“Life to me is defined by uncertainty. Uncertainty is the state we live in, and there is no way to outfox it.” — Thomas H. Cook.
Do you want to know what I remember most about that first day? The smell. Diesel fumes, gutter water, and somebody’s lunch frying in a pan somewhere above the street. Stepping off the bus in spring 1972, I stood on a NYC curb with one suitcase and no clue why I was there.
The voices hit me next. Fast, loud, overlapping—like everyone around me was in on something I hadn’t been told about. I just stood there and let it wash over me.
I rented a room above a shop on a street I could barely say out loud. The walls were this beaten-down gray—not painted gray, more like the gray things turn when they’ve stopped caring. One bulb hung from the ceiling. It buzzed every time I switched it on, throwing a weak yellow light across the floor. The air smelled like dust and whatever the last tenant had been cooking, day after day, for years.
I sat on the edge of that narrow bed one night, hands in my lap, listening.
“What am I doing here?” I said it out loud. Not to anyone—to hear something familiar. My voice. The room didn’t answer. The bulb humming, traffic noise leaking up from below, and somewhere down the hall, a radio.
An icy dread settled deep in my chest, a tight knot of fear that no logic could unravel. The rhythmic rumble of the bus from Boston had faded, replaced by the unsettling quiet of the tiny room. Here, alone, the unfamiliar silence pressed in, amplifying a profound sense of being adrift, more lost than I had ever known.
That feeling has come back plenty of times since then. At work, when the words don’t come, and everyone else at the table seems so sure of themselves. On the subway, packed in with strangers, I lose track for a moment of which direction I’m headed. The room always looks different, but the feeling? Same every time. That hollow, off-balance thing. Like the ground under you might not hold.
But something shifted that first morning.
I went out walking because the room had gotten too small to think in. A block down, there was a bakery with its door propped open, and the smell of fresh bread rolled out into the street. Warm, yeasty, and a little sweet. I stopped right there on the sidewalk. That smell—it felt like a hand on my shoulder.
Through the window I could see loaves coming out of the oven, their crusts gone deep gold, little wisps of steam lifting off them into the cool air. Next door, a café had a few tables out front. People talking over each other, laughing, cups clinking against saucers. A record playing just under all the noise. I couldn’t understand a word of it—not one—and yet it felt warm, the way music can feel even before you know what it means.
I just stood there and let it come in.
The smell of bread pulled me back to my grandmother’s kitchen. To mornings that felt, right then, far away. But the strange language around me—instead of making me feel more alone—did something unexpected. It made me feel as if I were standing at the edge of something enormous.
At that moment, various lives were unfolding in a language I aspired to master and a city I could eventually claim as home.
I had a guidebook in my coat pocket. I left it there. I wandered down streets I’d never seen, past neon signs flickering pink and blue in shop windows, past people moving in every direction at once. The sidewalks were elbow-to-elbow; the noise was relentless, and somehow—to my surprise —I didn’t want to run from it.
The fear was still there. It didn’t go anywhere. But something else had quietly moved in beside it. A steadiness. A sense that being lost wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. It was, perhaps, the beginning of something.