We were sitting at a table on the sidewalk
just down from Union Square and the massive
shoe warehouses, the crowds of people watching
a troupe of street performers, and I was telling him
about the passage from Sophocles in which Oedipus
says it’s better never to have been born,
but that, if you can’t avoid being born (as who among us can),
it’s best quickly to return from whence you came.
I said there were times—not many, to be sure, but still—
I wondered whether Sophocles wasn’t right,
and Jason said he’d always hated that quote, that
it was ridiculous—“I mean, who wouldn’t choose all this,”
he said—making a sweep of the air with his hand,
meaning the mini crab cakes on the table
in front of us, served with a side of remoulade;
the greasy paper cone of hand-cut frites;
the two martinis, sweat beading their glasses—
his pomegranate and mine Bombay Sapphire
straight up with two pimentoed olives on a plastic sword—
which we could order more of if we wanted
(which just at that moment we very much wanted);
the way the shadows made patterns on the building
across the street, shadows which by this point
in the day were growing longer as the city came alive;
Union Square and the street performers I’d watched
who selected volunteers from the audience, lining them up
so that one of the performers in a neon spandex suit
could take a running leap and jump over them:
you might feel a bit cheapened and manipulated
by the display (the stains and tatters in the spandex),
but didn’t it feel good to be alive anyway?
And standing there, watching, one of the crowd,
who wouldn’t think of Whitman? who loved this city
and catalogued its riches and who, like Jason,
would also have hated that quote from Sophocles,
who was surely glad to have lived—as you were glad
he had lived—and played his part, the part,
he wrote, that is what we make it, as great as we like
or as small as we like, or both great and small,
saying that just as we feel when we look on the river and sky,
so he felt, and just as any of us is one
of a living crowd, so he was one of a crowd;
meaning that when we’d paid our check and gotten up
from the table and walked back through the streets,
or when we’d turned to say goodbye at the corner
of 14^th Street—none of which we could have done
had we never been born—it was better,
better to have been born.