“Small But Unforgettable Moments.” What E.B. White Loved About New York City

In 1955, E.B. White wrote, “The two moments when New York seems most desirable, when the splendor falls all round about and the city looks like a girl with leaves in her hair, are just as you are leaving and must say goodbye and just as you return and can say hello.” Over the years, my grandfather became increasingly adept at this, both the leaving and the returning, and thankfully the writing about it. In “Goodbye to 48th Street” it was about “dispersing the contents of this apartment” in Turtle Bay, and in “Once More to the Lake” it was revisiting Maine’s Belgrade Lakes where he summered as a boy. His fictional “Getting Away” featured “that feeling you get sometimes, between five and seven in the evening—you know, when you’re coming home and look down Thirteenth Street and see the funnels of a ship against a red sky. That’s kind of nice.” On his birthday in 1956, White had experienced an early-morning version of that scene in Brooklyn, when a military transport called the Upshur disgorged his son, Joel, along with Joel’s wife and two toddlers, back from US Army peacekeeping in Germany. (White’s secretary called the ship the Upstart , but my mother, prone to seasickness, called it the Upchuck .) My grandfather remembered, “I got so excited by the moving scene and the earliness of the day that I had to be led away to a stable bench by my stable wife…” He was a master at finding the exact words for these small but unforgettable moments, but he always considered himself “a non-poet who occasionally breaks into song.” He lived with one foot in New York and the other in Maine, but whichever state he was in, he felt that “to sail away from so intoxicating a place would be unbearable, even for a brief spell.” Yet sail away he did, so he could return, but also so he could write about it. He was able to connect the big events of the day with the dailiness of our lives in a way that stands the […]

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