debt

FROM July 30, 2005

Or--may we defer to Joan on this one?:

"Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across sixty-second street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for awhile. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later--because I did not belong there, did not come from there--but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities, then still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month."