memory of how I got there.

Now I moan about sore feet, struggle to yank a heavy suitcase up four flights of stairs and after four days of jostling around in this sea of humanity, begin to experience a pressing encroachment, a discomfort with the noise, the crowds, the constant forward momentum. I long for uncrowded quiet, an uncomplicated drive in my car, and birdsong from the oaks in my backyard that appear to glitter like a million emeralds in the afternoon sun.

And so after traveling back from NY to Alabama, all this hits me. My daughter and I cheer when we finally cross back over the state line on our way home from the Atlanta airport. Sure, there are things about Alabama that confound, baffle and enrage. But the landscape holds a special softness, a spaciousness, and there are brave people here with important purpose.

I am grateful to be rooted here, for the time spent wandering and the act of finding my way back to where I’d been. It is home.

And it only took me 50 years to figure it out.