Surfin' NYC

It's like ... it's like ... I'm psychic! 

Two weeks ago I did a big blog post on the Rockaways and then, late last week, what does my eye spy in the media? A new book about, about ... ready for it? The Rockaways!

Not of the first time, Mr NYC has been ahead of the curve. 

A reporter for the Times named Diane Caldwell is, like yours truly, a product of upper Manhattan, a city kid if there ever was one, a denizen of the streets. About ten years ago her life was unhappy but then a weekend out on Long Island where she learned to surf changed her life. She become a huge devotee of the "sport" -- and eventually moved out to Rockaway Beach, living in a bungalow with some dude, surfing all the time, and transforming from a resident of the city's concrete jungle into a citizen of its beaches. 

How inspiring! It really is a different, fascinating world out there. 

Because NYC is so huge and diverse, where you live or what neighborhood you grew up in becomes small compared to the rest of the city (and it is). Growing up in upper Manhattan, the Rockaways might have well as been in the Middle East, not Queens -- it felt that far away, that distant, that wild, that otherwordly from the tightly organized world of "the city." Ms. Caldwell, like so many New Yorkers, discovered that there was another, magical world, just a subway ride away. 

You shoud read her article about how she came to write the book as well as an excerpt.

Apologies but ... surfs up!