A Walk into the Past

This week, I had a preliminary interview for a job. Had to meet with a recruiter first (to make sure I wasn’t a goth princess or had horns sprouting from my head). May have an interview with the actual company next week. Whatever.

As I walked to the building for the meeting, I looked up and noticed a familiar landmark. I was in the neighborhood of my first job in the city.

The meeting was brief and I had nowhere else to go afterward (one of the few perks of being unemployed). So even though the day was chilly and my shoes weren’t meant for walking, I decided to take a walk into the past.

It was quite a long time ago, the mid to late-‘80s, to be exact. A time of obscenely teased hair, high shoulders, cocaine (I never partook) and supermodel strut. You needed actual tokens to get on the subway and the wolves ran amok on Wall Street (well, I guess some things never change). Hard to believe today, but the Mets ruled the baseball world in New York City.

This isn’t to romanticize the past or make it more innocent than it was. Merely it’s about the excitement I felt when I got my first job in the Big City. It can be any city really…Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland. There is simply something special about that first job in the Big City.

Since that time I’ve hopscotched between Manhattan and northern New Jersey for jobs. I’ve passed other buildings in Manhattan where I worked and felt no nostalgic tug of the past. But this was my first job in the city, so it represents an excitement, a newness that happens only once in a person’s life. You've broken free from the shackles of your small-minded, restrictive hometown, even if that hometown is a solidly middle-class bedroom suburb about 20 miles from the city.

And since the creamy haze of the past resides both in memory and actual bricks and mortar, I wanted to see how much (or how little) the neighborhood had changed since I first took those apprehensive but eager steps along the same route so long ago.

Long gone was the well-known bookstore where I stocked up on reading material for a daily three-hour commute by bus. Vanished, too, was the outpost of a once trendy restaurant chain where my sister and I had lunch one day.

Yet there was the high-rise apartment building where a stuck-up co-worker who told me I should be ashamed I attended a community college once lived. The grungy Chinese food restaurant where I bought food just one time remains, as does the pizza place where I unexpectedly ran into my ex-boyfriend from college. (He extended his hand as if he wanted to shake mine. I refused. Hey buddy, you dumped me and rather harshly, as I recall. Go scratch.)

There was a corner garden meant to give the impression of nature in an urban circle, and what looked to be several new, only-for-the-1-percent condo buildings that I didn't recall. Yet I recognized many familiar structures, like a church, a TV studio where my mother's favorite, but since cancelled soap opera was filmed, and world-famous concert hall.

As I walked, suddenly, an uncontrollable, palpable wave of nostalgia rippled up from my gut to the tears that almost formed in my eyes. But I didn’t start to cry.

As I neared the office building, I panicked a bit. I didn’t remember this building to my right. Was I on the right street? Then I realized the façade had been altered and soon after the steps leading up to an open-air plaza overhung by the second floor of the charcoal grey rectangular building came into view. There it was, the building where I worked at my first job in the city.

I peered into the lobby, but I didn’t dare go in, lest I be stopped by some officious security guard asking could he help me and did I have business in the building. Way back then, you could walk into almost any Manhattan office building without being stopped or needing a key card. Not anymore.

What floor was I on? I don’t remember. In fact, a quick Google search revealed that the company I once worked for is no longer housed in that building.

I'm no longer in touch with any of those co-workers, either. My tenure ended abruptly and not very amicably after only two years when I tried for and was denied a promotion (one of many missteps in my checkered career path). I took another job, this time nearer my home in New Jersey.

When we visit the landmarks of our past, it gives an opportunity to reflect on the person we were back then and how much our lives and we ourselves have changed. To sum up, I was complete of body but naïve in mind and heart; a person nearly unrecognizable to me now (although thinner).

I do remember a young woman walking tentatively but excitedly to her first job in the city. Yet I’m so different from that person that it doesn’t even seem like she is me at all. Just a ghost from the past, someone I once knew and haven’t seen for many years. It’s almost like she is beside me instead of being me.

I recall walking home one evening in the billowing autumn twilight and seeing shiny bits in the sidewalk. “The sidewalks in the city shine!” I thought to myself. (Don’t judge: I was much younger.)

So much has changed since then: births, deaths, illness, job losses. But that’s what transpires as time passes. Things happen, we make decisions in sliding door fashion, and our lives are altered. We gain wisdom and the ability to endure, but at the loss of innocence and a sense of hopefulness for the future.

So I walked back to the subway station once bordered by two reviled and eventually razed structures. In their place are two gleaming glass-clad high-rises and a vertical mall.

The subway station itself has been spruced up a bit. But enough of its dinginess remains so as to mentally whisk me back to those days I waited for the Duke Ellington train to take me to the bus station and eventually home.