things you miss by not being in New York

For years I've had a sort of alternate reality in my head, in which I never settled in London, and instead did the more predictable thing and went to live in New York, the city I was conceived and born in, and whose identity is in so many weird ways still my own. The Gothamist has tapped into this by alerting me (via a link, of course, from The Londonist) to this full-page ad Yoko Ono has taken out in the New York Times - a paper I would have read in that other universe. (I do sometimes do that email-subscribe thing with the NY Times, because of the book reviews etc, but really - there is a limit to what one's groaning inbox can hold.)

Well, I was a teenager when John Lennon was shot. At the time that was the ultimate New York event, and I was tearfully grateful when my friend Charlene, who lived on the Upper East Side, went to the Dakotas and put a white rose on the railings for me. To this day I've never gone back to see that building - I prefer my mental image of it, which contains mostly my white rose - but for years after there was a certain (increasingly tedious) point in any evening when I would begin to talk about that day. (I bought every single paper that morning, and had to rise above reality to take a French test less then two hours after hearing the news. The French teacher, a 24-year-old girl from Paris called Isabelle, asked me if she could look at my papers while we did the test, and she sat there with tears running down her cheeks while we conjugated our verbs and parsed our passages...)

It's hard now for me to reconnect with what a terrible shock that was, how unthinkable, how it actually did split my world open. It was the first, definitive, cold blast of mortal reality into my idealistic adolescent world. Since then there have been other deaths which have shocked me deeper than that one - people I was close to and loved and couldn't manage without. Those deaths are physical experiences and knock the death of anyone you never knew personally into a different space.

But Yoko's ad does, as The Londonist says in its headline, "bring it all back." Remember?

I wonder if we're ready for a bit more idealism yet.