Time In a Vacuum Called NYC

Three years is a long time.

Especially if you count the days by sunrises and sets.

If you count the changes of the tree outside my window.

If you numbered the subway trains and steps I trod.

It's a long time if you measured it by heaping, steaming, freezing, soupy, syrupy, and clumpy bowls of oatmeal choked down at obscene hours of the long, short, rainy, bitterly cold, blazing hot days.

If you weigh the days in how many bars of soap used to erase the grit, grime, stress and smiles off your face from a day a disastrous defeat or valiant victory.

The pavement pounded, the wine consumed, the weekly underwear washed...

Considering just how many streets treaded and avenues traversed to get to where I am now, its been a long time.

But to New Yorkers, these years are a wee story, a chapter in the saga of time well spent and terribly wasted.

I am a short-timer.


This morning when I realized I missed my three year mark, I jotted down on my script the above words while sitting on an apple box under the camera tent, sheltered from the freezing rain, in the heart of Harlem. And then I realized someone had thought these same thoughts before.*




*In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights. 

 In cups of coffee. In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.
In five hundred twenty-five thousand
Six hundred minutes...

How do you measure

A year in the life?