Postcard
Postcard from New York
By: Paul Coore
New York is many things to many people, and you feel things there that you don't feel elsewhere. And, it can be as lonely as all hell
Posted: 12/08/2008
I had recently moved to New York and was staying in temporary corporate apartments in Newport, which is in New Jersey across the Hudson River from Manhattan. On this Sunday morning I was awoken by what I thought was a cat wailing and figured it was missing its owner. The sound grew louder as I become more awake and now sounded more like a possum stuck in someoneās ceiling, which is a horrible sound. I went to my window and saw there was what looked to be a woman, sitting on the pavement outside the pool area three floors below my apartment. Her head was bowed, she was leaning forward with her arms loose by her side and she continued to wail. Connecting the cries to another person shocked me deeply and I quickly got dressed and went down to see what I could do.
Pigeon, New York -
Picture by Andrew Begg
I approached her and first leaned down to speak and then sat down with her. She had been drinking, and there was what looked like a wine bottle in a brown paper bag by her side. I have a lousy sense of smell so did not really know what the drink was. I asked her some dumb questions like "Are you ok?" and "Can I help?" Initially she shook her head indicating a no answer but she had stopped wailing. I found out that she was staying in the same building as me, so at least she was not lost. She asked me several times not to leave her and I promised I would stay.
A few minutes after me the doorman arrived (someone had rang down about the noise) and we exchanged some words about the best way to help her - should we try and move her or not? He wanted to check with his boss about the best approach and needed to make a call. I stayed with her until the paramedics came and stood by while they asked her some standard questions in an effort to get her name, and to find out what had happened. They had a trolley but she was able to walk with them. The doorman and I chatted briefly about what we thought could have been the reason for her to end up there like that: corporate loneliness was big in my mind which could have been a case of transferring my feelings on to her situation; or maybe it was "the lights" from last night as the doorman suggested. On the night before you could see across the river the two beams of light that had been piercing the night sky in Lower Manhattan as a reminder of 9/11. I never found out as I never saw the woman again and moved to a rental apartment in Manhattan the next week.
Heading back inside I passed the gym and saw at least half a dozen people there, some with iPods, using the running machines and other equipment. That made me really angry, as the gym had a large window which overlooked the spot where that woman had been.
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