If you ever want to feel love from a stranger, respect, admiration and some kind of brother/sisterhood from a total stranger, go to London and tell everyone that you meet, you're a New Yorker.
After having suffered a serious bout of snobbery on my one and only trip to Paris some years ago, I just assumed that Londoners, like the Parisians, would think they were better than everyone else, most of all the lowly American.
I realized how wrong I was in my first hour of arrival.
"Where you from?" asked the driver of one of the wonderful, huge London taxis that make New York cabs look sub-human.
"New York!"
"How is it over there now? Are you OK now? Is the economy picking up?"
He spent most of the ride, which I would have preferred to use interrogating him about everything we passed, asking me if I and all of New York were all right.
"Did you hear about that woman who had burns over 70 percent of her body? What a trooper she is!"
"Yes," I said.
The love New York thing continued during my entire week trotting all over central London.
On my first night in town, my hotel sent me to Rules, a 200-some-odd-year-old eatery with truly authentic old-style British cuisine. Although I must say Rules added a new dimension to the term Yech! by serving me duck breast that was blood rare. (It's still poultry, for crying out loud, and it's not supposed to bleed when you stick it!)
I also tried the smoked haddock salad, which was far closer to sushi than smoked fish.
I started up a conversation with a very proper elderly couple sitting next to me, when I asked them what they were eating. Turns out it was steak and kidney pie (another rather large Yech if you ask me).
They were fairly reserved until they found out I was a New Yorker. Then it was an hourlong conversation about how much they loved New York and how even though they didn't care for Tony Blair (they were something like Republicans, whatever the Brit version of that is. Hated Clinton, too), they loved how their Mr. Blair had immediately hopped to it. By the time our chat was done, they had given me their phone number and address in a suburb outside London.
"Sometimes it's nice to know someone, in case you get into any trouble."
Maybe it was the lone woman trotting all over London's back alleys, or the fact that I had wild hair and men's ankle boots, but these total strangers had decided that I might need temporary parents and they were willing to fit the bill.
On my next night in London I went out to the theatre in grand style, a 280-year-old royal theatre on the strip they call the Haymarket, named for, well, once having been a place to buy hay, I suppose. Dame Judy Dench was the star, and while I must say the play was badly written, I felt so wonderful in this grand, ornate, ancient theatre watching Judy.
At intermission, when girls with trays come out and sell little ice cream cups with plastic spoons (love that!!) the couple next to me started a polite chat. Once they found out I was a New Yorker they seemed to fall madly in love with me.
Seriously, dears, it was practically alarming.
"We felt so close to you when that happened," the woman said, getting misty-eyed, "I mean here with the IRA, we've gone through terrorist threats for years. Nothing as terrible as what happened to you, but I think we know something of what you felt like."
On the famous Portobello Road outdoor antique market, I came across one of the most popular booths on the long stretch of outdoor stalls, a woman selling New York T-shirts.
On my big girly night out I visited an amazingly hot women's club in the Picadilly Circus area called The Candy Bar. Wanna know what the hippest gal in the place was wearing; black leather pants and an I Love New York T-shirt.
Even if I had tried not to think about September 11th on my trip, London was determined to bring it up every time I opened my mouth and they heard my accent, or lack of accent, however you look at it.
Since New Year's I've made a strong effort to get on with my life. I started to feel as though it would be so easy to wake up one day and realize that I'd spent 20 years wallowing in the memory of the World Trade Center. Going to London was part of getting on with living, my September 11th pledge, to no longer postpone the things I've always wanted to do, because life is short ... sometimes very short.
I looked at the gorgeous two-, three-, four-hundred-year-old buildings with nary a skyscraper in sight, unless you count the dinky 30-story things they call tall. I visited Buckingham Palace (not much to see there, oddly), rode over the London Bridge, dined at many an old very British pub, ate fish and chips, rump steak, Yorkshire pudding, truly great Indian food, drank tea at 3:00 and submerged myself into this wonderful, busy, complicated city.
I loved London.
When I arrived home at JFK airport, went past the battalion of armed guards, threw myself into a lousy cab with a driver who didn't give a crap about me, I wondered if maybe London wouldn't be a great place to live.
As the cab approached NYC, I saw the majestic, miraculous New York skyline stretch out before me and felt my heart catch in my throat like it does every time I approach Manhattan.
Twenty years of living in NYC and I still get goosebumps at the site of the skyline.
Home.
I'm home.
On behalf of myself and evidentially most of London, can I just say, I love New York.
