It turns out that this little mouse still remembers the city, still loves the city.

It turns out this particular city, this New York, is weirdly reminiscent of the eighties in Toronto. A time when she was young and the world was so much better. A less corporate time, a wilder time, a time when people could run their own little cafes and you could work as a waitress and save enough money to travel the world.

The grungy floors of the subway, the black and peeling walls, the happy rats making their way in the tunnels, in their own world. The parks with well trodden paths, the clattering roaring roads, the feeling that there is time and space for everyone.

This particular city, New York City, it turns out that it lives in a cool, calm chaos. It is place where all that live there, love it there. They are proud to be there and many celebrate this by wearing hats and shirts that call out the city’s name, and by being helpful to visitors.

The police are everywhere, not the big muscle building cops with the attitudes in Toronto, but just working people. And their cars are everywhere too. Just plopped in the middle of an intersection, or sitting on the side of the road, day after day.

On the night of my arrival, I stepped out of Penn Station, with my eyes peeled for the Monahan Train Center, a spot where I had planned to meet my daughter. But as I stepped into the street I paused in awe. I found what I saw mesmerizing, but what was it?

A street corner filled with people, hundreds of people involved in interactions and discussions, and car traffic filling the corner, with at least six yellow cabs, all blocking the intersection, and some honking and a soft but insistent blurp blurp blurp of an emergency vehicle, and sun, and bird song as well. I have never heard such determined birds as in New York. And a sort of hum, or white noise, of humanity.

It looked like a scene from a movie, and felt like a dream. And I loved it.

I spent a week there, delighted to wake up and hit the streets, happy to climb down the dirty subway stairs and shoot along in ancient tunnels. Sometimes following the path of the tourist, as when I walked the Brooklyn Bridge while my daughter worked, or visited the New York Transit Museum (fabulous), and sometimes along the path of a New Yorker, being introduced to where she works, the cafes she visits, the parks she enjoys.

A friend of my daughter offered his apartment while he was away, and that gave us more room and comfort than her tiny room in an apartment in Washington Heights shared with three other gals. We talked late into the night, we made meals in his tiny corner kitchen on his gas stove, and when we exited his apartment to the friendly greetings of his doormen, we stepped out into a shower of soft white blossoms from a pair of apple trees.

The young people (close to or in their thirties) that were friends of my daughter were succeeding, they were working hard and achieving their dreams. I was proud of them, as if I was their mom.

We went to a fabulous Broadway show, both of us somewhat surprised that we pulled that off. It turns out that matinees in the middle of the week are quite affordable. It was an unusual show for Broadway, a musical, with no dialogue, and no real story from the album Illinoise, by Sufjan Stevens performed live by musicians on the stage and interpreted by dancers.

I listen to Stevens, who doesn’t? He is an amazing song writer, and it seems from the makeup of the audience, that he especially speaks for millennials. A young woman who came to the show by herself and sat beside me, shook with weeping during the song about the girl who dies from cancer.

My daughter cried too, but she said that she was emotional because she was recognizing how wonderful it was for these young dancers and musicians and singers to be living their dream! And what a dream, to perform on Broadway, and here they were!

My daughter moved to New York by herself, and is building a career in narrative game writing. On her own, grafting and turning up every day. Her desire to live in New York was strong, and it was been proven right. She is like a plant that has been placed in just the right spot to thrive.

One day after wandering the streets in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge we popped into a café for a latte. Sometimes hot milk has an effect on my heart. It seems to melt away the defenses I have built, to survive.

I burst into tears and my daughter, the one who has been shepherding me through the busy streets like she was my mother, just told me, over and over, I love you.