Life In The Moment On East 1st Street

Tuesday morning, intending to go to a meeting on Senior Activism, I found that the location had been changed and that I was in the wrong place – at least the wrong place for that meeting.  Instead, since it was a beautiful first summer morning and still cool, I wandered around a few blocks of the Lower East Side, enjoying the relative quiet of a neighborhood that was still half asleep and observing the signs of “gentrification” and night club life as I overheard resident talking in Spanish on the sidewalk. Small eateries and cafes as well as bodegas and specialty retail stores create an unusual kind of neighborhood. (Someone offered me a book about New York City recently that described  it as becoming a Theme Park City.  Not so, yet, on the Lower East Side.) .With a couple of hours I hadn’t planned on, I looked for a place to have coffee and read the book I carry with me for subway/bus rides. A few false tries (No, I wasn’t interested in watching the World Cup) and then I saw a small cafe on East 1st Street that offered seating on the street, shade, and coffee for $1.  Inside, a few Ivy League-looking types (unemployed?) sat at small tables with their laptops – a sign said Free WiFi.  

The service was courteous, attentive and wonderful – something you can’t always count on in New York.  I went outside to the front shade with my coffee and pain au chocolat and opened my book, every so often soaking up the cool breeze as it passed through the nearby trees.  I watched deliveries being made, men hosing down the sidewalk, a passerby singing aloud to himself a song about joy and pain.  I saw a man with long disheveled blond hair come out of a building across the street. He was wearing red checkered, ankle high sneakers. It was 11 a.m. and he probably just got up.  The “feel” of the neighborhood was like another country: Costa Rica, perhaps.  The calm was conspicuous in the normal frenzy that is New York. Each time the breeze came through, I marveled at how little it can take to enjoy life in the moment. Then the sun moved into my space.  It got hot and I left.