By Herbert Hadad

But when I made my way back up Summer Street and across the Common toward the Joy Court garret where she and I had spent so much time together, something awful happened. I began to feel as though every internal organ had been yanked out of my body and only my skin and bones were walking up Beacon Hill.

I suddenly realized my days in Boston, a city I knew and loved, were numbered.

It wasn't just my girlfriend's leaving. At the age of twenty-eight, I'd felt for some time I belonged elsewhere. As good as Boston had been to me, another city was exerting a mysterious gravitational pull. My birthplace, New York City.

When I was four, my family moved to Massachusetts from Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan. I grew up in Dorchester and Roxbury at midcentury, a place and time rich with characters and events.

I earned a degree at Northeastern after five years of instruction. I spent twelve months as a semiprofessional prizefighter. I worked for four years as a Boston Globe copy boy, four more as a Globe reporter. I had parents and siblings, a handful of friends, and a regular watering hole at Beacon and Mass. Ave. called the Zebra Lounge.

And I was lonely.

New York seemed like The Big Time, the home where I ought to be.

Several months later, I stood in the Greenwich Village real estate office of Selena Godot. When the receptionist asked me what I wanted, naturally I said, "I'm waiting for Godot." Too bad she'd heard that one too many times to laugh.

Selena soon found me a ground-floor studio in a little brick house behind an apartment building on Sullivan Street. I quickly made a little patch of hard-packed ground my own by planting a row of daffodils.

Yet when you move, I found, you take your cares with you. In the beginning, New York was not the exciting miracle I'd dreamt about in Boston. There were days when I spoke only to tourists: "MacDougal Street? Go down two blocks, and take a left." I had entered the wilderness, as the Bible and the Quran say we must, in order to find our way.

Intuitively, New York still made sense to me. It was the Big Apple, the Center of the Universe. I planned to write my way to fame, friends, and riches.

At first, the only story I sold was to the Boston Globe, my old employer, about a tense New York girding itself in anticipation of some race riots that never came.

I signed on as a reporter with a weekly paper called the Gasoline Retailer, which covered the service station industry. As time went on, though, I couldn't stand the thought of writing about tires and batteries anymore and answered a blind classified ad I saw in the New York Times. Because I was young and impudent, I said in my cover letter that I wanted to get out of my current job because my boss resembled a fish.

Unfortunately, it turned out the organization that had placed the want ad was none other than the Gasoline Retailer. Worse, my letter with the piscatorial insult was read by Mr. Fish himself. Remarkably, he overlooked the reference and even gave me a raise to keep me in his net.

Little by little, I was getting comfortable in Gotham. Ascending subway stairs, I no longer needed to locate the Empire State Building on the skyline to know which way was uptown and which downtown. I learned the Greenwich Village byways, had a favorite tavern where they played Dixieland on Monday evenings, and saw a girlfriend or two.

A big public relations agency hired me, a job that gave me a new social life and the opportunity to travel to cities I otherwise would never have seen.

I made frequent trips to Boston, which filled me with nostalgia and melancholy. I still wasn't entirely sure whether moving had been the right decision. I loved Boston's manageability; you could go anywhere easily, and never get lost. The Public Garden always looked so inviting. Storrow Drive by the Charles was far more beautiful than FDR Drive on the East River. Filene's Basement at Washington and Summer was ten times more fun than Macy's in Herald Square. The pizza on Hanover Street was as good as, maybe better than, the pizza in the Village.

Through the PR agency, I went to work with the people behind the scenes at Sesame Street. Everyone there was super-talented and fun, and they embraced me as one of their own. The camaraderie was so strong we even vacationed together, in Woodstock, New York, and in Maine.

Eventually, I became a speechwriter for the show's founder. When she and I traveled to Boston for an appearance, we stayed at the Ritz-Carlton. Looking out the window at the Public Garden, I realized I was seeing it for the first time with the eyes of a tourist. Not only was I a New Yorker, I felt like a New Yorker on the cutting edge.

Those glittering days were exciting, but maturity, marriage, and fatherhood prompted a retreat to the suburbs, and I began recording the pleasures of this new kind of life in essays. The New York Times published many of them. They also asked me to be a reporter. It was fun to pick up the phone and say, "This is Herb Hadad of the New York Times," which I did for ten years, writing more than three hundred pieces for them.

Today, my day job is in the press bureau of one of the U.S. Department of Justice's New York offices, and I still freelance the occasional piece for the Times.

My three children were born in New York. Though they are very fond of Boston, they lead vivid professional and social lives as Manhattan residents. They show no signs of craving a new environment, or not feeling at home in their hometown.

Their grandparents, on the other hand, always felt divided loyalties. After we settled in Dorchester, my parents continued to live in two worlds, or, at least, two cities. When we moved from New York, there was my sister and me. My dad called me his "Latin from Manhattan." But he also wanted "a proper Bostonian," he told my mother, and so our brother, Alvin, was born.

On Sunday, my parents would send me to the drugstore at Morton and Blue Hill to fetch the New York Daily News. I'd curl up with Dad while he read the paper and laughed at the Katzenjammer Kids in the comics. "Nutsy-wutsy," he would say, transported back to New York for an hour.

Thinking about it now, I don't believe I ever decided to prefer New York over Boston, anymore than I decided which women to fall in love with. Sure, my parents introduced me to the wonders of being in New York when I was small, but that doesn't explain why I was so drawn to living there myself.

I have almost no memories from my first four years in New York, save one cab ride and the gift of a large toy hook-and-ladder fire truck. Boston was where I was formed. Yet New York was what I craved. This seemed to happen several steps beyond the realm of conscious choice.

Many attachments are formed this way. Consider the most inexplicable passion of them all: baseball. On special occasions, my children take me to the Bronx when the Yankees play the Red Sox. I jump up and punch the air and howl when the Yankees hit a home run. After the game, we all repair to a tavern, where Dad springs for drinks and snacks.

Strangely, the home team has won every game I've seen at Yankee Stadium. Later, though, on the train ride home alone or in the middle of the night, I realize I feel pangs of sympathy and affection for the visitors.

New York has become my true love. But no one ever really forgets his first love.

Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and award-winning writer, says that when he strikes it rich he's buying apartments facing Central Park and the Boston Common.