home

Today I overcame my aversion to picking up the phone and called Robin. Actually she had called me yesterday, but I was on my way to Connecticut and far from cell phone towers, so we couldn't talk very well.
She's in Denver! For all of 24 hours, she's in Denver. The feeling of strangeness and discolation she described very well seemed so familiar, and it made me realize how far I myself have come from those days in mid-March when absolutely everything was new and baffling and to be honest, frightening. It also made me realize how quickly we construct little worlds anew for ourselves, take shelter in our homey little routines that we hasten to establish.
I did not value this enough in North Carolina until it was all taken away from me. (Well, let's be truthful, nobody took it away from me.) I thought I did, but I did not.
I am feeling particularly reflective at this moment not just because it's my birthday or because I just had a glass of wine, although those are good reasons too, but for the first time since we have moved to Brooklyn we went somewhere overnight and came back. It was just a short of trip of about 24 hours, up to see my parents in the wilds of Litchfield County, but it was enough to give me a sense of getting away, of noticing how everything has changed.
For a start, I have not been to Connecticut in April since....I don't know, 1984? Is that possible? Spring is such a subtle thing in New England, it creeps up very slowly; it is completely different from spring in North Carolina, which has all the subtlety of a brass band playing a Sousa march, which is not to say it isn't nice in its own way. The point is, that had become normal for me. Being here in the North again, I am redisovering an old normal, the one I used to know, and it's not only about spring, but about many other things. The light, the look of things, the way people talk. The old graveyards with stone walls, the birch trees, the little hills that run together.
I feel like this is home. How is that possible, when North Carolina had become my home, had been so precious to me? And what, anyway, do I mean by "this"? Brooklyn? Connecicut? The North in general?

Sic transit gloria mundi

If I am reading the truffle calendar right, Robin must be in transit. I find myself thinking of her and worrying for her, thinking how it must be, but somehow I can't pick up the phone. It's as if even if I did, even if I talked to her, it wouldn't help. She's in a place now where I can't get to her. She's in a special world of her own. She's in transit.
I have been thinking back to my own experience, to the crazy days before, during and after the actual move, and it really is like nothing so much as dying and being reborn. Not to sound melodramatic, but there it is. Ordinary concerns fall away and life is reduced to these strange but basic questions. Having no place to call home, even temporarily, is a very odd feeling. It is not for nothing that one of the basic myths of all cultures is about a journey. A journey that changes you forever, that calls on everything you have.
So I will just wish her the best, smooth sailing, happy trails, and all the rest of it. May the roads rise with her, and so on. And I hope to hear from her soon, from the Mile High City.

Jersey

We drove to New Jersey. And back! Via the Brooklyn Bridge, lower Manhattan and the Holland Tunnel. And lived to tell the tale. Do other people find driving in New York as confounding as I do? We seemed always just on the verge of making some horrible driving error -- a missed exit, the wrong lane change -- that would have led to disaster, but we never quite did. Indeed the NYC part of the trip went quite smoothly, all things considered. But when we exited the Holland Tunnel it seemed that we had gone the wrong way. We drove for miles on a crumbling divided highway through a lunar landscape of garbage and urban decay that did not have a single sign telling drivers what the road was. Concluding we were hopelessly lost, we took a special U-turn overpass that seemed designed for the hopelessly lost, and headed back the way we had come, determined to get it right. We passed the Holland Tunnel exit again and finally realized (since there was finally a sign) we were in fact, on the right road, now going the wrong direction. We had been right in the first place. Now we had to turn back again, not easy since we were again on a crumbling, divided higway and this time there were no special U-turn overpasses. The horror!
By some miracle, we retraced our path, found the proper highway, and all at once were in a new world, no longer a lunar landscape but suburban New Jersey, with subdivisions, shopping centers, flowering trees, office parks. Surreal after what we had been through. I felt like I was back in North Carolina. Sort of.
It seemed such a relief to get back to Brooklyn, however, where the parking gods smiled on us and we found a huge honkin' space, right in front of our apartment, on our first pass. And they don't clean the streets there until Friday!

Adventures in Parking

I remember my friend Ledra long ago saying that having a car in New York was like having a special-needs child. How true that is. Jarek took the train to Wassiac, near where my parents live and where we had left our one remaining car, drove it to Brooklyn (a nerve-racking adventure I had to miss) and parked it on the street, in readiness for a job interview in suburban New Jersey.
Unfortunately, he parked on one of the streets where it is illegal to park between 8:30 and 10 am on Mondays and Wednesdays.(For street cleaning, in which a special truck comes by and raises the dust along the curb.Why?) So Monday we hit the streets at 8:30 and started driving around and around, looking for a new parking spot. And did not find one. I finally parked in a metered space, 50 cents for an hour, quite reasonable, and resolved to return at 10 am to where I had been before. At 9:15 I looked out the window and noticed the street was already filling up, a street where one was not supposed to park until 10.

