Boom-klacka-lacka Boom Klacka-lacka Boom BOOM… the drum beat of train wheels on tracks blends with the roar of subway lines running above ours and the woosh of air forced through tubes plays our hair like violin strings. I open my eyes from listening hard to see Hannah’s sparkling in front of mine, “The subway plays music, Mom!” “The whole city does,” I reply, and I can see that she hears it too. She’s too much like me.

It was a weekend of firsts:

• First visit to NYC for Becca & Sophia
• First up close look at the Statue of Liberty
• First visit to The Met
• First “girls weekend” for Hannah and ‘Phia
• First sleepover at the Grimes’ for the boys

Everyone had fun.

I’m known to say that NYC is my favourite place I never wanted to go. Nothing about the madness of that city appealed to me, until I went for the first time and promptly fell in love.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to live there for more than a few months. The constant motion, the unending noise, the perpetual overstimulation of the senses is not something I could keep up with forever. In fact, by day three I’m usually longing for some quiet.

But, there’s something about stepping off of the train with a hundred strangers, emerging on the street level and inhaling the world in a way that only happens in a handful of major cities.

It’s intoxicating.

Just the knowledge that anything that’s “one in a million” happens ten times a day in NYC is brain overload. I simultaneously want to swim in it and run screaming in the other direction. It’s the dichotomy that is so enchanting.

I sat on a pile of leather pillows and visited with a Pakistani man while Becca & Phia chose “I love NY” T-shirts to take home.

It’s always a good day when I can bust out my handful of Arabic words.

We swapped stories about what we missed from the Muslim world and my new friend suggested that Tony ought to marry Becca too; I laughed. “What?” He asked, “This is a good thing. This is the strength of the family… if everyone gets along… in my culture, this is permissible, this is good for everyone.”  For just an instant we were on another continent. We nodded and smiled, paid for the shirts, exchanged “Salaam Alekums” and allowed ourselves to be swept back into the tide of 34th avenue near Time Square.

The highlight of the weekend, without question, was watching the girls. They’re fast friends and a weekend without brothers in NYC is the stuff teenage girl dreams are made of.

• They held hands and skipped.
• They giggled. They chattered non-stop through Central Park.
• They took pictures of every Degas ballerina they could lay eyes on in The Met.
• They disappeared like vapor into the American Museum of Natural History on their own and didn’t miss us for a second.
• They sipped tea and giggled some more at Alice’s Tea Cup on 73rd.
• They fell asleep in the back of the van, having had more fun than two girls have a right to.

These are the moments life is made of; they’ll never forget this weekend.

We rode the subway back toward the Port Authority Bus Station with aching backs and sore feet from the countless miles walked. ‘Phia watched, wide eyed, as the first transvestite she’d ever seen rolled his bicycle onto the train and sit down, muttering to himself, strung out on some aspect of a hard life. New York is nothing if not a rainbow of lives from every corner of the spectrum of human experience.

I laid my head back and listened to the music of the rails drummed the stories of a thousand ghosts into the ether and thought of the thousands of people who’ve ridden the trains for decades before me. I strained to hear the echos of the millions of lives breathing the same air, hearts beating toward the same goals and minds reaching for the same dreams that Lady Liberty promised to the first immigrants who made their way to these shores. The people who struggled hard to build lives so that we’d have something to build our lives upon decades later. It’s the people that make the music of a city, and the bass notes resonate generations deep.