I was talking to Aimee last night about what I was going to write about New York, and she suggested I almost needed two entries for the state, one for the year when we lived in Rochester, and one for everything else, the fifteen years of visits to New York City. She’s right; New York is a big place, and has meant a lot of different things in my life, but I’ll try to touch on everything I can.

I could have chosen a photo from our days in Rochester in 2005-06, or from one of the many trips we took to the City when we lived in Boston, or from one of the monthly visits to Yankee Stadium when I lived in Connecticut…but I’ve unearthed an old one, if only to document another goofy haircut. The photo, taken by my roommate Brian, dates from January break of our freshman year in college, when we took a bus to the City for the weekend. It was probably my second or third ever trip to New York City, after a post-CTY trip in 1991 and a pre-college visit in the fall of 1993. I’m standing at our seats in Carnegie Hall, ready for whatever concert we were going to, part of a trip that also, if I’m not conflating things, included a concert at Lincoln Center, visits to MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Met, and virtually no use of the subway. Oh, it’s only 20 blocks south of here? Why not walk? I’m pretty sure we walked the entire length of Manhattan that day. That was always my experience of New York: an eighteen-hour day, with as much crammed in as possible, as we tried to pack in all of the culture, food, and sightseeing we could. Only when we lived in Boston did I learn to tone it down a little, and enjoy a few important things each time, with judicious use of the subway, rather than trying to do it all, every time.

Some great memories of the City, in no particular order: my first baseball game, at Yankee Stadium (Yankees 6, White Sox 3, David Wells on the mound and Bernie Williams with a homer, a double, and a single, leaving the Yankees 73-26 for the season…); watching Monster’s Ball at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas with Tony Bennett sitting behind me; Sunday morning breakfasts with Aimee at Grey Dog before heading back to Boston; seeing Blur, Tom Waits, Liz Phair, Elvis Costello, Wilco, Beck, and Travis in a twelve month span in 1999-2000 at various venues around town; crashing at George’s apartment – the same apartment, year after year – and watching Brian Bosworth in Stone Cold (have you all seen that movie? Incredible); running the outer loop of Central Park every time I’m in town; walking through The Gates; choosing the right Indian restaurant (Milon, a.k.a “the upper left one” on 1st Avenue; and the list goes on…

As I was preparing to leave Connecticut in the spring of 2000, I had a choice between moving to New York City and moving to Boston. I had my pro and con list all set up, and in the end, chose Boston, happily. I’m pretty sure I missed my chance to live in the City, which is fine with me – I’m too old to enjoy the insanity, and too young to have enough money to make it sane – and I have to say, I never imagined I’d move to any other place in the state of New York. But there I was, driving a Penske truck through the streets of Boston and onto the Mass Pike towards Rochester less than a month after we got married, in the summer of 2005. Every time anyone asks us about our year there, we honestly don’t have a bad thing to say – it was great. The year is well-documented here (and if something isn’t here, i.e. if it happened pre-late 2003, we’ve been having trouble remembering if it actually happened), but suffice it to say we have very fond memories of our life in Rochester: Wegmans, our lovely and spacious (and cheap) apartment, fantastic screenings at the Dryden every night, my classmates and the staff at the Eastman House, road trips to Toronto, and the amazing “Eye on the Roc,” some of the finest cable access hilarity I’ve ever seen. I’ve managed a trip or two back to New York each year since moving out here, and it’s always great to be back.