What did these other people know that I don't? Well, a lot, obviously, about parking. Perhaps the special dust-raising truck had already passed? I went out and drove back to where I had been, still empty except for a few people sitting in their parked cars. Following the lead of these other people, I parked. And sat. And sat, feeling silly. At 10, all the other people began leaving their cars, so I did too. We will need to use the car again Tueday, when we take it to NJ for a job interview, so all this was for a mere 24 hours of parking, and then the madness will start again. When you walk around the neighborhood, there is never a free spot. How do people manage all this without going crazy? Or are they all crazy?

look homeward, angel

Kathleen talks about fever dreams. Last night, I lived it. I got in bed at 9:30, thinking I would get out after an hour’s rest, and I didn’t get out. I was hot. I was cold. I was hot again. Somewhere in the middle of it, Steve called a couple of times, but I couldn’t tell you what he said. I remember nearly crying at one point because I was too cold to get out of bed and I had so much to do.
Finally, at 2:30, I woke up and realized I felt … fine. Like a baby bear’s porridge: Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. It occurred to me that I had already gotten a few hours sleep, so why couldn’t I just get up and pack a couple of boxes? But good sense, and my stiff achy joints, talked me out of it. I woke up at 7 a.m., convinced that if I didn’t get out right then I’d end up with bedsores. My getting out of bed was more of a dismount – I stumbled, did a little hop to avoid something in my way, and landed on my wobbly feet with my arms up.

Brooklyn sounds beautiful, and although I’m sad Kathleen is gone, I’m glad her new adventure is proving so wonderful. I knew it would. She should have no regrets. And just look at her prose: “enchanted, limpid quality.” Someone in Brooklyn, let this woman write something for you! Anything! She could make the phone book sound good! (And happy birthday in a couple of weeks, by the way.)

Today, on the phone with my mom, I started crying. She was surprisingly reassuring. “We’re all sad to see you go, but we’re just so proud of you, and we know you’re doing what you have to do,” she said.
I’m going to miss my mom so much.

Happy Birthday!!!

"Why candles?" objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. "In two weeks it will be the longest day of the year." She looked at us all radiantly. "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it."
--The Great Gatsby.

I feel Daisy Buchanan's pain on this one. I always watch for Robin's birthday and then miss it. Why should this year be any different? At least her husband remembers, that's the main thing.

Robin is measuring her life out in truffles. I know the sensation, minus truffles; the feeling that your days are numbered. (And it is not a large number.) That the days of the life you knew will soon run out, and some entirely different life, as yet unknown, will be starting. Oh yes. I've been there; that feeling is no stranger to me.

Happy Birthday, Robin! Happy trails in your new life! If no one else is happy for you, I will be happy for you. Soon this hell of moving will end, and you will be starting everything over. Settling in, learning new things. And it will be great.

Today I got home well before dark,a beautiful spring day in Brooklyn with dogwood and forsythia out, (but the nonflowering trees still leafless, wintery) and we walked up to the promenade on Brooklyn Heights. The light on the water, the view of Lady Libery and the Brooklyn Bridge! After turning off the promenade we strolled on Montague Street, the main commercial street in Brooklyn Heights, and I felt like I was in Paris, somehow, except that all the signs were in English. The old stone churches, the sidewalk cafes, the brownstones.... It had this enchanted, limpid quality, and it seemed that everything I gave up was worth it, that I had no regrets, just to be alive in this moment.

candy land

I am reduced now to measuring the days in truffles. For my birthday, Steve sent a box of chocolate and white chocolate truffles handmade by two English ladies in Denver. There were sixteen of them, one for each day until he returns home, we finish packing, and we move away. There are only five truffles until he returns; and after that, five non-truffle days until we all leave for the long trip. And so, naturally, in this busy time where I’m preparing for the mother of all yard sales, fixing things, painting things, packing things, each one of us has a spring bug. As I try to nurse two sick girls and a sick baby boy, I mostly fight the urge to sleep all day and try to shake the settled cold out of my joints.

My daughters, especially my younger one, are taking this move so hard. They don’t want to be away from Daddy, and they don’t want to leave. They want to go to the cool school with the planetarium – they just want it to be here, and they want all their friends to be in it.

