Spring in the City

As you can see by the date of this post, it’s been some weeks (years in Blogger time) since I’ve written. Not for lack of financial headlines begging for my commentary, but rather a hunch that “these hard times” might strike down upon me personally, giving me laser focus on basic survival and putting aside any activity not absolutely tied to maintaining gainful employment.

It doesn’t take a formal company announcement for one to fear for their security and whatever my reasons, the month of March brought on that fear like the proverbial lion whose turbulent roar disprupts the quiet of winter and foretells of changes this new season will bring.

And with that panic came a cincture, a stranglehold put upon any alleged creative juices that I like to think flow within me from time to time. (With that in mind, this post is indication that for the brief near future, the chopping block is out of sight).

Fearing the loss of income, coupled with a snafu in living arrangements leaving me without a roommate- and someone to split the rent- a month of nights were spent assembling mental to do lists and not in any sort of midnight repose.
But in those solitary hours, I was not alone.

As little comfort as it brings, many others were in on the late night number crunching with me. Not just those who bear the corporate flourescence in their cubicles, praying for not another re-org, but outside, along the once casual backdrop of a walking commute, storefronts with shelves full yet barren aisles cry out in pangs of a supply and demand equation gone wrong.

Walking on the small, quaint street in Manhattan that I like to call mine, store front after the next display signs, For Rent. At least a dozen within 2 blocks of my front step alone.

How can the recession of the economy not be a depression on our collective psyche when we must daily pass remnants of the good old days- boutiques and restaurants, now called ‘failures’- that perhaps didn’t have a solid business plan then and who serve now only as economic case studies, revealing how free money was when credit was in play?

Continuing on to the west side of the island for a brisk walk on a brisk spring evening, I proceed up the Hudson River, passing half a dozen tall glass buildings that break up the old and the brick and the industrial that had been Manhattan’s ragged western edge in years past. I remember seeing these buildings, townhomes and offices spaces, shrouded in scaffolding only some months ago when I was new to the island and my large eyes took in an even larger cityscape.

Walking along now, in the spring of 2009, I wonder if the everyman- the working folk of this big little town- gaze up at those now-completed and empty compartments to sneer at those who had the balls to continue building more and bigger, sneering at the banks who dared to take more and bigger risks, and all the rest who knew better but pushed for more, believing it was within their rights to do so. These opulent edifices, gauche even in a town known for opulence in all things, look now to be as bloated and fragile as the economy that deemed them appropriate.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Maybe these sleek, slender structures can stand tall and cast mocking glances down upon a society whose hubris believed we were worthy of such grandeur. A national collective who thought we could sustain such grandeur.

In either sense, after the fall in the fall of ‘08, we are left with emotional rubble and physical splendor and no map to show us where the middle ground is.

Question is, will we recognize a middle ground even if we find it?