My Walk Home

I live on 110th and Amsterdam. When I walk to school in the morning, I am usually late, eating breakfast, and focused on getting to the law school in less than eight minutes. The only person I notice at that time is the crossing guard, because she is yelling at me for ignoring her signals and the crosswalk for the umpteenth time. In the evenings, though, the six blocks of Amsterdam between my home and the law school provide for a time of conflicted meditation. I usually have headphones on, and the music provides a cinematic sheen to the daily event.

Over the course of the year, my walk home has developed two spots of purposeful acknowledgment that serve to humble me after playing Solicitor General For A Day. The first is The Grates between 114th and 116th streets. The second is the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine. In my head, they combine to confuse me about our world and my place in it.

Peppered in between The Grates and The Church are useful lessons in their own rights. The St. Luke’s stop where sick people and their family members slowly walk off the bus in front of an HIV treatment awareness ad that features an oddly excited and happy woman. The pharmacy across the street that doesn't try to hide the fact it sells drugs. The loyal husband who, having recently returned with the spring, sits outside of the Amsterdam House and earnestly speaks to his wheelchair-bound stroke-rendered dumb wife with a tenderness that always makes me want to cry and sometimes succeeds because it seems so futile. The North-African fruit stand man who came back around the same time and gives me free oranges and promises the freshest avocados and blueberries in a one block vicinity: “if I am not on 12th, you can find me on 11th,” he always says. The three food carts on three subsequent blocks with coffee pricing that lets me pretend it is still 1999 but whose food offerings seem uniquely tailored to clog arteries. The People's Garden on 111th Street that is often empty and wilted but pleases me simply by virtue of its being a community garden. And the pseudo-hipster Hungarian Pastry Shop that almost-but-doesn't-quite match my vision of the romantic intellectual cafe that I was just a little too late for.

St. John’s Cathedral is a testament to human prowess. In my first week in New York I see a father with a yarmulke on his head admonish his adolescent son to stop: "Do you realize how lucky we are to walk by this Cathedral every day? Look up there high and in the middle. Have you ever noticed the outside of this famous rose window?" The Jewish admonishment about the Christian church transfers to me and now I always stop and notice the Cathedral on my way home. On a purely architectural level, the Cathedral is pretty damn grand and arouses the Roarkian in me. When I feel really contemplative, I walk in and under the soaring arches, down the length of its stained-glass window and candle-lit aisle, passed the kneeling tourists, and up to the altar where I marvel at the phenomenon of human faith. When the organ is being played, I get swept up in the solemnity of the whole thing and can understand, for a brief moment, why it would be nice to feel that Jesus died for my sins.

The Grates, on the other hand, are up against the thick marble walls of Columbia’s John Jay and Alexander Hamilton buildings. They are home to between one and three homeless men (or their sack of belongings if they aren't around… at least some cop lets them have a twig in the bundle). The men like to sleep next to the grates for the same reason I slow my quick gait when I walk by them in cold winter evenings. They give off heat. When I walk by the homeless men I admonish myself, but not for being an uncultured passer-by. Sometimes I can ignore it by crossing the street. Sometimes I remind myself that I am in school to learn how to do something about it (I am in the homeless clinic for God's sake). But typically, I walk by and burn with the shame of a comfortable student who sees a man seeking sustenance off of the energy waste of a college dormitory. I feel shame at being a person who knows we have captured the power to create soaring edifices to our existence, while a man sleeps in the cold, on a cardboard mattress that falls in the shadow of God's fourth largest house in the entire world. I always walk home by myself, so I when I feel the shame and the absurdity and the irony, I feel it silently and alone.

After the NYU-CLS basketball game on Thursday night I joined a few students as they walked to the after-party, a little further down Amsterdam than my apartment. Journal applications were due at 5pm the next day, so as we left the gym and turned at the Alma Mater statue we started to talk about our editorial preferences. When we got to The Grates, I slowed down and interrupted a student to say that I feel shameful every time I pass the men who sleep there. Maybe I wanted to revel in the thing’s absurdity with someone else. Maybe I needed collective recognition of the “problem” and talk about its “solutions” to obviate a bit of my guilt. Maybe I needed both. Instead, there was a tiny beat in the conversation before the student continued, “Anyway, back to the Journal of Gender and Law.” Yea, I thought… Back to the Journal of Gender and Law. Maybe it's just my music.