I'll take Manhattan

One step at a time

It’s our first full day in New York City and I am in Times Square sitting on the red steps contemplating the statue of the songwriter George M Cohan, a fixed point in the spinning carnival of hucksters, costumed cartoon characters, naked singing cowboys, superheroes and street performers hustling tourists.

Presiding over the epicenter of crass American commercialism the Cohan monument celebrates America’s greatest tin pan alley patriot, Broadway’s Yankee Doodle Dandy, the jingle penning entertainer who inspired the nation in two global wars to go over there by reminding us we’re all real live nephews of our Uncle Sam born on the Fourth of July.

We three are hungry for a taste of Little Italy and Chinatown so we take the subway downtown to Canal Street and walk east into the neighborhoods where every new immigrant lived with every other new American, succeeding generation after succeeding generation.

Walking through the red and gold world of decorative lanterns, Mandarin signs and bustling markets I pause in a crosswalk like every jaywalking New Yorker to take a picture of a lonely humble monument set on a traffic island surrounded by indifference that reads “In memory of the Americans of Chinese ancestry who lost their lives in defense of freedom and democracy.” It's easy to forget when you’re in Chinatown you are in America among Americans.

We arrive at a corner restaurant with a working class feel called “Yin Ji Chang Fen” and find every aroma and exotic taste one hopes to find in Chinatown.

On our way to the 9/11 Memorial we stop at the new African Burial Ground National Monument and remember the thousands of peoples who experienced the nightmare of enslavement and who now rest beneath the American dream.

We walk on to the site where the two towers stood and see two vast pools with bottomless wells of grief in their centers. We drift apart as we walk along the edge reading name after name after name. I stumble across the raised letters spelling out “LADDER 61” and it is surrounded by names that read like the phone directory of the world and I break down.

We linger in our memories of 9/11.  I bitterly and sarcastically whisper thank God we responded to this barbaric monstrosity by attacking the wrong country. We take pictures of ourselves because like the thousands of visitors looking into grief and death and horror, we all crave evidence we were there to mourn.

By chance I look up through the trees that surround the memorial park and I see the tallest icon of defiance in the hemisphere, the new Trade Center named One World and I am reminded America always rises.

We have one more pilgrimage before the day is over and that is a visit to Alexander Hamilton’s grave at nearby Trinity Church. Ellen loves Hamilton. I’ve seen it more times than I’m willing to confess. During the Trump years I watched it nearly daily, as one would attend a Catholic worship service, to center myself in the noble American dream, while America’s nightmare swirled outside, stirred by Democracy’s heretics in Washington, thanks to a lesser New Yorker.

Lin Manuel Miranda describes Hamilton as being just like his country: young, scrappy and hungry and in this modern moment I hope my democratic republic, like Miranda’s Hamilton, remains eternally young, scrappy and hungry.

Back at our room, in the city that doesn’t sleep at night, I sleep deeper than I’ve slept since arriving in NYC.