The park down the block from my apartment in Astoria is called Athens Square. If you know Astoria, the name needs no explanation. If not, the northwestern-most Queens neighborhood has the densest population of Greek immigrants and Greek-Americans in the U.S. It’s not a subtle presence. The park is tucked just north of 30th avenue, a main east-west thoroughfare in the neighborhood, and has one main entrance facing the avenue. Rose bushes line a black iron fence and in the summer they bloom at the feet of Athena, whose full-body bust towers nine feet high over passersby. She’s glad you’re here.
 

Just through the park gates and off to the left, you encounter the bust of Aristotle. You're not thrilled by this news, but you're not mad about it, either. It's a fine bust. Fine, busty. But it's a bust. If you're making a bust roughly two-thousand years after the subject's death, perhaps just see where you'd get with the rest of the body? Aristotle seems to agree: he glares, jealously, past you, to the right of the park's entrance, where there stands the tall, tan, full-bodied Sophocles. Unfortunate for Aristotle, Sophocles has bigger Greeks to fry; he spends his stony forever gesturing, arguing, pleading across the gray and white tiled park floor at the one, the only, Socrates. By way of comparison, Socrates does sound like Sophocles if you say his name with a mouthful of spanakopita. But that's about as far as the comparison goes. You see, not only does Socrates have the full body that's granted to Sophocles (a bit flabbier, but who's counting), but he's also seated, plopped down on a giant stone slab, draped in award-winning thought, with a slender, flounder-sized foot poking out from his dressing with the casual grace of someone who's accustomed to the last word. 

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He commandings the square’s front right and he gesturinges to Socrates, who heads the opposite corner. Socrates sits atopis the piece de resistance, draped in thought atop a stone slab that details a twenty-by-forty foot stage. The stage is a few steps up from the park’s tiled floor, and it’s buttressed from behind by six enormous columns. One horizontal slab stretches thirty feet across nearly every column, pantomiming “ruin.”

 

Often, I take lunch in the park, gnawing at an air fried tofu sandwich under the watchful, knowledgeable gazes of my Greecian sitters. A few years ago, our neighborhood got its first good slice spot, Bellucci’s (a story for another time). Not only was the pizza great (“was”...yet another story) but it’s a half block from my apartment and another half block from Athena and the rose bush. Some time past the pandemic’s throes, I developed this habit called “secret slices.” Born from unquenchable hunger or a need to flee the apartment or pure lack of self-control, I’d get two slices to-go and bring them to the park. There, I’d grab a bench and eat them quickly (my favorite pace). 

In the summer, there’s a rotating selection of live music: Egyptian Arabic on Tuesday; Greek on Wednesday; Italian on Thursday. Thursdays are my favorite because they’re occasionally bolstered by the Association of Italian American Organizations (yes, the organizations have an association) and their leader, a gray-haired, oranged-skinned septuagenarian who bubbles around the packed park, variably dancing with old friends and putting out fires that “assistants” whisper in his ear. 

 

In the winter, the sunken tile floor gives way to an enormous Christmas tree, decorated with a mile of lights and ornaments the size of basketballs. Once during the fifty days it’s up, we gather for the lighting ceremony, singing Jingle Bells in a hundred different dialects, giving the tune a distinctly New York timbre.

 

During the school year, when the weather is still warm, great crowds of squat eleven year olds curse and kick soccer balls as hard as their legs manage, sometimes getting enough lift to hit the knee or shoulder of an onlooker camped out atop one of the many benches forming the park’s perimeter. 

 

The rest of the year, outside these peak seasons, the park is quiet. You won’t find children kicking balls, or multi-languaged carols, or a nonno zipping around like he owns the place. You’ll just find quiet. 

 

In fact, more often than not, the park and its central stage are an oxymoron, carving out space – “precious New York real estate!” – for a months-long celebration of nothingness. Now, I’ll be the first to tell you that nothing can be something in its own right. You learn this shortly after moving here, when on that magical occasion, the ambulances and drilling and beeping and shouting and general-appliance-rumbling all commune to give you what your brain has been trying to trick you into hearing all along: nothing. 

Sometimes it’s fun and fruitful to imagine the air above the stage as the performance, holding all the smells and sounds we push upon it. Sink into the park bench, close your eyes, and cherish the full-body symphony of these streets. But in moments during the year when my creativity dwindles, when the yearn for a more collective buzz creeps back again, nothing feels sharply like nothing. 

 

I remember such a day, an early November day, when the afternoon light looked half-throttle, when everything gray about New York jumped to the foreground, and when my neighbors and I were in for an unpredictable, memorable something. 

 

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Here’s the scene. 

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The trees are on their way to bare, finding their falling action after months of city living. Me and a dozen neighbors migrate to the benches in Athens Square for lunch. We sit under the trees’ barren canopy, eating in our regular November solitude. A car honks. We chew. The train rumbles in the distance, echoes metallic. We swallow. Some schoolkids just released approach the park with tinny laughter, then pass by on their journey home. We wipe our faces. 

