Almost forgot...

I can't believe I forgot to post this the other day! In my list of things I'd seen by 11:30 am, I didn't put:

The guy leaning up against the wall of Bergdorf Goodman Men's, who, as I walked by, said to his friend, "Fuggedaboudit."

Seriously, he said it! And he was serious, because he was talking before it and kept talking after it, and neither of them laughed.

I was so happy to hear a New Yorker say the quintessential New York phrase that I almost skipped to work. It's interesting, because as a non-natve New Yorker who has lived her entire time in the city in neighborhoods where she "doesn't belong," I try to remind myself every day that New York is, above all, a place of constant change. As America's primary gateway, it always has been a city in flux, with demographics flowing from younger to older and back, populations of foreigners rising and falling, hot neighborhoods changing almost weekly. Harlem used to be a farm, then rapidly changed hands from a mostly Jewish to a Polish to an Irish to an African American area, and now is slowly shifting to a Hispanic and young white professional neighborhood. That's how I told myself it was ok to live there, and deal with the mean stares I sometimes got, and how I now deal with living in the South Bronx.

But what scares me about this ever-changing face of the city is... well, ok, it's two things:

1) that the real New Yorker, the "fuggedaboudit" guy, will be pushed out by the new money moving in. When 9/11 happend (and I hate to bring up the specter of it, but...) the city fell silent except for those guys, the firefighters and cops and rescue workers who had grown up here and love this city like nothing else. Those are the guys who make it New York, and I see fewer and fewer of them with every passing year. So seeing this guy at Bergdorf's made me feel great.

2) that I have to then accept the Hipster as a legitimate presence in the city. And I just hate Hipsters.