I think I’m a little obsessed with the past or maybe just too nostalgic. I suppose here’s the part where I admonish myself for that but, well, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m just pointing it out because I’m about to do it again.

I wrote about my college graduation in this post that I wrote about my mother. I think about that graduation weekend every Memorial Day as the years since college keep piling up.

So, I already wrote about the day, when I hung out with my parents. But I didn’t write about what happened right after they left. The next day, we all went to New York to look for apartments.

I can’t recall my mood as we drove down. I’m sure it was, if not excited, then definitely hopeful. I was about to start my life in New York. And I didn’t always want to live in New York. I always pictured myself in Boston or San Francisco (actually I never really pictured myself in either place, I just thought that, like majoring in chemical engineering, it just kind of sounded like the right thing to want).

My friend Prince and I spent spring break of my junior and senior years road tripping together to whichever cities we felt like. One of them was Boston. We crashed with an alum of our fraternity in Cambridge and it was just cool. We went to Harvard Square and drank Samuel Adams, pretty standard Boston neophyte stuff.

Then we drove to New York and crashed in the NYU chapter of our fraternity. At the time, they had an amazing set up. They lived in a loft by Washington Square Park, right by the Shakespeare & Co. book store. (The fraternity loft is now NYU administration offices and Shakespeare & Co. is now a Foot Locker.)

New York felt claustrophobic. The streets felt narrow and every bar we went to was packed to the gills with people who didn’t care to acknowledge us. Us, two very cool young men in our fraternity windbreakers and baseball caps. We close down bars in Ithaca, NY, friends. Bars that stay open until one o’clock. We know how to party.

It wasn’t until winter break of my senior year of college that I really discovered New York. I went to a career fair in a hotel in midtown, then I hung out with my friend Jon and his brother Nick and Nick’s friends. Nick was (and is) a bass player and we hung out with his friends Fredrick, and actor, and Collin, a web developer. We went to see improv at Chicago City Limits and went to a party somewhere in the East Village.

It was that trip that solved the mystery of New York for me. It wasn’t the city, it was knowing where to go in the city. New York is huge, the beauty of it is making it small for yourself.

As we left that party in the East Village, Nick’s friend Frederick said, “I hope you move here, man!” It was a nice, throwaway thing to say to someone that you just met that night. But even before he said it, I had decided that, yeah, I was going to move to New York.

Through some miracle, I scored a consulting job (with an awful company that laid me off after two months but that’s another story) and set about moving to New York.

John, Raj, Byron, and I all headed down to New York to find apartments. When we got there, we got our first taste of New York real estate. We found out about brokers and guarantors who needed to be responsible for an entire year’s rent.

So, wait, just to be able to pay rent for a year, we have to pay you thousands of dollars first?

And the apartments all looked the same. They were small cookie cutter places with blonde wood floors. Each place had originally been a one bedroom but a wall had been put up in the living room to make it a two bedroom.

John’s older brother Todd let us crash in his Upper West Side apartment and hooked us up with other brokers for the next day.

Byron and I took a place on 82nd and York. John and Raj took a place in what the broker called “Upper Chelsea” on 8th Avenue, a block from Madison Square Garden and above Amadeus Pizza. I know this because I remember the building and this is the area where I’ve spent a significant amount of time over the last decade doing improv.

Our leases all started on July 1st. So, that’s my official New York anniversary. But each year when Memorial Day rolls around I always remember this pre-New York anniversary, where we were all just starting out. After our leases were up, we all moved on to different apartments and different lives.

There’s a picture that I don’t have at the moment but I need to find. It’s a picture that I took of myself while we were hunting for places. It was hot that day and it didn’t seem like we would find anything. I had a disposable Kodak camera on me and I took a selfie – and this was 1999, selfies were rare – because I needed to record for posterity just how pissed off I was.

I remember that picture, wherever it is. I still have enough hair to have bangs. My mouth is scrunched up into a scowl. And I’m so young looking that I can’t even really convey just how pissed off I am with my expression.

I think of that picture and the hot Manhattan day and the broker who literally stayed in her office while sending her little brother out with us to unlock doors so we could look around and decide that, yes, we’ll pay roughly five thousand dollars including the first, last, deposit, and broker fee just to get here and live in apartments that non New Yorkers will pity us for having. I think back and let the magic of nostalgia cloud my memory and think, man, that was a great trip.