Ruminations

One of the best things about living in a city, is leaving. the family and I tend to get out to somewhere pretty often especially during the summer. I remember on my first few years in the city getting kind of a cement claustrophobia every now and again. The walls here are so hard, and the cement and brick can start to seem more and more solid after a while. A little altitude like going on a roof tends to help over come the feeling a bit, the ocean feels even better, but nothing beats a mountaintop for rejuvenation. Theres something about being able to stand somewhere and look off into space and alow your soul to expand out in front of you to a distant horizon. Its like moving from the sofa into a real bed where you can really stretch out your feet.

For New Yorker's who are always hurring from here to there to there and doing 3 things actively and 2 things passively every minute of every day, a little time sitting in a field or watching a river is often immeasurably cathartic. And as such we tend to join up in little communities, carpool, and get the hell out of dodge together.

In my experience the suburbs are hard to appreciate. Growing up in the Connecticut countryside I certainly had my fair share of experiences roaming through the forest that began next to our house but for all the trees and the big yard, I don't think I ever really appreciated it. For me it was just a tedious set of chores that always needed to be done. twice a week I had to give up three hours in the afternoon and push a lawnmover back and forth across the yard and down the hill 142 times. When there wasn't grass to cut, there were leaves to rake and when no leaves fell, there was snow to shovel. For few few years we even had a big round pool in the middle of the back porch, which served to collect all of the leaves, pollen, and insect life from the neighborhod trees. I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of times we used the poll for swimming cooling off or relaxation, but it was memorable for the fact that it required someone (yours truly) to to put on a bathing suit, slip into the slimy cold green water with a completely nonfunctional "pool vacuum" and make sweeping motion around the floor until the green stuff would magically come off the floor and stick to their skin. After a couple years of this awesome practice, I left for college and the pool was closed temporarily, then permanently, then removed. But I digress...

In New York City, if a teenager walks (skateboards) up to a group his/her friends, he kind of just slips into the group, maybe offering a smile to someone, or teasing someone a bit, almost as if theyve been there for a while and don't mean to distract from the momentum of whats going on.

In Berlin if a teenager walks up to a group of his friends (on a subway platform for instance) he/she walks around to each of the afore gathered people, looks each of them in the eye, does some sort of a predetermined hand greeting, and says something akin to hello how are you.

Now I understand that europe is much more ritualistic than the US and certasinly more than New York, I just wonder what are the benefits of one or the other method of greeting. I see how in the Berlin greeting everyone is more assured of knowing each other and how to address one another moving forward, which are both pluses. But to my north eastern sensibility it kind of seems like a certain waste of time, and seems to have an adverse affect on the dynamics of the group. For instance if the group is talking about something important and everytime someone else arrives they all immediately make a timeout to welcome the latecomer.