Over the holidays, I unexpectedly renewed an old romance. It was a torch that burned brightty during a decade of high optimism, beginning before I turned 20 more than 25 years ago.

 

This time, though, rather than being drawn to the flame, I'm more mature me saw how it might illuminate the path ahead. The object of my reignited, headlong affection is that most luminous of gems, the first seat of our national government and still the capital of the world.

 

I first arrived in New York City late in the spring of 1977, taking a job and a West Village summer sublet before college classes began at New York University. Within weeks of my landing, I lived through what then passed for Citywide catastrophe: the famous blackout. The region lost power when lightning down major transmission lines. But memories of the lights going out aren't what endure. It was their coming back on. 

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As the blacked out night turned to a sunlit weekday, no power meant no work. Subways stopped, elevators stilled, everyone took a brilliant day off. I wandered about a lower Manhattan where automobile traffic was uncharacteristically absent, far from the destructive riots and looting that had occurred elsewhere in the city the night before. 

 

I reveled in an atmosphere that's best remembered as a curious kind of hushed festivity. Out all day, I returned, in late afternoon, to my third-floor walk up. I retreated, tired, to the upholstered chair in the small back room set against a narrow air shaft, windows wide open to let In a humid breeze. 

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Power still hadn't been restored to that sector of the city, and the limited edition of the day's newspaper advised against any appliance being left plugged in – to prevent a surge that might plunge the city into another night of darkness. 

 

Dutifully, I followed instructions, leaving only a small lamp switched on, sitting and waiting for it to light.

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As twilight came, it did.

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And there was a fleeting second of stillness – immediately followed by a collective gasp of recognition, fully audible through my open window, uttered by anonymous, uncounted domestic gatherings in the honeycomb apartment-house flats, clustered together in that dense district.

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Then came a spontaneous swell of indoor cheering and laughter. It seemed as much an expression of surprise and delight over how a sublime moment had just been shared as a celebration of life returning to normal.

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There was much excitement in the 10 years that followed – college, law school, a professional apprenticeship – before settling down, as I always knew I would, by returning to my native midwest, fully satisfied, grateful for a long ride on the crest of the wave. 

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An annual pilgrimage to visit family in nearby Connecticut has been a feature of life ever since. Not always a journey into the city, though. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I find New York a great place to live but I'm considerably less inclined to visit.

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The city's greatness, to me, lies less in bright lights than in daily rhythms. 

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Then, September 11th. Too blue since to wade back into the place where the towers no longer stand. 

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Back in the early '80s, when still living in New York City, I watched a local television news story marking the retirement of the guard on the Empire State building's 86th floor observatory. He stood sentry for 40 years or more, and there he was on the outdoor terrace with white hair and a smart blue blazer, the Sweep of downtown and the distant twin towers behind him. 

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The interviewer asked what he thought of the World Trade Center and its eclipse of the Empire State Building as the city's tallest structure. He shrugged and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. "They look like the box of this building came in.” 

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But they built two of them. Why? Because they could. What ambition. What epic scale, its evidence now gone, along with several thousand Earthly Souls

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In the first days of the New Year brought steady sleet and rain in the New York region as I boarded a train from a suburban station for a lunch date with an old friend. 

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We met in Grand Central terminal, neither one of us inclined to troop out into the muck and mire. So we set up shop at a restaurant’s small table situated on an open balcony overlooking the terminal’s softly lit Great Hall, its gorgeous vaulted ceiling above. There we sat, sipping coffee, catching up and reminiscing the afternoon away to the sound of train announcements and the murmur and clip clop of pedestrian currents and eddies coming and going on the marble floor below.

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And that light came on again, in the city that best exemplifies its spirit. It illuminated for me once more how, after the darkness and while living largely anonymous lives, we take comfort in knowing we're not alone. 

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Here's to knowing and remembering that in the new year. 

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(“A light came out of the blue” was first published as a column by Eddie Roth in the January 9, 2003 edition of the Dayton Daily News.)