Creative Aging: Where Did My Big Apple Go?

Editor’s note: Eighth in a series

What New York City was for me from my 20s through my 60s is not what New York City is for me now in my early 70s. 

There was the fabled New York of the advertising business. In my 20s and 30s, there was no better excitement and sense of having professionally “arrived” than being dispatched from L.A., flying business class, to the New York office, working on a new business pitch in what was referred to as the Big Apple. I’d be an instant part of a creative team with big Madison Avenue names, the giants of the industry who were winning all the awards at the Clios and the One Show. I’d travel on an expense account staying at the then uber-hip Paramount Hotel and eating at Elaine’s where the creative crowd hung out waiting to see if Woody Allen would show up. Late night I’d be taken to the Carlyle hearing the famous Bobbie Short sing. And then at 1am, we’d head back to the office to continue the brainstorming, leaving at 5 a.m. to return by 10:30 a.m. And start all over. 

Then there was the New York of the Jewish world, the metropolis of Jewish leadership and ideas, of community evolution, its organizations and new foundations, of great meaning and planning for the Jewish people. Living on the West Coast, I was at its center, there every two weeks, as the owner of the largest communications and marketing agency at the time focused on the nonprofit world. There was the Upper West Side, the Jewish thinkers, the movers and shakers, the conferences, and the meetings we believed were so important. And there were the friends I was making with whom I passionately shared so much in common. There was the invisible bridge with constant traffic running back and forth between Israel and New York, between the new Jewish leaders of the former Soviet Union and New York, between the emerging new generation leaders of Western, Central and Eastern Europe and New York. And I got to play a part in it all. 

Today, I go to New York a few times a year. As a grandfather. One of our daughters lives in bucolic Maplewood, N.J., with her family, a 35-minute train ride into Manhattan. We fly into Newark. We now know New Jersey in a way I never anticipated in my New York years. We know its family attractions, its neighborhoods, its parks, and New Jersey transit. Once in a while when my wife and daughter are tied up, I do the very exciting grandfather thing and take my grandchildren alone on the train and transferring to the subway, to places like the Central Park Zoo, the Circle Line Tour, Katz’s Deli (you been to Katz’s, the mother of all Jewish delis). I know my way around. 

This week, I went to New York for several days, alone. I was meeting with one of my writing teachers. It was the first time I had been there by myself in years. I walked, according to the Health App on my iPhone, nearly 20,000 steps each day. I always loved walking in New York. I passed restaurant after restaurant where I had once eaten, hotel after hotel where I had once stayed, building after building where I had once sat in meetings, store after store where I shopped as a young husband and father to bring back gifts to my wife and kids from a business trip. I walked the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, Gramercy Park and Greenwich Village, past apartment buildings where friends and colleagues lived ans invited me to so many extraordinary Shabbat Dinners. I walked past apartments buildings where I had stayed in friends’ guest rooms, who have since died. I bumped into a former colleague now in her 80s who listed for me her ongoing activism in the Jewish world. But she asked me nothing. Colleagues, even ones with years of history, aren’t necessarily friends.

New York is a symbol of a past life. I consciously chose not to hold on, knowing when it was time to create another kind of life, a more appropriate one here in Los Angeles.

New York, I realized on this trip, is a symbol of a past life. I have aged out of that period. I consciously chose not to hold on, knowing when it was time to create another kind of life, a more appropriate one here in Los Angeles.  Literally in my backyard where I write six hours a day. I’m very proud I was capable of making this transition. I never thought about the strength it required, until this week walking around New York.

Gary Wexler woke up one morning and found he had morphed into an old Jewish guy.