Member-only story
In the year 2005, I was fifty-one, and entering my first semester of grad school at Tisch School of the Arts as a composer/lyricist. I hadn’t been to any kind of a class since high school some 35 years earlier. But by the grace of God, I was accepted into this program, and quickly understood I’d have to get used to the brutal pace and hustle of NYC, or I’d go up in smoke before the first Christmas break.
Every morning I’d board the LIRR into Penn Station, walk the avenue to Herald Square, then pick up the N, R, or W to 8th Street. Once there, it was about a ten-minute walk to my class. Only I was never walking. Usually, I made the trip at a half trot, dragging my roller bag full of homework, laptop, manuscript paper, and books, desperately going over in my head what I was presenting that day. Rehearsing lyrics, remembering stuff I should have done but forgot about, questioning whether I even did the right assignment. This was still early on in my time there, and my body hadn’t yet acclimated to the high-intensity buzz of the city. It didn’t help that no matter how hard I worked, I still only barely kept up.
One of these awful mornings everything went wrong. I’d missed the first train, dropped my wallet stepping off the second, and I almost had a heart attack running for my class, already fifteen minutes late. I was sprinting past the cube at Astor Place when an old woman in a wheelchair…
