Roots or Rooted?

An old friend remarked to me that I may constrain myself with the mention of being a born and bred New Yorker. It got me to thinking. I wonder if it constrains me or puts me in a box. I was under the impression that it took me out of one, rather gave me context rather than narrowed my vision or me. Growing up in New York meant to me that I didn't play in a 1/2 acre backyard but rather a very large one-central park and becuase I grew up on the upper west side I also had riverside park. To me it meant I had access to the world's finest art, opera's, plays, musicals all at an age where I didn't know enough to appreciate it but could soak it up. In a way that it became and was, is part of me. I had rather worldly parents my Mother from Haiti and well educated and my Father from Oklahoma also well educated, well traveled and had spent 3 years in the peace corps living in Tanzania.

I felt growing in New York that I was at the edge of something, a springing point, the end of a diving board where I could jump into anywhere in the world. I grew up with every kind of cuisine you could imagine and every color, language and sexual preference was to be seen around me. When I say I'm a born and raised New Yorker I'm saying I grew up in a melting pot and it melted with me and in me. As a little girl I had friends of every creed with parents that spoke a multitude of languages sometimes not including English. A good portion of my friends were bilingual essentially since birth. My first word was not in English. I love that I'm from here because wherever you go int the world they've heard of my town. They know where it is. I also love that although I can "do" a New Yawk accent, I don't speak with one. I attribute that to my parents varied upbringing and that they two both speak at least 2 languages fluently. Not that elsewhere in the world that's not common but in America? Less so .

The comment got me to thinking what did it mean to me that I was born here. I decided it meant to me I am citizen of the world and I have always thought so. Because that's just what I've always thought and what I've been exposed to. Yes because I traveled extensively as a child but also becuase I only had to go down to the bodega where the Arabs where offering to trade me from my father for 13 cows when I was 13. I still don't if they and my father were just teasing me, I think so because they were friends with my family. Or the Koreans who run the other bodega across the street to get an education in diversity. Or listen to the salsa music in the summer coming from the center island in the middle of Broadway. The music, the drums would waft up to my room as I sweat to death because air conditioning was not prevalent then. I guess when I say I'm a born and raised New Yorker I'm talking about all those experiences that you can't describe but are in your bones, in your soul. I would not want to have grown up anywhere else, not for a backyard, not for anything.