My pain doctor just gave me an epidural and it seems to have allowed me to walk with greater ease, albeit hobbling a bit with the aid of a walker. I haven’t tried any long walks yet to other neighborhoods, but I feel sufficiently optimistic to push myself and extend my explorations of the city.
So far though, I have mainly restricted myself to neighborhood streets and a park I know too well. However, even if my experience is limited, I am still able to observe the slow emergence of the pre-pandemic city from the frozen shadow metropolis we have inhabited for a year.
The streets are filled with students — most are masked, but a few act as if they are immortal and operate as if no mask or social distance is necessary, endangering those who have not been vaccinated. However, I can feel there is more life pulsating on the streets than any time since last March. For example, all the outdoor tables of our favorite restaurants are filled. And I am under the illusion that the young people I pass on the street are more animated and high-spirited, in the best sense. It makes me feel that the desolate feeling that dominated the city, even this past February, is about to end, and we are inching towards a return to better times.
Some signs of the city’s rebirth are that bars and restaurants can stay open to midnight, city beaches and pools will open in late May and June this year, and most importantly, city workers in office settings must return to the workplace on May 3. This includes around 80,000 employees who have been working remotely. In addition, on March 8, Mayor de Blasio announced that the city’s high schools will return to in-person learning on Monday, March 22. The decision will bring as many as 55,000 high school students back to classrooms who signed up for in-person learning last fall; however, that number is far from the total high school population of 282,000 students enrolled. These are just a few positive signs of renewal.
More important than statistics is what I continue to see as my wife and I venture for the first time, outside the neighborhood, to visit an old friend who lives on the Upper West Side. It’s a mild weekend, and we walk down Amsterdam Avenue looking for a place to have lunch. What we discover are lines outside most of the many modest restaurants crowding the avenue, and many of them have added plywood cabins housing tables on the sidewalk and in the gutter. The tables are mostly filled with people younger than 35, but on the Upper West Side there are white-haired couples and a person or two with a walker.
Nothing memorable was said during our lunch, but I take joy in the easy and warm interaction between us. There have recently been very few times that we have had lengthy encounters with good friends. Before the pandemic, it happened relatively often, but now the rarity of it is something to be cherished. I am hoping for a few more years where the city and I will be whole enough to leave compulsively watching Netflix and Amazon Prime and engage freely in the public world. I know this is just a beginning, and there is still no guarantee that the pall that has enveloped us is over.
