ARTWORK BY ISSY WOOD

Shockingly, I find myself old enough to be an artifact of New York City’s history. From my current vantage point, I can scroll back through epochs of cultural time — the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and so on — like a dendrologist study- ing the rings of time marked on an ancient tree stump … except the rings are within me. I find myself turning into that old tree stump, that fossilized remnant.

In 1966, when I was born, my parents lived on St. Mark’s Place. The poet W.H. Auden and jazz legend Thelonious Monk lived on our block. My mother would sit at the window and watch Monk, in his signature porkpie hat, float by…