People here have lost their humanity......

The last week of my stay in NY found me schleping boxes to UPS on Broadway so they could be mailed home -- boxes full of my books and alllllllllll the papers I had accumulated while up there. ....I also managed to mail the kids the stuff I'd bought them my first week there. I was making so many trips because I couldn't carry too many heavy boxes at once. Of course, now I realize I probably could have scheduled a pick-up from UPS, but who had time to think? I did come to my senses long enough to spy the grocery cart push thingy in the apartment. I'd used it back and forth from CMet a time or two. Pefect!

On one of those trips, while I was waiting to cross Amsterdam, there was this lady standing next to me, and....she spoke. And....I answered. And....she kept talking. This, to me, was quite unusual in NY so I tried to sort of avoid her. I mean -- who carries on a conversation on a street corner, waiting on the light unless they want something? (See what the city did to me!)

Well, she was undeterred. She kept right on talking as we crossed Amsterdam, talked all the way up 120th to Broadway, and didn't stop until we reached the subway at 115/116. It turned out that she is French and was in NY for the summer taking dance classes. She was on her way downtown to her class. It was an interesting conversation. She feels that the people in NYC have lost their humanity. Yes, ma'am, yes, sir. That's right. NYers have lost their humanity.

You see, in France (so she said), people don't live as they do in NY. In NY there is poverty and homelessness all around that amazes her. And the noise and the energy -- even up in the Columbia area. She couldn't sleep at night because of all the energy in the air. And she had just been to a dentist who wanted $2,000 to fix her tooth. She was a tourist, she had told him, and didn't have that money. Get out, he'd told her -- and gave her a phone number to call. She'd been to a Spanish museum up around W 128th St. (I could have told her that was not a good idea) and had seen two women fighting -- using their fists like men, she said. She was never coming back to NY. There was no humanity there.

Now, what fasinated me more than what she was saying was that she was so stereotypically French. I mean the rolling of her eyes, the hand gestures, the ohh la la las -- you would have thought you were watching a movie. As we parted ways at the subway, she had asked me if I was from the city. When I said "No," she said she hadn't thought so because my face looked different. She said I had a look of peace and kindness.

Now, I might not have remembered that except she was maybe the third person to tell me the same thing while I was up there. Peace, love, kindness. I'm afraid it was probably just a look of naivety.