Plus ça change vs NYC

The old French expression, plus ça change, plus lâ meme chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same) is often true. But it's just as true, and maybe more often, that the more things change, the more they never come back. Above is an image from Paul Mazursky's beautiful 1976 film, Next Stop, Greenwich Village. The actors Antonio Fargas (l) and Christopher Walken (r) hustle their friend, Dory Brenner, across 7th Avenue at Sheridan Square. Behind them, the iconic Village Cigars. The film story takes place in the 1950s. I saw it when it opened, and its images of Village Cigars--my first--became part of my mental map of NYC. How exciting it was, in 1977, to emerge from the Broadway 1 at Christopher Street and stand under the Village Cigars thoroughly old school, Hopperesque awning. It was as if I’d wandered onto the film set of my imagination. The shop opened in 1922, it closed five score and two years later, and it won't be coming back. I'm not a smoker, so it's not the tobacco (or the vapes or the bongs) that I'll miss. I'll miss my New York, which was the New York of e.e. cummings and Marcel Duchamp and Patti Smith and Thelonious Monk--and you, until, that is, Feb 7, 2024. In 1980, if I stood on the sidewalk outside Village Cigars and sailed a paper plane over its roof, it would have landed on the steps of the home a former girlfriend grew up in, a home replete with a monkey, a parrot, alcoholic parents, and a cat named Sphincter. I spent many formative years there soaking up the kind of New York I'd dreamed of as a young suburban delinquent. (For the record, I don't miss the old girlfriend. Very much.)  These days, walking through New York City, I think of the old haiku of Bashō, which says something like even in Kyoto … I long for Kyoto. But I've come to understand that missing New York City while in New York City is very New York City, which is here and gone at the same time.