Ah, yes, is what I think soon as I'm inside the La Guardia terminal, hearing the announcement, "would the passenger Tony Massiotti please report to baggage claim?" The name puts me right back into my old neighborhood. I imagine his slick black hair and a gold cross round his neck, his manner wrapped in a pelt of machismo, his mother living in the row house next door.

Then there's the third world-ish feel to the airport: Smaller, tighter, dingier, and stairs (stairs!) to reach the outside, no elevator or escalator. I was startled for a moment. Seconds later, recognition arrived: This is America's old country. How much space and newness we grow used to on the west coast, living between minute-and-a-half-old walls.

With this acknowledgment of how dissimilar life is in Seattle, the city I now call home, I phone my husband, cell to cell, to laugh about the man next to me who I know is not "yelling" at his wife and she is not "yelling" at him as they, um, yell at each other contentiously. But any number of my west coast friends would think they were about to commit a double homicide as they lapse into a loudness that intensifies under the slightest bit of stress. I call because we've had to work on this, my husband and I, he from the laid-back-I-never-show-emotion-Scotch-Irish tradition, raised in San Francisco and, years later, finding himself married to an east-coast Italian girl impassioned easily about any old thing.

Besides, I'm not from a midtown or uptown neighborhood with its smell-of-the-greasepaint-roar-of-the-crowd, spic-and-span fashionable go-getters trying to make it in a city that means they could make it anywhere. I'm from downtown. And I don't mean The Village, as in East or West, but below Houston Street. Which any New Yorker can tell you "is a whole nudder thing." The first time I visited the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street I thought, hey, what's so bad about this apartment?

Here's the good news: I've been lent the keys to my publisher's pad on the upper West Side, just a few blocks from Central Park. Which means to my family that "I've come up in the world." And I suppose it means the same to me, though only in a parallel-universe sort of way. Out on the sidewalk, it's the Ecuadoran maids and nannies I identify with on a gut level rather than the blond, chiseled, ponytail-through-baseball-cap "aristocrats" (that's what my cabbie called them) who seem so fearless and entitled. I look at them and know I could never be so blase about privilege. It doesn't matter how many years have passed, how much wealth I've attained, or success I've met, in this city I'll always feel my proletarian roots resist, my past and present playing tug-of-war to and fro.

Among this jumble of emotions washing round is the feeling that I have a big ol' dose of homesickness. Not only for this city that lets me wear pointy heels without staring down as if I've just dropped my drawers, or for the buzz of it, which I actually prefer to, say, a walk in a national park, or how people don't seem to want to keep the mess of the world at bay by weeding lawns compulsively, but seem to embrace the street, accepting that it's impossible to hide from life. It will eventually take the elevator up to find you. And the doorman at my building on West 89th? He could be my cousin. He walks this block with such verve, such pride, such possession. God, I adore him. And when he hails me a cab by stepping right into the flow of oncoming traffic like an urban warrior, I think I'm in love. And because his mood is so down to earth and accepting of the caste system that plays itself out each day on this island metropolis, so, by association becomes mine.

As a young person straight outta girls' college (which my father believed would keep me unsullied. Ah, well...), I was too intimidated by the roar of this city to compete. Maybe if my parents had been educated and not of immigrant status, I'd have had a jump-start into a life that education and status combined is the very ticket one needs. That is, of course, if I didn't want to end up north of 120th Street or south of Canal living with eight roommates in a stifling concrete box on the top floor of a 20-floor walk-up. Which isn't fun at any age and why so many young hopefuls end up in Queens. And if I had been born to a different set of circumstances, would I have left this city? Why yes. No. Possibly. I don't know. Most likely. Who knows? All I know for sure is that right now, I'm swinging a bag of ridiculously expensive, exquisite groceries from Dean & Deluca. And I can appreciate the blissfulness of doing so in a way I might not be able to if this city had forced me to admit that my competitive edge is on a par with an eraser's. At this moment the simplicity of a life free from such vigorous drive is mine, and before I return to Seattle, I'm pretty certain I will remember anew that some people are better off in Manhattan. But I'm not one of them. I have no doubt that's the thought that will become crystal-clear in this competent, out of reach city as I feel the relief of being here in an uncomplicated way.

But on this particular sunny fall day, this city is mine again: From the food to the theaters to the fashions to the neighborhoods as distinctly different as men are from women. From the man on 96th Street whose yarmulke blows off in the wind, and the Jamaican woman who runs after it. From the dog in Bryant Park who makes a living for his owner by balancing two other dogs, pyramid-style, on his back. Even the nail salon on Columbus, where my hand is massaged while two cops ask all the women working here questions because, as it turns out, days ago a woman was shot dead here (sure enough when I look down there is this ultra-scrubbed-clean carpet by the door and, I'm ashamed to admit, I still enjoy my massage). And from my old block on Elizabeth Street, now so hip-it-hurts that I fear my Uncle Tony may be revolving in his grave like the rotisserie chicken he once sold here.

For me, this is as good as good gets in Manhattan. And there is no way I will spend another minute measuring my life against the choices I might have made. It will only rob me of the very thing I once thought an "uptown" life would bring.

Because, finally, here I am.

(This is from my essay collection Falling Awake, forthcoming from Cune Press.)

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THIS SEAHAWKS VICTORY celebrant apparently didn't read our January issue, in which we proclaimed Jimi Hendrix fetishism to be Out.

© 2006 Belltown Messenger