That’s the reason that I gotta get out of here; I’m so alone. Don’t you know that I gotta get out of here, ’Cause New York’s not my home. – Jim Croce, ‘New York’s Not My Home’
I love New York. Though I moved to Chicago as a baby, I was born there, a third-generation New Yorker.
So every time I fill out a variety of forms, I’m reminded of my original hometown. And hometowns are special; they connect you to a dot on the planet, and they instill a special pride in you.
And New York is certainly special.
My dad, a huge sports fan, had an 11th Commandment: “Once a Yankee, always a Yankee” (of course, his passion for the pinstripes was intensified by the memory of once sitting as a 15-year-old in the Yankee dugout in 1927, between Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, two of Yankee history’s greatest giants – not to be confused with the New York Giants baseball team, which fled the city in 1957 to the other coast, to become the San Francisco Giants; but I digress).
