A Sense of Place

Have you ever jumped double dutch? When I was a kid we lived in the projects on the lower East side, near the Henry Street Settlement. The girls in the neighborhood who jumped double dutch were the cool girls, the ones to follow. They knew what they were doing, and they were awesome. I did not look like them, and I was not cool like them. I went to school uptown in Chelsea, where Marlo Thomas was beta testing Free to Be You and Me, where it was cool to have a weekend house in Connecticut, and a Dad in advertising. I wasn’t cool like those kids either.

There was a lot of moving, back and forth across the country. One side of my family was filled with artists and musicians and inventors who had been here a long time, who had stories about openings on Times Square or at Carnegie Hall. The other side was much more recent, with very different stories. 

I fit in to these different worlds, in different ways. I am thankful for that, for the gift of having this background, for the sense it instilled in me that home is important, but that it’s where the people are, not the place itself. I am equally comfortable walking around Manhattan — past my beloved Flat Iron over to Chelsea and then down to the East Village — as I am around Portland — through Northwest into the Pearl and over to Downtown. 

A friend recently commented ‘Enjoy the Upper West Side’, and I laughed out loud, because the image that comes to mind for me — the Dakota, Central Park, Old John’s Luncheonette — is a far cry from my neighborhood. But in this place that I call home, that’s precisely where I am. And that made me think of the girls who jumped double dutch, the ones who were really good. They knew that the best place to be, as they jumped and twirled and leapt, was between those two ropes, interacting with both of them at the same time. 

© Patricia Zanger