Rhythm of the city

I hear the R train rumbling deep beneath my apartment - not loud but a deep and consonant presence, reassuring in its regularity, like an earth mother.

That's one of the sounds that I associate with my new life in a city that thrums with noise. I'm not the first to observe this, of course. The poet Federico Garcia Lorca said that "New York is Senegal with machines," which just about sums it up on some days.

Outside as I write this, a siren is "burping" - squealing in short bursts in a frustrating attempt to get vehicles to move out of the way, which they will - eventually. That's another part of the rhythm of the city.

On my way to the Y tonight, I walked past a street that the police had blocked off, thinking maybe there was a domestic dispute in progress or something like that. I got a few blocks further and realized that it wasn't just that street but a large area cordoned off by the police. In Seattle, if something like this had been going on, you could stop and ask bystanders what was happening and they usually wouldn't know. No one had thought to ask the cops. But here, I asked a woman and she already had the whole story - suspicious package, the bomb squad was poking around trying to figure out what it was, no big deal.

By the time I left the Y, the excitement was over and the streets were back to their normal rock and roll: Cars moving in that peculiar speed-up-slow down pattern that always reminds me of something David Letterman says - "Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines."

Back at home, I hear another rhythm - the murmuring of people walking by my windows on their way to here and there, all part of the flow. I like that sound because it's the sound of life going along, moving with the pace of time.