Years later, in the course of my service to humanity, I found I was actually quite good at dealing with New Yorkers, somewhat to my chagrin, a bittersweet understanding, something I should have realized long before. Initially abrasive, testy, demanding, appearing not to be easily satisfied, qualifying their orders by how things should be done exactly, they would inevitably turn out to be fun, joyful and friendly and even solicitous. And this pleased my passive love for them, as if I'd been waiting for them gently. Maybe it was that they were discovering that someone they perfectly expected to be a rube and a bumpkin largely incompetent and ignorant of the finer details of life turned out to be a pleasant not completely uncultured fellow, capable of conversation and humor. But it was always as if these qualities were reasonably well hidden upon their entrance and the initial encounter and the 'here's the way I want it and what can you do about it.'

But the realization, an ongoing one I would have repeatedly over the years as a quiet polite barman, would always, as I say, have an amount of sadness, for the life I did not take, the route I didn't follow, the talents I did not develop in that place so appropriate for them, the musicality, the literary, the conversational. And the girl I'd fallen in love with, well, my talents would always be latent, too shy and undiscovered, largely out of my own initial youthful hick quality that then seemed to settle in on me like a patina I could not shake, as if, like Lincoln, I would always wear ill fitting clothes and have a 'Mr. Cheerman' sort of twang in my lips, which then had become a sort of twenty five year prison sentence and a blight upon the real career I should have had had it not been for certain things and depressions.

My deep simple love of New Yorkers, experienced on gut level, would then remind me of the parable, if it is a parable, of the shepherd father's happiness at recovering the one lost sheep that has strayed from the flock. It was as if the sheep had leveled all sorts of presumptions about the father and made accusations of him and even scorned him quite terribly even though it was all rooted in innocence, but then realized all the shepherd father was actually about, so that all could rejoice.