 

Secret slices are wrapping up and I’m about to head home when the stillness breaks. A young couple emerges from just behind Socrates, their stares locked upon one another. The man dons a huge white shirt and a tight black hat that holds his thin, sleek ponytail. He backpedals, carefully, hands down by his side. The woman in an oversized sweatsuit approaches him. The tip of an inverted skyscraper hangs from her sleeve-covered hand. 

 

A few paces later, the man bursts with fury:

 

“Do it then! Fucking use it!” 

 

A few more paces and they’re at center stage. The woman throws her daggered fist in his direction—a warning strike. Us park-goers are now fixed on the stage, struggling to understand this sudden mimesis. 

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“Use it then! Fucking do it!”

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She lunges again, this time hitting him in the neck with everything but the blade. He doesn’t strike back. He continues backpedaling and shouting his two-line refrain. “Ooo it” bounces off the stone in the square, creating a natural surround-sound. 

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None of us move, no one says a word. Me included–after all, I brought tofu to a knife fight. I’m scanning for some confidence-boosting eye contact that could pull us from our bystander paralysis. But no one is ready to adopt this problem. 

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Luckily for us and them, the scene skips a climax. As quickly as the duo’s drama flooded the stage, it now jumps to the margins. They hide their fangs and exit, escaping stage-right beside Socrates on his slab. 

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New York is a strange mixture of crafted and natural spectacle. It keeps you on your toes and moves faster than your toes can manage. It’s delectably sweet and impossibly bitter. It’s ageless in some moments, dying in others. And most reliably, it shows up. Putting a stage on these streets is a calling card for drama, and New Yorkers accept the challenge better than anyone else I know (I don’t know LA or Vegas or many other places, so leave me alone). Coney Island, Times Square, Williamsburg even…these are all stages of a sort, where the invitation to live out your dreams and nightmares is always open. 

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I wouldn’t blame people for not understanding this at all. Whenever I’m meeting someone new or catching up with a friend who lives elsewhere, I always get the inevitable, “So how do you like New York?” I never know how I’m going to respond until the words start coming out. The answer can change hourly. Maybe on the commute over I saw someone having a sloppy lobster feast in the train car, and so I’ll rant about how gross the city is and how its beatdowns are creative and inescapable. Or, maybe on the elevated train ride, I saw children running in the street through a rainbow haze that streamed from a cracked fire hydrant. I’ll wax on about how amazing and vast the city is, how just about anything you could possibly fathom happening in a human society is happening here at all times, and, wow, isn’t that beautiful. 

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What I’ve found is that despite the tenor of my answer, there’s always a tinge of the opposite sentiment lurking in there. If I hate New York today, it’s because I experienced something that feels like an affront to what this place could be. If I love New York, it’s because I struck “gold” by hitting every green light from Union Square to 59th St, making the three-mile trip a bragworthy twenty minutes. 

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I’m not New York or nowhere but I’m not goodbye to all that, either. I want to say I’m in the middle but do these mentalities sandwich a spectrum? I don’t think it’s possible to be just “ok” with New York. “Ok” tells me either you haven’t spent enough time here or the time you have spent has been uncommonly charmed somehow. What seems truer than thinking of myself in this impossible middle is thinking that I do already know what my experience is here. I know what New York is, I just don't know whether I understand its call as a “yes” or a “no”; that is, as a full-throated but fatalistic “yes,” or a bereaved but relieved “no.”

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Claire and I are in different boats within the same fleet on the question of leaving New York. Moving is inevitable, but our timelines have mostly looked different. But recently our boats have gotten closer, motored by rent increases, parking headaches, and lack of easy green access.

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Over breakfast one morning we agreed to an experiment. We’ll give it one year. One best effort, all-in year, filled to the brim with everything we love about New York, everything we’ve been meaning to do, and everything we only think feasible elsewhere. If at the end of this year’s lease, in July 2024, we find the juice still worth the squeeze, we’ll find a way to stay. If not, we’ll follow the call of other cheaper, greener dreams. 

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With the possibility of leaving on the horizon, I started thinking about the day we actually do pack up and go. A pressure release valve comes to mind. Shaking, sputtering, seizing at max-capacity, it finally lets out a massive, system-saving exhale as we cross the George Washington Bridge or board the flight at LaGuardia or do whatever it is to get wherever we’re going. The exhale will be personal. A part of me will ooze into the city’s dense ether. No more worrying about alternate side parking, or the guy under the scaffolding that I give money to, or the price of bulk citrus in Trade Fair. 

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Still, I know I’ll carry me wherever I go. Some New York me will remain. Maybe I’ll still want to explore neighborhoods by foot. And maybe I’ll still understand the motion and rhythm of a busy sidewalk. Maybe I’ll still feel compelled to help the people in my community. Maybe I’ll still ask, spontaneously, “wanna get Thai / Greek / Venezuelan / drinks / ice cream?” and we’ll actually do it. And maybe I’ll find a favorite local park to sit in day after day. A new place to chart the passing of seasons. A new place to watch life fold and unfold again. A new place to contemplate leaving for good.