The Bubble
I was a government brat. And while that can mean a lot of things, it mostly meant that my family moved a lot – a new city, a new house – every two or three years.
When we moved, it was my father’s job to find the best pizza in town. Depending on where we were, “best” could be more like desperate wishful thinking, but generally it meant whichever pizzeria had pies closest to New York style. And while pizza was (and is) viscerally, deeply and religiously important, my mother’s job was even more so.
She was in charge of finding the other transplanted New Yorkers.
Wherever we were - San Diego, St. Louis, Monterey, Washington, D.C. - she would seek them out. I asked her about it once. She wasn’t especially philosophical. “We get each other,” she said. “It’s easier.”
Both of my parents grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, just a block apart from one another. My father in the Phipps Apartment complex on 39th Avenue (Building FF) and my mother one block away on 50th Street. My mother was the child of immigrants from Ecuador, my father the grandchild of immigrants from Ireland and Denmark.
And I was their child. The middle one. Born in a hospital in Manhattan, taught to walk and talk in Queens, and then off to wherever the FBI sent us.
We’d come back to New York here and there. In my mind it kind of blurs into one long New York stint, but it was more like a year in Queens, off to St. Louis, back to Queens, off to Monterey, back to Queens, out to Long Island… Eventually, the come back to New York part of that dance step was skipped entirely, and it was just the forward motion of city to city.
These are the “find the other New Yorkers” years.
Is there any other city that does this to your brain? Another city that wires you into needing to be near people who have walked the same streets, ate the same slices and leapt over the same puddles of questionable depth? My parents did NOT want to move back to New York City by any means, but they did not necessarily want to be away from New Yorkers. Queens kids, they ended up falling in love with the suburbs, with garages, with lawns and a mailbox at the end of the driveway, with wide-aisled, glistening supermarkets complete with colossal shopping carts and shining linoleum floors devoid of even the rumor of sawdust. But they wanted to share that new world with folks from the old one, with people they understood. They wanted to sit on their deck in Fairfax County, Virginia and talk about that bar on the east side that’s just over the 59th Street Bridge. The one with the actor/bartender who they would only ever refer to by his first name. Where is he now? How’s he doing? Isn’t he on that show? Good for him.
Do people from other cities do this? Hold on this tightly? Why do we continue to identify as New Yorkers even when we’re no longer in New York? Why do we feel the need to seek out former residents of that bubble, even when our own bubble has popped?
My father never taught me how to change the oil in my car or how to use power tools, but while I was in high school, he did take the time to teach me how to properly read the New York Times on the subway. You might not be familiar with the need, as the physical paper has shrunk both in size and integrity in recent years, but the technique is somewhere between map folding and origami. The paper in your hands should never be larger than ¼ of the full sheet – you read the ¼ sized rectangle and then begin a complex process of folding and unfolding, inverting and bending, fingers flipping TRYING to find page A13 to continue the story, while never, ever physically entering another commuter’s airspace.
I sometimes practiced this unnecessarily on the very uncrowded (and disturbingly carpeted) Orange Line Metro in DC, imagining being shoulder to shoulder as I commuted daily to high school from the suburbs of Northern Virginia. I generally ended with a floppy paper mess, a black and white map with all muscle-memory erased, somehow now LARGER than it should be, somehow now ANGRY that it had been undone.
Eventually I got it.
Our pizza situation during that time was passable. We’d put up with the methadone-like margherita’s of the greater Washington, DC metropolitan area because we knew soon enough Abi would come to town, and when Abi came to town, everyone would get well.
Abi was short for Abuela, my mom’s mom. After her husband died, she’d rotate time between her apartment on 50th Street in Sunnyside, her youngest daughter’s home in Chicago, and in our house, wherever that house was at the time.
The morning of her flight, she’d lug her suitcase up to Rosario’s Pizzeria on Skillman Avenue, order two pies and wait. The luggage was mostly empty – she didn’t need to pack; she had clothes at each of her daughters’ homes – but in the suitcase were towels and a roll of aluminum foil. Once the pies came out, she’d carefully wrap each slice in foil and then wrap those foiled slices in towels to keep them warm. If there were no delays, by the time we got her luggage at National Airport, the pizza would still be a little warm. We’d be allowed a slice each in the parking lot. At least that’s how I remember it.
Nowadays, we’ve all done a version of this, albeit with the level of difficulty dropped to the floor – bagels stuffed into our luggage when we visit ex-New Yorkers abroad. How we feel about the person is directly related to how complex our wrapping of the bagels is – individually wrapped in plastic wrap and THEN put inside a Ziplock bag? There’s love there. Bagels still in the brown bag with no extra packaging? Basic obligation. Favor for favor. Here are your fucking bagels. What’s the Wi-Fi password?
After returning for 18 years, I did end up leaving New York City for a decade of my own adult life. My wife, son and I moved to Austin for ten years and it was fine, really – but I still held on to the city, albeit a little differently than my parents. Listening to Brian Lehrer on weekday mornings. Listening to WFMU all Saturday while doing chores. If NY1 was available, I would have watched it on the daily. Honestly, NY1 could probably make a killing if they had a subscription tier for out-of-state New Yorkers. I want to watch Roger Clark make small talk with Pat Kiernan, goddammit. Put him in some costume and make him deliver a series of facts about some seventy-year-old outer borough bakery.
We started talking about leaving Austin about three years in, possibly moving further west to LA for my work, but we couldn’t find the right time for it. When covid hit the distance between us and family on the east coast became painfully clear. Moving further away made no sense.
We’re back in New York now, back in Brooklyn. The neighborhood extras are all ten years older (and I guess so am I). The current (and indicted) mayor is again a maniac, but we hold onto hope for a positive change (vote Mamdani, please), all while the world is confidently ablaze.
People always talk about bubbles as if they’re bad… I even thought this way for a while. But I don’t know how I would have survived my 10 years away from NYC without one.
I tried to make Austin home, tried to tell myself that I had broken out of New York’s orbit, that I had let go of it. But you can never really leave what’s all around you.
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