Howdy.

How are ya?

I’m sipping a cappuccino, on a coffee date with Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir.

I recently received another gorgeous book from someone in a random act of kindness. This is about that gem and some thoughts inspired by it. Plus, the poetic thing a kid in my class said that I can’t stop thinking about.

SIGNS FROM THE UNIVERSE

Let’s talk about the universe.

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who randomly gifted me a book about New York. She handed it to me one day in class and said that I just needed to have it. It was full of quotes and photographs and little odes to the city and I loved it entirely. I was around sixteen, meaning that my love for that city was just beginning to be born. I don’t know how she knew, but she did.

The following year, something similar happened. I remember walking into fifth period one day when a girl I barely knew handed me a travel guide book on Brooklyn, (this one). She had bought it for me. I was quite shocked, naturally, and asked her why. She told me that she saw it and just needed me to have it. I didn’t think she even knew me, let alone my dreams. I suppose we exude more of ourselves without speaking than we realize. It remains one the strangest things that has happened to me. I took that book with me the first time I went to Brooklyn alone. I thought of her while on the train.

And now, it has happened again.

I was sitting on the couch watching In With the Old last night when my dad handed me a book with a bow around it from his client, a lovely woman who has known me my entire life. I unwrapped it and read Humans of New York across the cover. She reads my blog and said that I needed to have it.

AN INSPIRING ART PROJECT

I opened it up and read To the city of New York. I had this crazy, juvenile idea that you were going to make all of my dreams come true. And you did. That gave me chills for all of the obvious reasons. I then, of course, went down a rabbit hole of research on the author, Brandon Stanton, reading his story, and the stories of the thousands of people who he has photographed and interviewed.

What’s so cool about it to me especially is that he started with a blog, one that didn’t get much traffic or attention for a whole year, and just kept doing it. He moved to New York without any money and made it his mission to document the human experience of living in that city. Much like Bill Hayes in Insomniac City, also known as one of the most authentic books I’ve ever read, he was interested in capturing real, mundane, imperfect moments of everyday life. It was his big, crazy idea that no one believed in, and then it was the idea that landed him on Time magazine’s “30 Under 30 People Changing The World” list. I mean, what?

His website, found here, is even cooler. I got totally sucked in and crawled through every corner of it. This one moved me especially. I think that what he is doing is kind of extraordinary.

TOUCHING THE PAST

Stanton’s project reminded me of something that a kid in one of my classes said the other day. He said that we write as a way to make the past tangible, to touch who we have been and the world that we have known.

I jotted those words down into my notes immediately and thought of them all day. I thought of how maybe that is why I write so much about one particular period of my life, even now, even all of these years later. Because perhaps more than anything, I just want to reach through all of the years and the thick vines that have grown over them, and hold the hand of the girl that I was as she lay in the moonlight, not knowing, not ever knowing, what lurked in that silvery glow. Not yet knowing that sometimes, beginning are also endings. That sometimes, things can be so sweet that they rot. I would want to hold her hand, to really reach out and touch it, as she fell to her knees in pain that hot summer day when it felt like the world was crumbling around her. I would want to sit up with her, shoulders touching, all of those restless nights that she spent reading anything she could about heartbreak and grief and loss. I would wipe her tears with my own hands if I could. I would use my own shirt. I would wring it out in the moonlight.

But I can’t. So I write. I touch her hand, her shoulder, and her wet face through words. They are the only portal that I have ever found.

What’s yours?

Love, m.

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