Stepping Over NYC: Colors of Fall

East side, west side, all around. . . there are so many colorful and curious images to step over on the storied sidewalks of New York! It’s especially resplendent in October.

First you have the many squarish metal covers that provide entrance down, down into the steep hearts of darkness that live below street level leading to the myriad storage cellars beneath the trendy and not so trendy shops; these sidewalk “doors” range in hue from shiny, corrugated, recently replaced light silver to dismal, overly stepped on bent, dirty charcoal of a heavier, bygone material;  but they all make the same hideous, ominous, clanging sound when one dares step on them directly, rather than scooting around in order to save a precious second or two. I can never decide whether to take the dare and chance being sucked into one of those doorways to Hades in mid air, or simply slip around and be safe, though this maneuver may risk my bumping rudely into strangers. Seconds do seem to count while racing along the sidewalks of a New York minute. Seeing how fast you can get on foot from one light to the next, while squinting in the clear October sun as you dodge cars, trucks and careening delivery bicycles, actually becomes a kind of quest, not just a matter of expediency. You start to enjoy it, a kind of guilty pleasure under a perfect blue sky.

As a kid I was especially fascinated by the subway grates and the thrill of standing on one of these as a train roared by underneath. This innocent joy was seconded only by the sparkling diamonds in the schist, or engaging in the concentrated act of cautiously stepping over the cracks while the leaves crunched underfoot.

But back to the present, and the more insidious, smaller stuff you scrupulously must avoid, utilizing fight or flight responses that most natives actually have encoded in their DNA by the time they reach toddler-hood: gum, once pink, now black (speaks for itself- forget about ever using those shoes again); dog doo (a time honored city tradition that maintains it will bring you luck- yeah, right. . . ); liquids of all sorts from even more dubious sources (the spilled orange smoothies being truly among the grossest). In short, it’s a mess out there.

Finally, there are the sidewalk sleepers and their piles of Dickensian rags straight from a mid-Victorian set, a motley riot of faded color jumbled together in a heap on a late autumn afternoon, under which a body lies crouched and which you can partially discern, still breathing; or in nicer weather, the sprawl of sunny sidewalk sunbathers in various stages of disheveled dress or undress on the littered beaches of Broadway.

A metaphor here, for sure, though I wish not explore. Just keep walking.