HOMETOWN

By Bill Fields I met a friend for breakfast one Sunday morning this spring at a Connecticut diner. With its bustling vibe, vinyl-covered booths, menu the size of a novella and servers with a sixth sense for a coffee cup in need of topping off, the restaurant could have been anywhere in the Northeast.

In between bites and conversation, my mind wandered to a time when eating at such a place was new, not routine, when I was young and eager and, like so many people before and after me, ready to take on New York.

Forty years ago, ostensibly for a magazine job but more accurately to experience a city I had known from books and magazines, movies and television, I moved north. Before relocating from the first floor of a house on East Maine Avenue in Southern Pines to an apartment in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, my exposure to the Big Apple was limited to two brief visits a handful of years earlier, during and soon after college. I truly didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but America’s largest city attracted me like a paper clip to a magnet.

The inexorable pull was expensive. The $175 monthly rent for a one-bedroom in North Carolina became $775 in New York, and there wasn’t a fireplace or a yard at my new residence. What I believed was a huge bump in salary nearly disappeared in housing alone.

After signing the lease on my exorbitant digs, I motored up Interstate 95 as filled with anxiety as the U-Haul truck (pulling my Ford Escort) was with my belongings. Upon recovering from the stress of the back-rattling drive and settling in, the fretting was replaced by the excitement of where I now was and what I was doing, although my newly purchased twin-sized futon in no way mimicked the pillow-top mattresses in the very few fancy hotels I’d experienced.

New York’s subway fare had gone up to a dollar per ride earlier in 1986. On the morning of my first 25-minute (assuming no delays) commute from Carroll Street station to 34th Street-Herald Square on the F train, I shelled out a $10 bill to fill my pocket with enough penny-sized, bi-metal tokens — “Good For One Fare” on one side, “New York Transit Authority” on the other — to get through the work week. The train made 10 stops before my destination, the stations familiar still: Bergen, Jay, York, East Broadway, Delancey, Second Avenue, Broadway-Lafayette, West Fourth, 14th and 23rd.

After coming above ground at my stop, I walked several blocks east along 34th Street, going right past the Empire State Building, to the Golf Illustrated offices at 3 Park Avenue. There was a pinch-me period when I realized that, yes, I indeed was working in the metropolis that I had seen so many Novembers on TV as a backdrop to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

My mother, then slightly younger than I am now, was able to take Amtrak’s Silver Star north for a visit on my first Thanksgiving in New York, where, bundled up on a sunny but cold morning, she saw the floats and bands in person. Mom would be back in a couple of years, taking in the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall and paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a long, long way from her roots in sleepy Jackson Springs.

I made that daily subway trip from Brooklyn to Manhattan for two years and rode a commuter train from Connecticut to the city for three more. Then Golf Illustrated, along with the other magazines owned by its parent company, went belly up, and I left New York with more doubts than the ones that had accompanied me there. But life would play out just one state away. Golf World magazine, born in Moore County, had relocated under new ownership to Connecticut very shortly after I moved there from Brooklyn. The publication — from which I had departed to go to Golf Illustrated — and I reunited in short order. We stayed together for more than two decades, until Golf World ran its course, too, a victim of changing habits in a changing world. You tap your phone to ride the subway these days; tokens have gone the way of the typewriter.

If I’m in the mood to glimpse personal history, I’m a 90-minute train ride and eight-block walk from 3 Park Avenue. I take that trip a couple of times a year, find a diner, and have one of those turkey club sandwiches that rises high off the plate, looking like a skyscraper tall with dreams.