By Willa Umansky PZ ’27

Graphic by Ben Connolly PZ ’26

It’s fall and I’m happy. In the sun, my chest bakes to a berry stained pink. When my children’s literature lecture lets out at 5:30pm, I’m cripplingly cold if I make the mistake of wearing short socks. Fall in Claremont is something that I will surely miss in the way I miss fall in New York. Fall in Claremont is finite, though, so I may mourn it more wholly. New York is forever, and that’s why I never long for the place as much as I should. But I think I’d like to go home for a moment. 

I go to New York in just less than two weeks for Thanksgiving, the city calls out to me at night when I have that recurring dream that Dad never moved from Strong Place (I’ve been having it for years now). I ache for New York not only when I wake up from visions of the bay window in my childhood room, but also when I am slapped with the realization that I am no longer sixteen and nor will I ever be again. Shockingly, or maybe not shockingly if you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, I’m hit with that at least a few times a week. I miss 16 and New York when certain songs come on, that’s something I’ve noticed. I’m excited that I get to go home, I really am. 

The 16 year old New York, that I miss when anything from Lorde’s first two albums comes on, is defined by my weekly music lessons in Midtown. I was having a conversation with a friend about this recently, the city grew exponentially pre and post COVID for us, just because of where quarantine landed developmentally. After lockdown, we were set free of 11 pm curfews and the requirement of parental permission to brave the bridge or tunnel. I think that’s probably why going to the NYC Guitar School around the corner from Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, in exhilaratingly close proximity to Empie (a nickname that my highschool friends and I conceived for an iconic landmark, I’ll let you guess which one) felt so colossal to me. Before COVID, I thought Penn Station was quite far, turns out it’s not. The city shrunk to me at 16 and god was that a thrilling prospect. That’s what those weekly trips to music in Midtown did, it shrunk the city and grew me. Despite how wide the streets and how tall the buildings and how small I was in that neighborhood, I listened to music and walked and memorized new paths. I grew into the city that year!

Those dreams of Strong Place always bring me comfort. There was one day back in like 2012, back when Octobers were cold in New York. It was Sukkot and Uncle Eric came over for a cup of coffee, before he and I and Dad ventured those two blocks to our Synagogue. God, I wish you all could see the streets whose image I’m conjuring in my mind. They’re so quaintly, gorgeously, quintessentially Brooklyn, you wouldn’t believe it if I could transmit you the visuals. I thought about trying to paint you a picture, but I think I’ll keep Strong Place as my own for now. Anyways, I don’t know why I do, because it was rather unremarkable, but I remember that day quite well. I was wearing a black peacoat that I had gotten for Hanukkah the year before and I was wiggling my fingers around in the pockets for maximum warmth. The pockets were lined with satin, though, so I couldn’t get my fingers to sustain any real heat. Despite this, I felt joy in Uncle Eric and Dad’s presence and I felt hugged by the colored corn of the sukkah in the courtyard of Kane Street Synagogue. The dreams of the Strong Place apartment feel like that day. It’s always a bit cold, cold in the way that it was in the Octobers of my childhood. But I’m warm and fulfilled and so happy to be back.

This time last year I also wrote about New York. Those two words signify a thousand different memories/concepts/feelings to me, that was the crux of my unclear argument in my essay ‘I think I miss New York.’ Maybe you gleaned that from my choice of an early memory and a teenage one, the fact that there are thousands of New Yorks between the two. Even more before and after. When I’m in Claremont I very occasionally miss the real New York, the immortal one that knows millions of others, just as it does me. But mostly I just ache for my New York, in all of its endless iterations.