What Leaves A Mark?

Quantum Entanglement and Midtown Manhattan

It’s quite possible that the matter you and I are made of is entangled with every place we’ve ever been. John Locke, by way of quantum physics. What can I say, quantum stuff is weird.

But hey, it also feels right.

Some places I’ve spent so much time, we’ve marked each other. The woods I walk in are used to me. The paths are made of my footprints. And of course, the woods leave their mark on me, every day. How could they not

My stories are absolutely entangled with the where of them. After enough time, as the places changed, I’ve changed too. I’ve seen this pond fill up with otters and get clogged, and 20 years later be open and glass like it is above. At each stage, how I felt about the pond was different. Which means I was different.

The Rink

In 1975 I play Pee Wee hockey at the local boarding-school rink. Flying toddlers starfishing across the ice into hockey goals, slowly learning to stand up and play. Pure joy.

This is not the Lenox School skating rink in 1974, But this is exactly what it looked like in my mind. Giant steel hoop building. Some offshoots for lockers and a store.

Fast forward: a somewhat scandalous “religious” organization converts the ice rink into a televangelism theater with a giant built-in baptismal swimming pool, right where where the back goal used to be. It “ruins” the place for me for years as a teen.

Fast forward: as a young man, really good acts now play in the non-baptismal theater, catskills-in-the-60’s style, and I hang out with George Carlin for a while backstage, just, ya know, laughing it up, right where the back goal used to be.

Today: My kids have grown up in mother’s costume shop, playing Shakespeare dress-ups in the cavernous space full of thousands of exquisite period pieces. 20 years ago, there was a porta-crib permanently set up at her desk. Right where the back goal used to be.

Places leave marks on me. And as the places change, how I react to those changes feels deeply entangled. I was *wounded* when the ice rink came down, but the universe took care of itself, and I am now deeply grateful for the place it has become, and been all along.

Manhattan

I feel the same way about Manhattan as I do about my woods. I feel the same way about mid-town from Bryant Park to Central Park as I do about the Rink.

I’ve never lived in NY. I, like many sometime-in-towners, have “my New York,” the places I feel like I know.

Over the years, I’ve watched this small window of the city breathe, and I’ve watched how I’ve changed. In the ‘80s I was was all about the big narrative dream of New York, the good — the Rockefeller Center tree (which comes from a field about 10 miles from my house), and the bad — rat-infested Bryant “Needle” Park (now one of my favorite spots in the city).

Over the decades, I’ve found my “secret spots” that persist, decade after decade. A reliable clean bathroom. A place to sit down, in the quiet. A place for a coffee or a bourbon, with room to open up your laptop and chill.

Those places are gold.

The lobby bars and coffee shop nooks at the Hilton Midtown Manhattan are like that. It’s the largest hotel in New York.

It’s a hub from which a bajillion finance folks like me have spent the last 40 years eating sushi, taking breaks at the MOMA, and bitching about our bosses on quick walks up to the park in between meetings with salespeople and accountants and portfolio managers and lawyers.

It’s also where that Penn-zoomer guy killed the CEO.

I don’t have much new to say about the event or the people or what it all means. I don’t make the rules, I just live here.

But the place is going to feel different now. The place had already left it’s mark on me, and now that it’s changed, one think I know is certain: I will be changed too. Changed by the momentarily thinned veil between humans and systems and places.

My intention is to be honest, metacognitively aware, and fully conscious of that change. The next time I stroll up from Bryant Park, past Radio City and the Hilton and that place I used to work, and the awning where Trader Vic’s used to be, I won’t pretend it was all better in the good old days.

But I also won’t pretend nothing’s changed.