New York reunion

Had a week in New York again. I'm trying to decide whether to spend next summer in New York or in London.

New York for me feels like a blend of Boston, and Rio, and old childhood memories. Boston in the essentially East Coast culture and brassy attitude, the small-town mentality, the rattly subway, the proud history mixed with the ramshackle air of a 17th-century colonial city that has far outgrown its tiny island infrastructure. Rio in the size and the roar of the traffic, and the international feel, the swarms of tourists, the racial mix, the overheard snatches of foreign languages. And childhood memories pop up from the oddest things. (I lived in New Jersey till I was 10.) Really good bagels! The cries of blue jays in the distance. Fireflies in the parks at dusk. The steaming humid heat of the East Coast August: Hot bright sweaty days, then banks of heavy clouds gathering low overhead and bursting into sudden, drenching rain.

Unique to New York are the simplicity of the street grid, the sight lines, the vanishing point of the vast straight avenues. It's very relaxing on the eyes. Walking down the avenues is like walking through an open-air cathedral. The buildings soar on either side like twin mountain ranges, and your eye is drawn to the far distant point where the avenue disappears over the horizon. You can never get lost. You always know where you are and how to get home.

This time I stayed with a musician/juggler friend in Union City, New Jersey, which turns out to be a far quicker trip to Manhattan than I would have believed possible. A zillion little mini-vans were constantly zipping past my place and through the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan - fifteen minutes away. (One of my best NY experiences so far was a motorcycle ride with Andy through the Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour. Complete with getting pulled over by New York's finest)

My New Jersey friend actually had a soundproof room where I could practice, so I got some good repique time in, and a bit of pandeiro too. I have not been doing much pandeiro recently - I go off and on it, depending on whether it is making me happy or not. Over time I have realized that pandeiro, like dance, is something I only do for myself, not for performance; I just play pandeiro alone at home, or out in a park, never with other people. There's no market for it; usually there's just 1 or 2 gigs in town for a pandeiro player, and there's already 3 or 4 vastly skilled people competing for it. I could fight for a spot in the pack, but it hardly seems worth it. So now I only do it for myself, and only when it's fun.

For once I didn't seek out any samba on this trip. But I did track down some old samba friends. On Thursday night I had an unlikely reunion of 5 former VamoLa sambistas. Three live in New York now (Fernanda, Robyn & Tom), and two were coincidentally passing through in the same week (me & Kimberly). This was a group of people that I never thought I'd be with again, for a whole lot of reasons, so it was really something special for me. Especially since we didn't do anything in particular... we kept talking about going to see some music but ended up just walking around, had some dessert, walked some more, had some drinks, walked some more, just chatted and laughed. Took silly pictures of each other taking silly pictures of each other.

It made me so happy to be with a group of old friends. Something I have almost never been able to do in my life. It made me happy because I'd lost touch with some of them, and it was so nice to be back in touch again, and to have such a friendly happy time of it, too. And I LOVED having an evening out with friends that had NO SAMBA AT ALL. When is the last time that that has ever happened? Almost never. Why don't I do it more? Because there's usually nobody to go do it with.

At the end of the evening I realized I wouldn't see any of them again for a long time, and felt terrifically sad. Dreading the prospect of heading off alone again to another unknown foreign city tomorrow.

It is funny that I travel so much, because it actually makes me very lonely. That is why I write these blogs; it is what I do when I am feeling very lonely. It'll be ok though. It is always rough at times, but all these places start to seem like homes eventually. My casual Rio friends are slowly maturing into real friends; Rio is becoming a real home and not just a samba destination. The same is happening with New York, and with Portland. Eventually, if this keeps up, I will have dozens of homes all over the world, and maybe more of the short-term samba friends will slowly turn into real friends. I hope.