I walk quickly. I always have. I chalk it up to being a New Yorker. Because, you know, New Yorkers walk fast. We’re busy people, and we have places to go, and things to see.
Even when we aren’t in New York. (Even, in fact, when we haven’t lived in New York for many years.)
You can take the fast walker out of New York, but you can’t take the fast New York out of the walker. Or something like that.
Now here’s the thing:
All you people out on the sidewalks who aren’t from New York – all you people who walk so agonizingly sloooooowly – and you know who you are – you’re in our way!
You’re holding up traffic!
Get the heck out of the way!
Move to the right, so that we can pass you.
No..further.
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You are absolutely correct: New Yorkers walk fast, and we know it. I was born in Denver, Colorado but really grew up in New Jersey and Vermont; but with a mother from Brooklyn (Bay Ridge) and family in the West Village, New York was like my third home before I realized it was.
I love taking my friends around the City, but they slow me down; I walk too damn fast (that’s what they tell me). But when I’m back in New York, yeah it’s some kind of mystical, because I’m one with those streets, with those people, through the subway throngs, out into the heat or the cold – I become free again, in love again, or just alive again, in a way I’ve never been elsewhere, and never will.
Then again: my mother dropped me off in Chinatown when I was 15 or so and, without any prior guidance, navigated my way through the grid-defying streets of Downtown back to The Village. If that didn’t make up for being completely born and raised, I’m sure it was a start.