green acres

I was born and raised in the country -- not a country suburb, but really the country, far from highways, shopping malls, towns of any size. Although we were 2.5 hours' drive from New York (or "the city" as people there called it, as if there were only one) I went there exactly once as a child. It wasn't a place my parents knew about or liked; there was nothing there to attract them. Nonetheless it had an enormous allure for me as a child. I loved stories like "Harriet the Spy" and "The Saturdays" and "Catcher in the Rye"; I envied these fictional city children their urbane outlooks and endless adventures. It seemed to me that all of life, real life, was there. Though surrounded by trees and grass, and not entirely indifferent to nature (I had a thing for Thoreau, too) I mostly lived inside the world of books and my own imagination, and I dreamed of a time when I, too, could live in the city and start real life.
When I was 18, my dreams came true: my parents loaded up the car and took me and my stuff to Barnard to begin my college career. I only now realize how much this must have cost them, not just in money but in worry; why couldn't I be like other people's children; why couldn't I go somewhere civilized like Middlebury or Smith? But they never complained, at least not much, as they undertook what to them must have been the deeply terrifying drive through the Bronx and Harlem to Morningside Heights, to leave me in the wicked city.
I would like to say I took to it immediately, but that is not true. I was overwhelmed and intimidated by the noise and the clamor and the vast strangeness of everything: the smells, the panhandlers, the subways, the strange foods. Living in a dorm on campus and going to school, of course I did not have to deal with many of the most difficult things about life in a city, and yet I would still say it took me a year before I began to feel at home. Before I began to really like it.
Once I began to like it, I loved it. After the first year I lived in college housing that was an apartment, six blocks south of campus. I loved the walk to school every morning, all the teeming life I saw, the stopping to get coffee and drinking it on the steps at Low Library, the walks I would take with friends around the Upper West Side or farther afield. I loved it, and then I graduated, could not find a job, lived precariously subletting a friend's studio apartment on Jane Street, wandering the city that summer, wondering what I would do. And then I found a job, on the other side of the world, and left New York, never suspecting I would not return for a very long time.
So long that I seem a different person now, one who has to get used to the city all over again. And the city is different too; less menancing, but far more expensive.
Last time it took a year to adjust. I wondered when I got here how long it would take this time. And how do you know, when you are adjusted?
Five and a half months here, in some ways, it is already happening, though I would not say the process is complete. Life in the city is a big thing to get used to. Yet I cannot say that I wish myself back in Raleigh. Sometimes I go to Connecticut, to the same house where I grew up reading "Harriet the Spy" and dreaming of city life. It's a wonderful change to be someplace so quiet and calm. The country is full of trees, and the air smells wonderful. I love seeing the stars and fireflies, cows and wild turkeys. Nonetheless I feel isolated and a bit unsettled, out of my element. When I get back in Brooklyn I feel I am home.

Is it possible that Robin has not given herself enough time to adjust? Is she giving up on her dream too soon?

life ain't nothin' but a funny, funny riddle

Once upon a time, I was just dying to live in a city. Right smack in the middle of a city, in the middle of hubbub – a place where I could walk to shopping and conveniences, where entertainment was within easy reach, a place that teemed with cool. At the time I lived in my country house, on my acre of land on the pond, where white herons stopped to fish and turtles sunned themselves on the log near our pier, where the ducks and geese woke me each morning. And, alas, where you had to drive 15 miles to the nearest decent grocery store, where my children were plied routinely with Little Debbie snacks at school, and where we sometimes went to bed by the sound of gunshots.

I have my city life now. Say what you want about Denver (Lance Armstrong’s in town! Film at 10!), but it does exude cool. Picture this: a lithe woman in a tank top and cutoffs, with oversized goggles a la “Snoopy,” riding a Vespa with a dog in the sidecar. Only in Denver. On the first day of school, one of my daughter’s first-grade classmates came in with hair dyed green. At the King Soopers (which you East Coasters know at Kroger) a few blocks away, I’ve seen studly firemen who remind me of “Arrested Development’s” hot cops stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a lollipop-sucking man in silk pajama pants, oversized sunglasses, white-blonde hair, and a too-small T-shirt that said “Sugar Daddy.” It wouldn’t happen in Smithfield.

But what I didn’t think about in this quest for city yin was the inevitable yang: The noise and smog. Our bedroom window sits about 10 feet from a singles apartment complex with no air conditioning, and on summer nights when the windows are open, it sounds like the San Fernando Valley over there. Honestly, you have to be trying to have sex that loud. And because the mountains shield the city, the pollution of the Front Range pools here. One of my daughters is asthmatic yet outdoorsy; and it’s hard to tell her that no, we can’t go to the pool or play in the park because the air is thick and dirty, like a roux mopped off a busy floor.
After much soul-searching and discussion we have decided to investigate, of all things, a country suburb – only 20 minutes from the city but where you can have more space at a more affordable price, where there are good schools, where you can have horses and chickens if you want them. Where you can drive a few minutes to play in healthier mountain air, and where the only people we will hear having sex will be us.

