Radio Workshop

I Want To Be A Part Of It ... (Transcript)

by Emily Grossman

NARRATION:

The other day I thought I might have become a New Yorker. It was a rainy Saturday evening and I was headed to my apartment on the Upper West Side. The number one train was running express, just past my stop. But it was no problem, I thought. I would just take the bus up Broadway.

I walked through the rain to the bus stop. And, I'm no expert on crowds, but there must have been about 200 people who had the same idea as me. A few minutes later, the bus arrived … already packed. I quickly crammed myself close into the crowd so I could get a small spot on the bus.

And that's when it happened…a woman I assume was on vacation, says to her friend: "I'm trying to frown so I can seem like a real New Yorker." "That's how you can tell a real New Yorker," she says again, as if she were a child learning a new word.

I felt myself frowning. There was no reason to smile. Having a long list of reasons to frown is a way of life for New Yorkers…because maybe our arms had been hit when we were scurrying through the tunnels at 42nd Street. And maybe someone had cut in front of us only an hour before at the newsstand or the supermarket or the post office.

But, wait a minute. Where is this 'us,' this allegiance with New Yorkers coming from? I had moved to the Upper West Side only seven months before from Berkeley, California. When I arrived, I found tiny supermarkets, where you had force your arm in between other shoppers' bodies just to grab the saddest-looking head of lettuce. There wasn't a single suitable taqueria for blocks and blocks. One hundred degree weather with 90 percent humidity continued for days on end.

My allegiance to California was the only thing I had held sacred, where the supermarket aisles are wide and burritos are the prototypical on-the-go food, instead of gigantic slices of pizza. Only seven months later, the voice inside my head had changed its personal pronoun.

The next day, I went to the supermarket to find coffee filters. It was a typical New York City supermarket scene. The store was full of shoppers banging their carts into each other without saying excuse me… dozens of people were turned sideways, in order to wedge their relatively-fit bodies in the narrow check-out aisles. I found the filters and got in line. As the cashier rang up my purchase, she did not greet me. And she did not ask for my money. She just stuck out her hand and glared at me. I turned the money over to her. When she returned my change, she practically threw it at me. No thank you. No smile.

Once again, I felt myself frowning. But, this time, my frown didn't signify an allegiance with New Yorkers. Instead, it came from a longing for the elbow room of home. With time, these vacillating feelings would probably wane. But that equilibrium will probably never take hold … I'm going to back to California in two months. This is Emily Grossman.