bookends

The key to happiness is access to a ten-million-volume academic research library. Okay, perhaps not that only, but it's an excellent start. Friday was my last day at work, and today was my first day as a doctoral student at Columbia. Academia has welcomed me back into its embrace in characteristic fashion, by which I mean to say my stipend check is missing, my library account isn't working yet, and crucial emails from the departmental secretary are going astray en route to my inbox: so really, I feel very much at home.

It's a little giddy, a little uncertain--the transition's happened with no time to reflect. A few days ago I was in a cubicle writing memos about the crisis in Georgia, and now here I am: sitting in introductory Hindi-Urdu, learning to write vowel sounds in Devanagari and say aapka naam kyaa hai? (except I knew that one already, and also most of the vocab words on our vowel handout--half of them being the same in Turkish/Arabic.) Today I successfully prevailed upon the gentleman listed as "Reformed Hindoo" in the credits of Mira Nair's last film to allow me register in his Gramsci and Foucault course; tomorrow I'll go talk my way into a history class with the author of one of my favorite books on another Ottoman/post-Ottoman city. The four students taking Advanced Turkish will soon huddle in a hallway with our instructor, whom I met once at a conference in DC in 2005, and devise a schedule for our studies; and my missing words will come flooding back to me. I've already gotten half-drunk in the company of (most of) my doctoral cohort; they seem lovely. We're a small group, but I'm sure we'll turn 'Questions in Anthropological Theory' into a rollicking good time somehow. I saw a kid on campus in a 'restore the judiciary!' black flag t-shirt, and another in a shirt with the Blue Scholars logo (oh please, I hope you are my future students!) And I satisfied the Health Services with proof of my vaccinations, and located the nearest purveyors of ginger tea and secondhand textbooks.

***

Something happens when I get off the D-train at 125th street and head up the hill, and catch sight of the scaffolding-shrouded tower of Union Theological Seminary. Ten years ago this month, I came to New York for the first time. I had just turned seventeen, and it was a few weeks before the start of my junior year of college back in Seattle. I'd come out to visit my friend G., a classmate from the early entrance program who had transferred to NYU. But her dorm room was tiny and crowded, so we camped out in the quarters of a friend of hers who was a student at UTS. I found my way there from the airport alone--I'd never been to the East Coast before, never ridden a subway, but I lugged my suitcase and my wide-eyed self from train to train and emerged finally into the sunshine at 116th street. My first encounter with this city was scattered across those few blocks of Broadway and Amsterdam: the Hungarian Pastry Shop, St John the Divine, Labyrinth Books: indelible impressions. One night, we climbed to the top of the seminary tower as a thunderstorm lowered itself over Manhattan, and stood looking southwards at all the stretching skyscrapers--my only visual memory of New York with the Twin Towers standing.

Two years ago, when I was newly arrived in the city, and dating someone who lived on 121st & Amsterdam, I'd occasionally find myself coming out of an apartment building on that block early in the morning, glancing westwards at the tower, always pleased to be making its acquaintance again. Brooklyn was already my home by then, and it's even more so now, but Morningside will always be where I met New York. When I walked through these same streets a decade ago, I never dreamed I was mapping out my own future. And yet, unexpectedly, delightfully, here I am.