For those in the slow lane, the city’s rush is daunting

Over the last two months I have come to see a new New York -- and I’m not referring to the latest gentrified neighborhood. This is not just a place but a mental construct that reflects the strength and frailty of those who envision it.

And so when I was ailing recently, the city was redrawn in my mind, just the way it was when I had my heart broken and a certain bench in Central Park became a reminder of a bad breakup. Or after I had my children and remapped the city for accommodating diners that would let us use their restrooms.

Perspective is everything in New York. These past weeks I have come to understand that I hadn’t seen the New York of those who are ill or disabled or just fragile until I was forced by circumstances to struggle in their shoes.

Last week, I caught up with 74-year-old Camille De Frino walking downtown on Seventh Avenue to a senior center. Her pace was slow and deliberate, at times unsteady, yet she still jaywalked. She waited a few seconds on the curb but then instinctively dipped her cane into the street. There were no cars coming, and a lifetime of not thinking, not watching, just moving forward, propelled her to take the risk. She made it across the street, but she knew better.

“I should wait for the light,” she said looking up at me with a guilty smile, “but old habits are hard to give up.” As we continued on, she eyed the ground for curbs and crevices, and at the same time was alert to the precarious world around her -- a teenager biking on the sidewalk, children swarming out of a school.

Eight weeks ago I was like De Frino, a once-strong woman suddenly afraid of a strong wind. Some people say you have to have a hole in your head to live in this city and love it. I did and still do. A surgeon had burrowed through my head with a sharp instrument to remove a small tumor. It wasn’t life threatening and he was successful, but while I was recovering I had to redefine how to negotiate New York.

The novel “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” about a frantic working mother, took on new meaning two weeks after the surgery when I had to walk my son to school. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. Would I pass out after one block? What if my 11-year-old bumped into me or I tripped on his never-tied shoelaces as we were crossing Broadway? We made it to school that morning but I felt like I was walking through jello.

On the way home I literally ran into a friend with her two enormous golden retrievers on a leash. I was recovering against a parking meter when my friend, clearly trying to summon a smile, began mocking the mentality of the Manhattan sophisticate.

“People are going to hate you, Geraldine, because you look so thin. I can see it now: The New Brain Surgery Diet.”

Jenny had known the former me as someone who reveled in threading through traffic in the middle of the busy street or pushing a giant blue baby stroller in front of a yellow cab to get its attention. But now I was wan and wobbly, and she sensed it.

The experience of not being able-bodied left me with a new appreciation of the people I see every day in New York who are vulnerable to the hardest edges of this hard-edged place. After living here awhile, you stop noticing the little old man inching along the sidewalk with a walker or an amputee hobbling on crutches down the subway steps. You’re too self-absorbed or in a hurry. But then one day the power is knocked out of you and you suffer it all.

Richard Cohen, a former television producer and relentless New Yorker, recently published a memoir about coping with chronic disease, in his case multiple sclerosis and near blindness: “Writing about my travels above -- and below -- ground in this great city sounds like a complaint list. That it is not. Adventure is great and this is just how my life goes.”

My determination to get my son to school that day was nothing compared to what I saw in Camille De Frino the other morning. For a few hours I forced myself back into slow motion to take life at her speed.

De Frino has lived in Manhattan her whole life, mostly in a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, and worked 48 years at the Butterick and Vogue patterns company. Not long after retiring, she moved into a building with an elevator.

Her life now revolves around her circle of girlfriends -- Joy and Josephine and Millie and Charlotte -- none of them particularly healthy but all determined to enjoy the bounty of New York. Imagine the female solidarity in “Sex and the City” but fast-forward 40 years. They talk by phone several times a week, meet at the movies on weekends, then each sets off in a different direction toward home by bus, subway or on foot.

Small but sturdy, De Frino has gray hair that is cropped short and sprayed firmly into place. She started relying on a cane only a few months ago to keep from stumbling and embarrassing herself after she was diagnosed with vertigo. With no self-pity she continued with her life, making adjustments for the dizziness. She now always stops in front of an opening to a parking garage: “Cars suddenly appear and I can’t get out of the way as fast as I used to,” she says. “I’m more cautious.”

The other day, she wore soft, red suede loafers and a pocketbook slung close to her chest, freeing one hand to hold a plastic bag containing her lunch and the other for the cane. When De Frino tired or was afraid of fumbling, she did not immediately hop in a taxi, like I would have after my surgery. Rather, she paused, took a deep breath and recalibrated before going on.

It’s harder to relate these days to the valiant struggles of New Yorkers like Camille De Frino now that I’m darting through traffic again and throwing my backpack between the subway doors to keep them from closing.

But the same things that make New York exciting and edgy can also make it daunting and dangerous, depending on whose shoes you’re wearing, whether they’re Camille’s red loafers or my black high-button boots. The city allows each of us a kind of single-mindedness, until it rudely awakens us.