A Million Gumballs

Moving is always a new beginning. A chance to start with a clean slate.

Our particular clean slate happens to be a one-bedroom in Queens, on a tired side street. The city that never sleeps takes its toll on the neighborhoods of the working. Anyhow, it’s a nice place all in all, clean, freshly dusted off it seems. There’s a sign on the fire escape to remind us that obstructing it would result in a ten dollar fine, and that the building has at least one half a century on us.

We signed all the papers, talked to Old Lady Landlord to both convince her that our cat(s) could stay and ask her if she was planning on putting in a stove anytime soon, and it was ours. And will be as long as we can pay the rent.

It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful because it’s ours. Because we join the masses of tens of thousands who came to New York searching for a better life. Because an empty room, like an empty canvas, holds so many possibilities. Possibilities of memories to be made, as the days go by and we slowly grow old and wise. Though we will be starting a life together, we will be surrounded by not just thousands, but millions of people. It's frightening.

It is difficult to imagine a million of anything. Allow me to rephrase. The average person can comprehend a million by thinking of the million as a single unit. I don’t think the brain is able to comprehend one million of anything. Take a million gumballs for instance. One would visualize them as perhaps the volume they would fill or linear distance they might cover. Quite a mouthful. One does not and cannot picture and understand each and every gumball at once. Once a piece is picked out and examined, it ceases to be part of the million. It is then separate from the now million-minus-one. But a million people is a million different lifetimes and stories. Each lifetime takes, well, a lifetime to understand...if you're lucky. Our challenge is to be a witness to a single life, and not completely ignore the mass around us. But, we must also not let the mass dictate our life.

Though the challenges are great, so are the possibilities…