The return to NYC

impossible songs

I reserve the right to return to New York, that is my stated state and I love the paradox. To be a tourist on pilgrimage to the haunts and quarters and pavements that first fired my imagination before it froze with age and experience. Bob Dylan, Nico, Lou and Andy on the mean streets and in the plush hotels and waterfronts and galleries bless me with a jolt and jump start. I'd swear I saw the ghost of Elvis being carried out of there or was it the Algonquin or the Somewhere Else? Cheap guitars and t-shirts in a Greenwich Village store and old furniture shops in Soho and the waving cats in porcelain. The intellectual bums and the taxis and the easy breakfasts suck up the sacred dollar and the all seeing eye but I fly by in my Volvo-like helicopter, safe with my borrowed insurance. Why does this all resonate and trigger reactions in a Scot from the Central Belt? (Borrowed and not returned from the library of the buckle of the Bible Belt and the cults of lesser men.) Where is my heart and memory in these last and late days of the green and blue familiar planet? Why do I gravitate towards Expedia and Trailfinders and browse there, savouring their hook, line and sinker wonders? Saviours of the modern man and benefactors in a time of discounted famine and need. New York is not my town but it is my city - I shall return and eat a Kenny Rodger's roast chicken and sip the world's finest coffee whilst avoiding the soup kitchens and the desolation rows.