Love and loss along 2nd Avenue

[Photo by Vinny and O]

From an essay by East Village resident Sarah Larson in The New Yorker...

As I write this, at my apartment, the sound of helicopters overhead is constant, and two people who were in the sushi restaurant, Nicholas Figueroa and Moises Locon, are known to be missing. Some two dozen were injured, four critically. And whole buildings are gone. On Twitter, people were lamenting the loss of their beloved Pommes Frites, the late-night standby that made its corner of the world smell like French fries. Other people on Twitter berated the frites lamenters, and still others pleaded for understanding between the two camps. We could mourn all of these losses, they said.

I agree. It’s important not to be glib. It’s important to focus on the missing, the injured, the brave people who escaped and helped others escape, and the people who lost their homes and businesses. The softer losses, the cultural losses, the neighborhood losses, are not as important. But they’re losses, too. They’re things we love — parts of our lives that we take for granted and now understand to be, or have been, vulnerable. They feel like trivial things, but they represent fundamental things: what we love and care about, their permanence and impermanence.

Read the whole article here.