I just had a wonderful time reminiscing about the “old days” in NYC. The Big Apple as many call it, but to some of us it is much bigger and sweeter than the largest of apples could ever be.

I was raised in New York City and after more than three decades living elsewhere I still consider it home. It’s where I tell people I am from. It’s where I took my kids from small town America to see the greatest of cities, my city.

I often return there. Sometimes for work, for visiting family, and just for fun. It’s always like coming home. No place else feels so right and no other streets feel so familiar. The old feelings and habits just come racing back. Walking down a familiar block, catching a whiff of ethnic foods whose ethnicity has changed a dozen times since my day, spotting a recently swept stoop that is perfect for catching a squat on, seeing a corner that begs to be hung out on. Yes, it’s the disappearing blue collar New York that I really love.

Growing up in 1960’s New York neighborhoods (we didn’t have communities in NYC back then) was strange in hindsight. Racial tensions and anti and pro-war sentiments could not find a spot that fit well in the political, ethnic and social jigsaw that made up the City. The great melting pot was boiling again and languages, customs and looks were being reforged. The City was being torn down and rebuilt as fast as you could get from 59th Street to Times Square. Things did get strange and difficult to understand at times but it all just seemed like normal NYC stuff to us.

In the midst of this there was always the people. The good resilient people of NYC who long before 9/11 learned to deal with the challenges that come with living there. The same people who are presented to the rest of the world as cold and uncaring.

New Yorkers are a tough and strange people but nowhere else have I encountered so many people who would rise to the occasion, any occasion, there’s or yours. So many who would offer so much to others when they themselves had so little.

New Yorkers won’t talk about their beloved city and people in wimpy terms. The image we like to project is hardcore. Yet under the hard boiled exterior there is a much softer interior that is difficult to explain unless you have lived it in the neighborhoods. It is so amazingly based in sharing, in looking out for each other and worrying about each other that you don’t even realize it’s happening.

Like anyone else, there are things that I am proud of and things that I am not so proud of. Oddly enough, one of the things I take greatest pride in is one of pure luck- living in New York City and being a New Yorker.