My parents are also taking the move hard, and this for me is difficult. My father, with whom I have made so much progress in the past few years, now is withdrawn and sullen around me. My mother is in denial and makes a sad moaning noise when I mention it. It’s hard to get excited when nobody around me is excited for me.

On the other hand, I get better about the move with each passing day. I am sad when I think about what I leave behind; and even though I know I will be back to visit my family and friends, it will be like a puzzle with the occasional piece gone or moved to a different spot where it doesn’t seem to fit. You can go home, but you can’t expect it to be as it was before. Just as you move on, so does everything you leave behind.
But I have to think of that toward which I move – a great city, a great school for my children, a lovely house with a little yard, great resources for all of us to learn and grow and enjoy ourselves. And I think of us being together, which, after this dreadful separation, will be such a relief for all of us.

the persistant illusion

Every now and again I have this strange feeling that none of this is real. Particularly late at night, when I leave the relative calm of the office to step into the neon tumult and human clamour of Midtown to race for the subway home to Brooklyn, I have a distinct sense that I am dreaming, one of those feverish monotonous dreams where you know you are dreaming but somehow still cannot wake up. Except that eventually I will wake up again and find myself in Raleigh, and none of this will have happened. I will wake up again in my own bed, my own little stone house, Carolina sunshine streaming through the windows, birds singing outside. God, I'll say. That was weird: I dreamed I moved to New York! And it seemed so real!
What is reality anyway? Why does Raleigh seem so much more solid then Brooklyn? Why am I haunted by remembering absolutely everything? The way the light looked in the winter and the relentless humidity in the summer? How it was to go through the U-Scan at the Harris Teeter in Cameron Village and the route I walked with Garth every morning through our neighborhood? The view from my desk at work and the jokes I used to make with my co-workers?
When will all this -- the light on the river at sunset and the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and the screech of the subways -- start to seem real? When will it start to feel like my life, instead of some fever dream?

Light and air

The dog, who barks like mad whenever we leave, has had us under house arrest, but today we defied him and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A few stops on the 4 train and we were on the Upper East Side, another world from Cobble Hill. How can I describe it? A spring warm day, the light, the sense of spaciousness, the dog walkers heading for Central Park... "Can you smell the money?" Jarek asked. Yes. I could. In the museum, my work badge got us in for free, which seemed too good to be true even though I had been told about this. The "suggested donation" is $15, cheap if you consider all the art there, but it adds up. Now I can come whenever I want! Visit the Vermeers and leave again, if that is my wish!
We got lost (literally) in European Paintings, looking for Rembrandt but kept getting sidetracked, buttonholed really, by old friends like Memling and Goya and El Greco and Caravaggio. I kept thinking, I can't believe I actually live here and can visit these guys all the time. In some ways that is wonderful and perhaps in some ways it leads you to take things for granted. I remember standing in front of "Las Meninas" in the Prado for something like half an hour, knowing I would not come back to Madrid for many years, or maybe never, trying to remember every single thing about it, and it was a profound experience that haunts me still. Every single painting I saw today, and I saw some great ones, I thought, hey, I'll be back. That is probably a mistake. You should look at it every time like you will never see it again, because one day that will be true.
The Diane Arbus show was temporary, so maybe I looked closer at that. What an amazing talent she had. The works left me both awed and rather depressed; there is such a sense of desolation in every frame. How did she do it? Even the subjects who don't seem to have a perturbed look, like they've just lost something important, a tiny minority, seem myteriously doomed. And yet they are so beautiful, so strange.

go heels

Yes, it’s been years, it feels, since I wrote here. Nice to do it again. Like visiting an old friend, which is, in fact, what I’m doing.

Our alma mater, where I got my BA and Kathleen got her Master’s, is the national basketball champion as of Monday night. North Carolina is legendary in the annals of basketball insanity. Every year, in Chapel Hill or in a nearby city where a more evil, Blue Devilish team lives, someone gets burned by a bonfire set in the throes of post-victory glee. So much so that “Don’t step in any fires” is a flippant but well-considered piece of post-game advice (along the lines of “Don’t eat yellow snow”).
The last time UNC won the championship, I was a junior in college. I was miserably sick with a cold, and the game was the first time I had left the bed in two days. I was supposed to go to the Smith Center to watch the game with three old friends from high school, but I felt so lousy, I talked them into coming to my apartment afterward instead. After the win, my favorite cousin (also a UNC student) phoned, and my friends never showed up – they got lost and drove around for hours.
How times have changed. I’ve completely lost touch with one of those friends, another is married with kids, and the other one is also married now – to me.
The only thing that hasn’t changed is that Monday night, the first person I called was my favorite cousin. He was in the Smith Center, watching the game with his old college roommate. Stranger to return, however briefly, to this collegiate time warp than it was to contemplate the differences.

