Nic wakes me around 7:30. We have about four hours before we have to leave, and she wants to go see St. Patrick’s. We grab a smoothie and saunter down the avenue. On our urban adventures, she has successfully ceded navigation duties to me while she takes the beautiful photos. We work well like that, playing to our strengths to help each other. It’s a quick walk, left on 49th, through what seems to be a street fair setting up, past Radio City Music Hall, and across from Rockefeller Center.
Inside St. Pat’s (and no, not the one where the “Bloody Baptism” scene is set: that’s the Old St. Pat’s in Lower Manhattan), Nic is walking around snapping pics, but I’m feeling a bit more pensive; sitting in large cathedrals do that to me, but perhaps it’s also a hangover from the park last night combined with some desire to wrap this trip all up with a pretty rhetorical flourish of a bow.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kHbQr6Xsy8U
I’m thinking about how we communicate ourselves to others, perhaps a return to my introversion amidst this ocean of people on this tiny island. The windows, paintings, and statues here all tell stories, instructional for the Christian life. Icons carved on every surface, each with a moral, each an act of dedication to a religious faith.
Rows and rows of pews among massive columns have held parishioners for years, some with subtle lettering to remind of a family that likely gave to the church.
At various altars around the church, people light candles for loved ones passed.
In all of these is an opportunity to pull oneself outside the dangerous ego trap by immersing ourselves in concert with another. To torture ourselves with the unfulfilled needs of the self is an easy, vile, malicious spiritual trap. I often lament that I don’t have all I could imagine or cannot fit every experience in limited time. To wallow in these desires and chase these “needs” seems a sure path to despair.
It would be easy to sit in this church and get caught in a critical vein of the ornate opulence of the building, or rue that money spent on golden candlesticks and gilding these walls could be better spent on those poor bastards walking the streets and sleeping on cardboard boxes. However, there is something in the ornate and reverent nature of this space that may bring people together, to create something greater than simple self-improvement, the community that allows for the support of large scale change.
My mind flits to the promo video of One World Tower, where architects and construction workers beamed with pride over their role in building that tower. “The most important building in America,” they called it. Blah. Blah. Blah. But in that moment, it probably gave the city a place to focus on a common good, much like a church strives to on a daily basis. At least despite my cynical side that wonders about the other good money spent on golden altars could do, halls like these also serve to point people in the direction of the spiritual, to forget the petty needs of the atomistic self.
In a place like Manhattan, this guidance may be both difficult and necessary. It could be easy to seem so small and forgotten in this place. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. But even if you make it here, you’re one in 8 million, milling around. As we emerge, a fractured reflection of St. Pat’s emerges in an office building across 51nd street, housing the Armani Exchange, above billboards pushing idealized human forms to sell clothes and cosmetics. 
We head back to the hotel. Nic and I are different in this regard: she is a painstaking, careful packer, and I am fine being rushed to finish. To this end, she elects to go back to the room and start the process, and see the opportunity for what I’ve felt I’ve needed since we first crossed the Brooklyn Bridge: a run through the city.
I’m out the door, hook a right past Carnegie Hall and a left on 6th and into the park. As far as urban running goes, the quick up and down of the hills in Central Park provides something akin to trail running back home. It’s not the woods as I know it, but on this island, it’s the sanctuary I would choose over and over: a canopy of shade, rushing water (in fountains), and even smiling people to boot.
The day is still young, and the air fresh. Earlier risers availing of the cool weather clog the walkways. In many races, you often dodge other runners. Here, dodging pedestrians—taking pictures in iconic spots, walking their two Akidas and a cat in a backpack—is a sport in itself. I’m a solitary runner bouncing around the other humans leisurely strolling in life this morning.
There is a race in Central Park today, and a Springsteen cover band at the Namburg Bandshell. They sound good, and I wonder for a sec if The Boss himself is giving an impromptu Saturday morning show until I hear the off-key “Whoa-oh” of “Born to Run.” Runners mill around–my tribe. Who knows? If lived here, I might be donning a bib and be chit-chatting over a post race beer with these fellow runners.
But I’m comfortably solitary in this group of fellow travelers this morning. I dodge between them, back down the steps toward the fountain, significantly less crowded than last night, hooking a left over the Bow Bridge dodging a man with an accordion and a family taking pics over the lake. Back around the west loop I see a small yoga class, wish I had the time to stop and enjoy it. Maybe if this were my town, I’d grab the Saturday subway here in the morning. But I don’t.
Pushing back down the mall with statues of famous non-American writers (like Robbie Burns and Willie Shakes), there’s one saxophone player who has a small drum machine. Unlike last night, his accompaniment is pure harmony, in sync with a beat and the chill Saturday morning vibe of the park.
New York will soon be in our rear view. It’s hard to say I’m racing through a city that moves so fast, but at my own pace, it is my own meditative solitude. It is my pact and act of love with the urban landscape, playfully bouncing over cracks, returning to the childlike exuberance without purpose. The run is my bond with the city–what I’ve done most like a native, what I own most as I leave.
I race on, past the Gapstow Bridge, so I can run out the right way this time. Back to the hotel. Back to my wife. Back in the direction of home.
An Uncarved Block 