Highlights of New York, Part I

There was once a middle-aged Spanish woman who breezed through my life. I believe we were in Villazon, Bolivia. I was 20. She had shortish hair, and some of it was graying. She wore comfortable-looking clothes. I was inexplicably attracted to her. She told me how America just looked like such a bratty adolescent from the European perspective. I never knew her name. We shared a half-hour together. I've thought about her so many times since; her comments set a framework for my experience abroad.
In Argentina, in the company of people like Gabi Yocco and Lucila Trolliet, I felt like I was with peers, but for the first time I was in the company of adults. Buenos Aires, with its sweaty public transportation, cracked sidewalks, history of economic and political hardship, and strong artistic and intellectual traditions, creates a culture of melancholic tangos, fuel-efficiency, slow sipping, and reason. On a crowded sidewalk or subway platform, people bump into one another. But no one apologizes. Everyone involved knows that the bumping is unavoidable, it's a fact, not an event.
Back in the Colorado, I found people apologizing for getting close to each other. People hate someone for loud-talking on a cell phone. People call the cops to break up a party with loud music. People throw dirty looks at a biker weaving through a crowd. These are examples of people taking offense at another's action, even though it doesn't hurt them at all. It's as if we wish we were all alone.
It all goes back to what the lady-Spaniard said, about us all being like children. Because and adult wouldn't care about any of this; an adult accepts these things as normal and has other more important things to worry about. But in the States I saw adults freaking out as if they were just born, and still not comfortable being out of the womb.
But New York is different. Traffic is a weaving, jamming, mess of acceleration and braking, but that's just how it is. Sam and I, longboarding through traffic, have had some incredible "encounters" with cars, bikers, and pedestrians, and since no one's been hurt, no apologies are in order. Everyone is fine, and everyon understands that it's just a fact: it's a busy street.
Incredible, here we are in the United States, behaving like adults!! I wish I could talk to that gypsy now.