Google Maps says it's 98.6 miles from the library in the middle of Sag Harbor to the Empire State Building, which I think of as being the metaphorical middle of New York City. Interesting...take the temperature of any healthy person in Sag Harbor, and you come up with the distance we live from Manhattan. I'm sure there's a correlation there. Maybe the key word is "healthy," in that our health is somehow tied to living almost 100 miles from one of, if not the, greatest city in the world. Of course, depending on how you feel about New York, you can interpret those 100 miles quite differently. Some might say, any closer and our health would be at greater risk. Others might say, it's the proximity to New York (only 100 miles!) that accounts for much of our vitality. I'm not taking sides, because at various times, I have found both points of view credible.

A long time ago, my wife and I lived in Manhattan. When we first started visiting Sag Hampton (East Quogue, to be exact), the City was home. We loved it for everything it had to offer, a long list of attributes with which I am sure you are familiar. Gradually though, as we spent more and more time in Sag Hampton, our feelings about what was important in our environment began to change. This process accelerated with the birth of our first child. When our second child was born, we moved to Sag Harbor and began to truly value the 100 miles of difference. We never exactly forgot how wonderful the City was, it just became less and less important to the lives we were leading.

Still, an awareness of our proximity to a very different way of life remained with us, and occasionally proved useful. Once, when my children were a bit older, I remember taking the two oldest, and one of my son's friends, a Sag Harbor native, who was about twelve at the time, to an event in New Jersey. On the way there, as we were headed for the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, I happened to mention that we were passing through Brooklyn, a part of New York City. My son's friend said he had never been in the City before. I was amazed. After all, it's only 100 miles, and there's the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Planetarium, the dinosaurs in the Museum of Natural History...just a ton of things that I thought every child in the northeastern United States got to experience as part of their birthright. But then I remembered conversations I had had with at least one adult in Sag Hampton who told me with some pride that he had never been "west of the canal." So, I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised that this adolescent had not yet set foot in Manhattan. At that point my somewhat tenuous connection to New York kicked in, and I realized that I could easily rectify this situation. I immediately changed our route so that it would take us through Manhattan on the way home. We then spent a pleasant few hours driving around (it was Sunday), sharing our knowledge of the City's better-known landmarks with our young friend.

Now, two of my children live in Queens (the third lives in Portland, Oregon, but is contemplating a return to New York, by which he means the city, not the state). So, after many years of very sporadic outings to the City, we now find ourselves visiting our former home with greater and greater frequency to spend time with our children in their chosen milieu. As a result, it's gradually coming back to us why we appreciated the City so much in our youth.

My Portland-based son, spent the holidays in Germany. On his way back, he had a two-day stopover in New York. We used the opportunity to organize a family get-together at a restaurant in Williamsburg, near where my youngest daughter works. (It's handy having "friends" who really know the City, my wife and I would never have been able to select the location without help from a "native".) After dinner, we walked around the neighborhood, which is quite different from the Williamsburg I new back in the...well, never mind. We ended up in a park at the edge of the East River with a lovely view of the Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan, even though the night was somewhat foggy. (See photo in sidebar.) Standing in that park, surrounded by my entire family and their significant others, I couldn't help but feel  incredibly blessed to have a truly wonderful and loving family, a comfortable home in a place where I am surrounded by beauty and wonderful people, and the ability to regularly take the temperature of  New York City which is only 98.6 miles away.