Only in New York...

New York is THE city, and there's no place else like it on earth. It's been said so many times in so many places that it takes on the air of cliche, and maybe it is. I think that the real meaning of the saying doesn't come from the saying itself, though. Like in "It's a Wonderful Life" - a bell tingling and an angel getting its wings - , I think that the real significance in saying "New York is THE city..." comes from the person who says it having their New York moment. Like New York itself, there are so many different reasons for people to say it, that every time they do, it's a renewal of the idea, it's another piece of evidence that makes it true.

In this case I'd like to introduce into evidence exhibit #15,829,182,218. This past Friday, our team E/R took a trip to one of the greatest collections of art anywhere in the world. Will our students remember the frantic control of brushstrokes on Chinese landscape paintings? Maybe. Will they recall with fondness sitting in the light-soaked indoor Greek and Roman sculpture garden, sketching the great life-like marble edifices of the past? I'm sure. What I think they might remember most of all though is the man outside the museum who made saws sing.

It started with two students sitting on the fountain edge, staring but not staring in that not subtle enough way people do when they want to observe, but not be noticed. Of course, the kind man with the saw was fully able to see their interest while playing songs like Happy Birthday and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. He called them over, eager to sate their interest and whet their appetite for more, and maybe get a future saw player started. He patiently explained how the saw made music, and then gave the students a turn to make it sing on their own by having them strike with a wooden dowel while he bent the instrument into the right configuration for the notes he wanted. More students came over to see. It was 3, then 5, then 10, many of them getting the chance to make the instrument sing.

We went inside, saw the great art, but as soon as we emerged from the way we went in two hours earlier, the crowd quickly developed around the saw man yet again. I can't think of another place I've been where individuals change the landscape just by being themselves as this man did. I've lived in New York City for 5 years now, and I think I am only starting to understand why this is the greatest city on Earth. The New York moments are everywhere, and they never take the same shape twice. For today, it was a man with a saw seeming bigger and more important to a group of kids than the huge columned building behind him and all the thousands of years of human creativity contained within. Only in New York...