New York Xmas memories
"I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting to a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, 'new faces.' He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. 'New faces,' he said finally, 'don?t tell me about new faces.' It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised 'new faces,' there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story."
An excerpt there from Goodbye To All That, a bittersweet reflection on Manhattan by Joan Didion. Anyone who's lived in the city will instantly understand the emotions, the scenes Didion depicts so movingly. The multitudinous facets of Christmas, that season of hope but also that season of unbearable loneliness for so many of New York's internal exiles, are captured memorably here in Didion's painfully accurate prose:
"You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers? places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country."
