The Search For Soul

I’m on a quest.  A mission to dive more deeply into the stuff that makes us real.  The soul of things.

I grew up in New York City, The packed, cracked, and gritty streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan still have a relentless grip on my soul, long after I stopped living there.

Until I was eighteen or so, I lived in the post World War II planned communities of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. Stuy Town (as we call it) was home from grade school through high school. A place of playgrounds, parks, benches, and lawns, it remains a well-scrubbed contrast to the neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and East Village, that it rubs up against.

The funkiness and cultural mashup of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village captivated me the minute I was aware enough to fathom it. At the age of about twelve, sneakers on, I set out to discover the magic of those streets.

“Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.”

Irving Berlin

I’ve gone back and retraced the steps of my grandparents and their parents who were born in tenements there. The old Jewish neighborhood now morphing into Chinatown, hipster-ness, new condos, and townhouses right next to old rent-controlled apartments with newspaper on the windows.

As I walked I was overwhelmed by how comfortable I felt, and how much I love this rich ethnic tangle.  The sidewalks, grime, voices, accents, cadence of overheard conversations.  Familiar sounds of the unfamiliar. Foreign tongues, street slang, arguments between cops and cabbies, music and laughter. English, Spanish, Yiddish, Russian, Chinese, Hebrew, Persian, and Italian are spoken here.

It’s a neighborhood filled with frenetic life. Merchants in storefront bodegas, children on their way to school, folks on their way to work, homeless people, all moving in familiar daily patterns. Every background, culture, and age. Alive, in motion, and constantly changing.

“When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.”

Fran Lebowitz

In a flash, it became evident how my early immersion in this cultural stew opened up my curiosity and instilled in me the values of creativity, community, a fearless sense of exploration, and comfort with the unknown.

A quest indeed, always in search of the elusive soul of things, as rich, diverse, and real as the streets of the Lower East Side.