Why I love NYC and the whole Diversity Thing

I came back from NYC a month or so ago just pumped on how exciting and diverse it is there. Lucy had an indoor hockey tournament just a 10 minute subway ride from Alyssa's apartment....10 minutes north....which is away from the touristy areas and where many regular working people......people of many colors and languages live.

One thing I love about being in NY is that you can go anywhere and everywhere on public transportation and when I first started going to the Big City, I had to learn to practice "Curb Your Enthusiasm". Regular subway riders do not glow and smile and talk enthusiastically on the subway.....oh no no, everyone who is a regular and not a visitor like me is deadpan...allowing no emotion to show on their faces. Bored, bored, bored. But still, even now that I've learned to damp down the excitement of being there, I love watching all those different people riding.... mothers riding with sleeping kids leaning into them, businessmen with their briefcases...reading!...while standing up and jerking about with the subway motion, fashionable teenagers with full shopping bags....and sometimes beggars or semi-performers trying to make some cash. But still, and through it all, everyone always keeps a blank face....nothing fazes those experienced New Yorkers....they've probably seen it all. And so I try to pretend there is nothing exciting here....though I find that ALL of it is.

This park where Lucy had her tournament is really cool. Talk about multi-use, it's built on a pier over the Hudson River on top of a water treatment plant. It has an ice skating rink, a pool, a soccer field, a restaurant and an indoor recreation building and probably more that I didn't see. Leaving the park at night and walking to the subway, there's a bridge over the Henry Hudson Parkway where you look right at the GW Bridge lit up and reflecting in the river below with the skyline of New Jersey behind it....breathtakingly beautiful!

The range of people in....I think it was called the Big Apple Tournament.....was very different than you usually see at most hockey tournaments. Field Hockey is pretty much a "white bread" sport, about as UNdiverse as you can get. But this tourney had a men's bracket...and these men played only indoor floor hockey, practiced only indoor hockey and so really knew how to play indoor hockey. Lightening quick, they were amazing to watch. But the really super cool thing about it, though, was who they were. There were men originally from Jamacia ....immigrants I guess....in dreads. One man had dreads down to his waist that he pulled back into a giant bunch while playing. There was a team from Canada, of, I'm not sure, Indian (as in Bombay) or Pakistani descent, wearing turbans. And then there was the team from the Bronx....black guys who brought their own DJ. How cool is that! While I couldn't understand what the DJ was saying...or rapping....the accoustics were pretty bad....just the fact that here were black guys there playing indoor hockey that had their own personal DJ was so cool. We're not in Pennsylvania anymore!!

On our subway ride back that night, we were the only white people in our subway car among people of every shade of skin color. So refreshing!! I loved that....so many different kinds of people....but all sitting there with their bored faces unimpressed with it all. But at some point a....hmmm....I guess you could call him a performer, came into our car. This guy was loud, talking, shouting, a little bit scary until he began to do his thing.....which was.....to stomp! Stomp in a rhythm that only he could hear. Stomp, stomp, sta, stomp stomp stomp!!! Well, I never saw THAT before on the subway! And I guess, neither did the young Asian woman sitting across from me.....the one who had gotten on the subway earlier, sat down and ridden up to that point with the usual New York City Uninterested Face. I'm not sure if she spoke English or not....probably so, but probably also an Easten language with her family in this multi-cultural city. But when this guy began to Stomp!, we both lost our bored expression, sort of laughed/smiled at each other, raised our shoulders and rolled our eyes together in a universal comment of "what the heck!". It was a brief crystal moment of connection in the usually blase world of subway riding....a ZIP! moment that somehow seems important to me.