It's not better because of the New York pizza we ate. It's not better because we went to Schmackery's, and it's not better because we visited the Rockefeller Center. It's better because New York, like other metropolises, is like a little slice of heaven. An imperfect slice, to be sure, but a very real one.
Walk down the street in New York and you will hear every language under heaven spoken there, by people gathered from every tribe, nation and tongue. You'll hear Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, French, Chinese and Spanish. You'll hear Kreyol, Portugese, Italian, Korean and Japanese. You'll hear Tagalog, Swahili and Urdu. You'll hear languages you never even heard of, spoken by parents to children, spoken by brothers to sisters, spoken from one friend to another, and even spoken among strangers.
Amd the people! Visit the boroughs and you'll see the old-school communities still nestled away in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Harlem. But you'll see unexpected variety blooming everywhere in a riotous garden of humanity. There are Syrian German women married to the Argentine-Indian men whom they met in Japan; French Egyptians married to Afro-Russians they met at a conference in Texas, and on and on.
New York is the mass of humanity gathered together, and laboring to make it work. That's something we look forward to seeing in its culmination, and it's something we celebrate.
Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.
Tweet
No comments:
Post a Comment