I know, I get what I want, then I never want it again.

Big, bigger, biggest

Although I knew, duh, that New York was the largest U.S. city, I did not realize until I got here and started paying attention quite how much it towers over the competition. The next largest, L.A., is not even half its size in terms of population. Brooklyn alone has a larger population than all the U.S. cities except L.A. and Chicago.
It's sort of mind-boggling, the vastness of this city, and yet most of the time I don't think about it all. (Except when we have to drive through it on the way to Connecticut, when it seems vast, annoying and even frightening: the dreaded BQE through Williamsburg and Queens; the Triborough Bridge, the endless Bronx. When we hit the Hutchison State Parkway, which marks the start of Westchester County and the end of New York City, I always feel like the journey is, essentially, over, even though there are two more hours to go.) Most of the time my world is work, in Midtown, and the enclave of Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights. Of course we go places sometimes: to Coney Island for the bracing sea air, or the Upper East Side for the museums, or to Lower Manhattan to see a movie or to walk around looking at the cast-iron buildings in SoHo. But you can't take this city in in its entirety -- no one possibly could, except maybe Robert Moses.
When I first got to New York, the town was still in the running for the 2012 Olympics. Most people's reaction seened to be, Aren't there enough people, traffic jams and worries about terrorism in this town already? And we want to have an Olympics? And to me that sums up New York perfectly. Not the city that never sleeps, but the city that is too big to give a damn.

a cowtown crisis

As cities go, Raleigh had a Napoleon complex: small, but it wanted to be bigger. To that end, it acted big – it courted professional sports, it courted major theater productions, it courted big retail outlets. And it got them, because its leaders really wanted it to grow and believed it had the potential to run with the big dogs.

In contrast, Denver is past the “courting” phase. We have all that stuff (but still no Sephora!), but the city must have grown quickly, before it could shake its quaint small-town naïvete. The dairy delivers our milk twice a week in the icebox on my front porch. (In true Denver-lefty fashion, the dairy only produces milk that is free of growth hormones and additives.) And when Oprah came to Denver for something or other, one of the local anchors, looking starstruck, interviewed her and made it into an hourlong special! Something tells me that WNYC doesn’t jigger its programming around when Oprah comes to town. Hey, we’re big enough for a Grammy winner to get shot here. (Which was in a safe, touristy, well-traveled part of town – like getting shot in the middle of “new” Times Square on a weekend night – so it was pretty shocking.)
Finally, in addition to having two large daily morning papers, we have a little community paper that delivers to about 10 neighborhoods on this side of town. I’m pretty sure the editorial staff went to the 1940s newsreel school of journalism. The main headline in this month’s edition was “Girl Bandits Terrorize Colorado Boulevard.” Throughout the article, the writer (who is uncredited) calls them “female desperadoes” and such. After more breathless puffery, the piece concludes with: “A massive man (girl) hunt is on for the elusive Ms. Drake.” Oh, please. The Smithfield Herald was far more professional.
This is a legitimate city. Wikipedia (if you consider that a legitimate source) says Denver is the 25th largest city in the United States (Raleigh is 55th; New York is, of course, 24 spots above Denver).* I feel like someone needs to grab this overgrown cowtown by its bolo tie and lariat-embroidered lapels and tell it that it's more than the sum of its omelets and boots.

* I am shocked to see that Austin, Texas (which was nearly our home), and Indianapolis are both larger than Denver. Charlotte, too. And I’m surprised that Raleigh is larger than Tampa, Cincinnati and Orlando. Wikipedia swears this is legitimate – it says this comes from the 2004 Census figures. Huh.

