Homekeeping

"I’m always surprised when people leave New York.
I mean, where do they go?"
- Samantha, "Sex & the City"

The episode where Carrie learns Mr. Big is leaving town was on TBS tonight. The show lives on in syndication as I learn how to live the city life every day. Just four short months in the city, and I already feel like Samantha. Where else in the world would I go?

A friend who was visiting from NC last weekend asked me if New York City felt like home yet. The answer is that it does and it doesn't.

It doesn't feel like home when I'm lost somewhere below Canal, where the streets still don't make sense to me. It doesn't feel like home when I stand between a mom from Kansas City and an old man from Palm Beach and snap a photo of Beyonce as she exits the ABC Studios. And it doesn't feel like home when most of my best friends are never nearer than a phone call.

But it felt like home tonight when I exited a store on 66th and Broadway clutching several large bags like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. I think images from Vivian's shopping spree on Rodeo Drive are embedded in the subconscious of most women when they carry large shopping bags.

I wasn't carrying bags with expensive designer clothes and hat boxes, of course - rather I had just purchased bedsheets for my new mattress, a chenille throw and some other housekeeping items from Bed, Bath & Beyond. But I wasn't a tourist with bags of souvenir shot glasses, "I [heart] New York" t-shirts, and Statue of Liberty paperweights. I was a resident carrying things I had just purchased for my home in New York City.

It would have been nice to proceed directly up into one of the condos at 66th Street. I looked up at the large windows. Lit Christmas trees blinked down at me as I waited for the traffic light to change.

Must be nice ... but I felt my own personal pride and accomplishment as I descended into the train station and caught a train uptown to my own home on Broadway.

My street just has a three digit number on it.