Memory

I didn’t spend much time in the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan.  My only acquaintance with that now-vanished New York landmark was a few early morning visits with my father when I was a child and then, later, as I went through to the Seaport to visit friends who crewed on the tall ships.  Therefore, I never knew South Street Annie, a woman who died last month and was remembered this week in a moving tribute in the New York Times.

Nonetheless, this obituary touched an emotional nerve in ways I could not have anticipated.  It tells the story of a woman who made choices that may have shocked and alarmed her family and which certainly put her beyond the pale of what mainstream society would consider acceptable, then or now.  It also tells the story of a generous woman who gave away nearly everything she earned – enough to put a granddaughter through college and buy her a car.  A warm-hearted woman who knew how to help those around her.  She lived a brutal life, let’s not romanticize it, but she lived it well and with, it seems, a certain zest.  I believe she will be missed, and remembered with great love – which is, to me, the only immortality worth contemplating.

What struck me, as I read the article, was how the banishing of the Fish Market to Hunt’s Point, and Annie’s death, seemed somehow to represent an end point in my own association with New York.  The city I grew up in and loved, loved for its grittiness and its dirt, for the seediness around Port Authority, for the tacky neon in Times Square – that place no longer exists.  Much as the city described in E.B. White’s essay Here Is New York has passed beyond recall, so has the city of my childhood gone, replaced with a cleaner, shinier, more Disnified atmosphere.  I still like to walk there, to visit Fort Tryon Park and Coney Island, ride the Staten Island Ferry and eat cevapcici in Astoria, but it is no longer my city, my home.

This summer I have had, on two occasions, the chance to show friends around my favorite New York City haunts.  Each time we walked the northern parks, and the Highline, and each time we wandered the Lower East Side, in search of the touchstones of my childhood memories.  The tiny raised storefront where my father used to leave me to eat barley soup in the care of the elderly shopkeeper while he ran errands has vanished and Gus the Pickle Man has relocated (although I am assured that he still gives children a free pickle as a reward for waiting in line with their parents).  You can still buy knishes and smoked fish on Houston Street, and a salami at Katz’s.  But these feel like holdouts now, wavering memories that may not outlast the rising rents and intrusive polish that the city, or so it seems to me, has been undergoing everywhere.

I have moved recently to a new city, one where I have no place memory to mourn and only a future to build.  It is easy to be swept away by fears: that I will never find a job in this recession, that the bumps and trials of life will be more than I can bear, that loss will be more prevalent than gain.  Annie’s story reminds me, although she may not have wished it to, that what is important is to do your best, and let the memories – of place and people – take care of themselves.