525,600 Minutes

Yes, you understood the title right: the Far East Side Minyan has been delivering the finest in commentary on Taoyuan, Taiwan; then Wichita, Kansas; and now Moscow, Russia there is to offer, for almost one solid year. On September 30th, 2007, I sat down at my laptop, in the home of a couple of good friends on the Upper West Side with whom I was then staying, and set to create the blog I had promised various friends I would keep during what I expected to be a stint of a year or two in Taiwan. Before I even left New York, I had already written five posts.

Well, things have been topsy-turvy since then, as those of you who have been following this blog for a solid year already know. Taiwan aggressively did not work out. The Far East Side Minyan became, temporarily, the Midwest Side Minyan, then (albeit without a formal change of name) the East Side of Europe Minyan.

But in a way, it was the beginning of the end--the end of dealing with life in a spirit of desperation, clutching at any straw that floated into my field of vision instead of figuring out what I really wanted out of life and how to go about getting it. Bit by bit, I know I am getting to where I belong in the world. Moscow is an important step--but just a step--in that direction. But things are working out here better than I expected or even hoped when I accepted the position in January. I know I have a long-term future in teaching (though probably not in teaching EFL), and I am taking steps to prepare for that future. My application to an education program at American Jewish University remains pending, but I have most of my materials together for an application to an education program at Jewish Theological Seminary, which I will dispatch in a couple of months.

So progress has happened the past year, even if not in the ways I had hoped for when I left for Taiwan. I am doing something amazing, each and every day, and am on the cusp (if being a year away from something can be called the cusp) of something even more amazing. It's hard not to look on all of that with a great measure of gratitude.

The realization that my life in New York is almost 525,600 minutes behind me has had some effects. I suppose homesickness was bound to set in sooner or later; it's an evitable side effect of deciding (or in my case, feeling forced) to roam the world. But I find my thoughts turning toward the mess of a city between the East River and Nassau County more and more these days. Part of the reason for that, I know, is that I am nearing the anniversary of my departure. I timed leaving New York to make sure it happened after the cycle of the Jewish holidays in the fall that begins with Rosh Hashannah and ends with Simchat Torah. And behold, Rosh Hashannah is upon us once again. This year, my body will spend the High Holidays at a synagogue two blocks from my apartment building (to think I had to go halfway around the world to end up within walking distance of a shul), but my heart will spend it where it spends it every year: at 100th Street and West End Avenue, among cherished friends I have seen in almost a year.

Today, peering through the New York Times website to find information on Wall Street's financial meltdown, I noticed a story about a new Google service that will give subway directions in New York. There have been services like this before; I got a lot of cheers three years ago when I introduced my friends to a site called hopstop.com that did much the same thing (previously, only driving directions had been available online, which are pretty much worthless in a city where even the billionaire mayor is a straphanger). The big difference in Google's service is that it coordinates with other regional transit authorities, like the PATH trains between Manhattan and New Jersey and the Long Island Rail Road. Curious to see how well it compared to what I remembered of hopstop.com, I clicked on a link and set about investigating Google's service.

Here's what I found out: the service failed to give the best directions between my last address in New York and my last place of employment. In twenty minutes of trying different addresses, not once did I get directions involving a bus line--something I regularly pulled up on hopstop.com when I lived in New York. But I did get to see, on the now all-too-familar Google maps (they appear on television news these days, for goodness sake), a red line snaking up from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side, the route I cursed every Saturday morning for two years as I rode the G train, then the A/C, then the 2/3 (often at a snail's pace, since far more weekends than not, the 2/3 express became the 1 local because of track work).

And that somehow brought back a host of other memories--afternoons browsing at the Strand bookstore near Union Square, the cozy look Park Slope had at sunset in autumn, the annual announcement from my rabbi that "Manhattanhenge" (a day in the summer when the sun perfectly aligns with the Manhattan street grid) was nearing. All afternoon, as I prepared for a new class I started teaching tonight, home flooded back to me.

It's weird to think I've now been in Moscow almost five months, a fact I let my students discover tonight during a getting-to-know-you activity. And it's weirder still to think that the chance are good of my being back in New York, and in New York's Jewish community, only 525,600 minutes from now.