Watching the ball drop

The Column: 01.05.26

We stood at the window, my love and I, and heard the fireworks whomping and racketing away over Times Square at precisely midnight last Wednesday, as 2026 arrived and like many people my age I thought about aging — in sixteen years, Lord willing, I’ll be 100, which is astonishing; I’ve been avoiding exercise all my life. Meanwhile, the city was swearing in a new mayor, 34, born in Uganda to a Muslim father and Hindu mother, an immigrant at the age of seven, running as a Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani. It appears that we Episcopalians’ grip on authority may be sort of fragile.

New York is the city to live in if you don’t have the time and dough to travel all over the world, just get an apartment here and use public transportation and walk in the parks. My love walked for a few miles around Central Park recently and heard a good deal of French, Arabic, several African languages, some Swedish, Spanish, and here and there some English. I read somewhere that eighty languages are spoken by students in the public schools.

If you travel to foreign countries and visit the big museums and cathedrals and historic sites, you’ll meet a lot of well-to-do Iowans and Californians. If you want to meet the natives, come to New York.

Mayor Mamdani promised to govern “audaciously” and remain true to his progressive principles, but he wore a suit and tie, his beard was trimmed, his hair was nicely coiffed, and he smiled as he said it. He didn’t wave his arms or make sharp jabbing motions. His idea of free bus service seems doable, public safety reform — okay, rent freeze on subsidized housing, tax increases on the rich, all worthwhile. And good luck with the $30 minimum hourly wage and universal public child. But the city seemed rather delighted by his election, that the democratic process, messy as it is, could reject the strongman candidate and the crooked incumbent in favor of this young idealistic newcomer, leaving his one-bedroom apartment in Queens for Gracie Mansion.

The opposition will marshal its resources in due course but the inauguration was festive, as it should be. This is a proud city, proud of its pizzazz, its street life, its Up-Yours resistance to bullies as shown by the women who fought Robert Moses’s plan to build an expressway across lower Manhattan ages ago, wiping out Soho, destroying Washington Square Park in the Village. The women won and preserved the city of neighborhoods we know today, the primacy of public transportation, a city of walkers.

My love is a devoted walker, walking is how she maintains her cheerful spirit, and she comes home and tells me, the guy sitting at the laptop, what she saw and heard. She came to New York when she was 19 to study violin. When I was 19, I could no more have come to New York than I could’ve gone to Greenland to study Inuit. But my literary ambitions tended eastward and I spent time in the city, brushing elbows with writers, hoping something would rub off on me.

One Christmas long ago, I was in New York enjoying the general dazzlement and one day slipped into St. Patrick’s as a tourist and found it packed to the rafters for an afternoon Mass in Spanish, the name “Jesucristo” drifting around the battlements, and was delighted to be there, entirely out of my element, anonymous as could be. It was like a big joyful family reunion but not my family so nobody was mad at me and I didn’t have to remember people’s names. I squeezed into the crowd, under the placid stone faces of saints, the sweet smell of burning wax, and felt the fervor, and tears came to my eyes, and I lit a candle, said a wordless prayer, and listened to the sermon and was in agreement with all of it, everything, the totality.

It was a profound experience. A man gets a keener sense of the divine in a church speaking a foreign language. Maybe Luther and Calvin and Jan Hus were dead wrong and literacy is not the key or a correct understanding of doctrine, maybe the essence of our Christian faith is dumb childlike wonder. In New York, I’m surrounded by things I don’t understand. It’s good to know I am not as smart as I thought. Okay, enough about me, let’s go have lunch.

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