A Nightingale Sang in Herald Square

I may be right, I may be wrong,
But I'm perfectly willing to swear
That when you turned and smiled at me,
A nightingale sang in Herald Square.

I read an article in the New York edition of that haplessly global publication, 'Metro' yesterday, and it was written by Ryn Gargulinski, a New Yorker who has moved to New Mexico. So says Ms. G, 'culture shock is not some obvious, earth-shattering thing...I was erroneously waiting for that bolt of lightning from the sky, or candy-coated dreams of taxi cabs...'.

You see. When people move, when they transplant, they're expecting a shock of something. A change wheeled in by stagehands accompanied by a twenty-trombone fanfare and a choir straining four types of harmony out of the phrase 'What do you mean, you don't know what crisps are?'

But things don't happen like that, especially when the day to day business of change occupies you so directly there is little time to reflect on differences.

I haven't exactly made it secret on here, but I'll continue to allude to it in non-Google-friendly phrasing - I'm working at a large store in Midtown. Some might say that it is the most largestest shop in the world. Today I had cause to sit for a second next to a window. The window looked onto a balcony which wasn't meant for people, and below Broadway and 6th Avenue toiled away, the whistle of a traffic policeman shrieking above the rumble.

A slanting charge of sunlight competed with the flickering spot lamps above my seat, and the warmth of it was on my back. Then a shrill song pierced the low comatose noise of the city, it warbled, and it trilled. I turned to look along the balcony, rough with rubble and the fragments of broken glass from years gone by but I couldn't see the bird who was singing.

And all of a sudden I thought of London, a city I know much less well than New York, and of a song from a long time ago, and then the song made me think of Vera Lynn and the time in which she was famous, which made me think about the Downs above the town where I grew up, and the old foundations of the fledgling radar towers there buried under hungry gorse, and the tiny yellow flowers in the summer and the rabbits scurrying to ground beneath them and the view and smell of the sea and the jumble of tall town houses on the slopes.

So I had a pang of homesickness, but it made me happy to hear birdsong in such a manically concrete and human place.