Biodun Iginla

Love in New York Time-Zone Biodun Iginla

New York, New York: In any case, to discourse about New York and its transformation, or you should say its transformations: For transformations are precisely what define the city and what set its conditions of possibility-and what animate the people who live there. You're a New Yorker even if you weren't born there. But you or anyone else can most certainly be a New Yorker even if you weren't born there. You become a New Yorker the first time you say: "That used to be Danny's and that used to be Clancy's," before the Internet café plugged itself in and before Starbucks installed itself. You start constructing your private New York the first time the city came into your view. Maybe you were in a cab leaving La Guardia when, on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, you saw the Manhattan skyline. All your worldly possessions were in the trunk, and in your hand was a piece of paper with an address on it that would turn out to be your first home. You say to yourself: "Look, there's the Empire State Building; look there: The World Trade Center towers." Maybe your first time in New York was when your parents dragged you there on vacation as a baby and towed you all over the gigantic avenues while shopping for holiday season gifts. Your first view of the city from your stroller was the legs of adults on the sidewalks, and you wondered why the sidewalks sparkled at certain angles. (Your thirteen-year-old Emily, who was also born in New York, told you that her earliest memories were the shiny hardwood floors in your two-bedroom coop apartment in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn: Of course she was crawling all over those floors in those months as a baby.) Maybe your first time was when you came to visit your buddy, the one who moved to New York the previous summer. You took the train in from Maplewood, New Jersey. You stepped out of Penn Station into the dizzying hustle of Eighth Avenue and almost fainted. But whoa, freeze it right there: that instant becomes the first brick in your new city.