Although Carolina has an alumni association in Denver, it won’t be the same there. Steve said, “Do you know how many people here are talking about basketball here? None!” Indeed, the only stories about colleges I read in the Denver papers are academic controversies. Academics? In college? Feh.

I am excited to report that we now have a forwarding address. Our house is lovely, with brick-exposed walls in the living room, a renovated kitchen, a loft office and bedroom, shade trees, and all the rest. I feel like we stole Kathleen’s house, grew it by double, and moved it 2,000 miles west.
We will be smack in Denver, not in a suburb thirty miles away as we are now. We will be within a mile of the kids’ school, Whole Foods, two other grocery stores, two independent pharmacies, three independent bookstores, an art-house video store … the list goes on and on. The kids’ school has a planetarium and Montessori-style education. There are bike trails that start nearby and run all the way to the mountains. We plan to get Vespas. I’m already in touch with a business contact, trying to lay the groundwork to get some bread rolling into this fantastic house. I’m floating. Twelve more days.

And as such, the goodbyes have started. This weekend was my birthday and also the birthday of my daughters’ best friend. She also is herself the daughter of my widowed friend, the one I hate to leave. So in an effort for all of us to celebrate and shake off our sadness, we had an old-fashioned slumber party complete with pizza, videos and bunny slippers (and wine after the kids were in bed). We stayed up until way past our bedtime. And when it was time to leave in the morning, nobody cried, at least not until we were on the road.

So far away, so close

Where's Robin? She must be very busy. Robin, please send news.
So. It's finally springlike here: Today the streets of Brooklyn were alive with sidewalk cafe diners, people pushing baby carriages, children playing, a man painting a streetscape on the corner near my home. The city suddenly seems smellier, less gloomy and gray.
A Chinese food deliveryman here disappeared a few days ago after taking an order to an off-duty policeman in a gloomy, high-rise apartment complex in the Bronx. His bicycle was still chained up outside, but he had vanished without a trace. It seemed most likely that someone had robbed and killed him; I was constructing elaborate conspiracy theories involving Triad gangs and crooked NY cops. But today he was found in a malfunctioning elevator, dehydrated but otherwise OK. In the meantime all sorts of details had emerged about his life. He was illegal and had already, in two years of delivering food, paid off his $60,000 smuggling fee. I wonder whether immigration will now send him back to China. It seems a cruel fate after everything he's been through, but I suppose they will feel that he needs to be made an example of. I wish I were an eccentric billionaire and I could read a story like that in the paper and simply pick up the phone and become the man's benefactor. It also made me think of how strange life is, that the thing you are looking for all over the place is most often right in front of you, if you have the wit to see it.
But this is supposed to be a blog about life in New York and the experience of moving, and I am drifting off course. Hmm. Today I went to the NY dmv. I was prepared for anything, so perhaps it wasn't as bad as expected. The office is located in a sort of a shopping mall where a tangle of large, pedestrian-unfriendly streets come together. The long line of people waiting seemed sent from central casting to demonstrate the ethnic diversity of Brooklyn. I have also never seen a security guard at a dmv office, though his function seemed more ceremonial than anything else. An annoyed man shouting loudly about his documents was the most tense things got there during my expensive two-hour visit. Now we must somehow get the car photographed (Insurance requires this. You would think for what we are paying for insurance that someone could go to Connecticut, where the car still is, and shoot it for us. But nooo.) and inspected. More money. And why do we have a car? A car is an easy thing to get rid of, as I learned with my Camry, and a hard thing to replace. Right now it is more financial drain and pain in the butt than anything else. If Jarek gets a job in New Jersey, he may need a car. If we can overcome our fear of the BQE we can load the dog in the car and take him to my parents' for the weekend. Or go upstate. Or go to Maine. How I would love to go to Maine....
I was talking to someone I met at work who lives in Washington Heights and owns a car. It's horrible, he said. You can't escape getting tickets, especially at first, before you figure out the alternate side of the street rules. And sometimes you get towed, and that's even worse. I asked why he bothered to own one at all. Freedom, he answered without hesitation. The feeling that you can go somewhere, even though I never have time.
In the end, isn't that what owning a car is about? Freedom. Or the illusion of freedom, which in this case is more like it.