In the Morning, Feeling Half Right

Lights, excitement and skyline drew me in, but when the fog finally cleared I found much more.

Illustrations by Sara Lautman

Through the twin living room windows of my Brooklyn apartment, I often watch airplanes dip gently north, toward their berths at LaGuardia. Most days they pass every two minutes or so—close enough to make out the darkened rounds of individual portholes, and yet, by a trick of wind, somehow silent. When the planes appear outside, already low in the sky, tray tables have doubtless been stowed and seatbacks restored to upright positions. Travelers sigh and work their jaws, drain tomato juice from thin plastic cocktail glasses. They have viable agendas or imagine so. One, perhaps, has a line on a no-fee apartment; another hopes for a taxi medallion; a third has come to see about a girl. Some possess no more than vague notions of their destination, yet unruffled by experience. At night, they duck beneath the moon before disappearing from view.

A few months before I arrived in the city, at my college graduation in Boston, a professor told the assembled audience th…