On Saturday, I was walking down Broadway when a man started walking alongside me. An older man. As I concentrated on my steps, he seemed to be leaning his head into my path, trying to get my attention with a bow of his neck. I scooted past, annoyed, slightly intimidated, wondering what this man could possibly want from me, and having lived here for ten years, certain it couldn't be anything worth my time. I could feel him stopping on the sidewalk behind me, dejected. Then I caught his reflection in the curved window up ahead. Gray beard, navy blue shirt. Smiling.

There stood the man who helped me learn how to ride a bike. My childhood next-door neighbor.

I apologized for trying to avoid him. "Now you know how I act around strangers." He shrugged his shoulders and looked around him. "What are you gonna do?"

He and his wife have lived here over a year now; they'd just been to see the new Mamet play. "She loves the theater, you know. We can't get enough of it." She caught up to us a moment later, her jaw dropped in a "well, look who it is!" expression, digesting my presence on this city's streets. We talked city life, errands, their kids, how you beens. They couldn't believe I was entertaining thoughts of leaving the city anytime soon.

"It's just like we're standing there in the lane back in Ohio!" he said, as a siren cut through in the distance.

I spend too much time living in my own head; once in a while it would be wise to look up and make eye contact with the world. It might serve as a reminder that this "foreign" place isn't so very foreign after all.