The fire next time

I searched my mind for an anecdote that could possibly match -- or even complement -- Robin's Dumpster fire, and came up empty-handed. Nothing that exciting has happened in New York, at least not that I was a witness to. But yesterday when I was walking the dog on one of my favorite Cobble Hill streets, enjoying the late afternoon light on the brownstones and a faint wind off the water, I noticed a group of people standing around, seemingly aimlessly, on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. It was a curious configuration, one I had not seen before. They did not seem to be waiting in line for anything, or socializing, or browsing at a stoop sale (Brooklyn's equilvalent of the yard sale). What, in fact, were they doing? As I got closer, I got a glimpse, between the parked cars, of a man lying on the sidewalk. Since the crowd did not seem violent in any way, I surmised he must have just collapsed, not been punched. One woman, on the other side from the collapsed man of the knot of people, was walking in tight circles and talking on her cell phone in nervous, clipped tones, apparently getting instructions from the emgergency dispatcher. She seemed to have taken charge of the affair, and the others were just hanging around, waiting to see how it would end, transfixed by the randomness of the thing. One moment you are walking down the street, enjoying a beautiful summer afternoon, and the next....
I kept going, resisting the urge to cross the street and join the curious throng, so I can't say I know how it ended. But I was reminded of one day years ago, a hot day in March in Raleigh when Robin came over to see me and we took a walk around my neighborhood with the beagle I had temporary custody of. We were walking up a street close to my home when we saw a man collapse in his front yard. He had been using some noisy power tool -- a lawn mower, perhaps, or a leaf blower -- and I remember we walked by just at the moment he fell over. Soundlessly, it seemed, though perhaps he made a sound that was drowned out by the roar of the motor. We looked at each other in some disbelief, and then walked up onto the lawn and to his supine form. He did not look good, but we were not sure what to do. As I recall it, Robin went to the door of the house and started pounding on it while I stayed with the man, feelig stupid for not knowing CPR. Why couldn't someone more useful have happened by, instead of us? Inside, the man's wife called 911 and a fire truck noisily arrived, drawing the attention of several worried neighbors, but there was no sign of the ambulance. We waited, not knowing what to do, not wanting to leave and not wanting to stay. Finally,the ambulance arrived, and we left. I remember that afternoon we were both working at the paper, where we read the man's obituary.

"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."

James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"

denver is burning

We had a dumpster fire yesterday. There was the familiar knock at the back door -- the next-door neighbor boy, who is smitten with my two older, glamazon daughters. He stood there, dumbstruck. His mother walked up behind him. "Come outside!" she said, with animation and a sly smile on her face. "Bring the girls! You've got a great view!"
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I do know that she loves summer more than most children and has a mile-wide streak of mischief. So I grabbed my daughters and ran out the back gate, into our alley.
"Dumpster fire!" our neighbor said, and she jumped up and down, smiling and clapping her hands. “Isn’t this exciting? This is the most exciting thing that’s happened in our neighborhood all week!”
It was on fire, all right. The smoldering plastic hurt our lungs and drove the rest of the family inside. I stayed and watched. The flames crawled up the wooden pole and threatened the power and phone lines. Before they could do any damage, a fire truck raced down The Nicest Alley In Denver (as everyone here calls it – it’s lit, and I’ve never once seen a rat) and put the thing out. The extinguishers blew brown, dirty smoke through the air and made the neighbor boy cough and gag. The firefighters took long sticks and poked through the Dumpster, trying to figure out what had been burning, and kept squirting stuff inside. Finally, they left. The pole is still black. The heat from the fire burned the outer coating off the Dumpster, so now it’s just a charred box. I’ll give it to my neighbor: It’s probably the most exciting thing that’s happened in the neighborhood all week.

i feel the drizzle of the rain, like a memory it falls

This is funny, the story about the dryer that vents inside. It reminds me of a house we had in North Carolina – our first one as a married couple, one that Kathleen probably remembers well. It was in the middle of oblivion. The directions went something like, “Go five miles down this country road, turn left, and then go five miles down THAT country road, then turn right and go five more miles …” And it was so flat, it made the sky look big, just as it looks here. Like a plains oasis in a hilly state.
The house sat at the front of a trailer park; our landlord was its owner. It was beautiful, built by hand in the 1940s by J.C. himself (the landlord, not the deity). It had the original tongue-in-groove interior walls; the original, perilous wiring that gave off smoky whiffs when the glass fuses blew, which was often; and a full front porch with a light that we never used. Robins built a nest in the light, and our last year there, the robins had chicks. I taped the light switch so nobody would make the fatal mistake of setting the nest (and our house) on fire. I watched the babies obsessively and listened for their mother to come for feedings. When the last chick left the nest, I cried. A month later, I was pregnant.
J.C., the landlord, was a talker. I dreaded his visits to the house because it meant he would tell the same boring story in circles, until afternoon turned to night. Although he looked about 300 years old, I think he was closer to 70 – crinkly, wrinkly skin weathered by years of sun. He mumbled like Jesse Helms. He always wore one of those trucker caps with the netting in the back and the huge bill in front, the ones that stand tall (this was long before Von Dutch made those cool again). And he kept trying to kill us. I’m thinking in particular of the dryer vent – one day, I looked outside and there was a plastic bag covering it. Each time I removed it, it reappeared a day later. But at least the dryer was in the mudroom, and I could close it off so the whole house didn’t get fuzzy.

I have missed that spacious mudroom since we’ve been here. We have one now, but it’s so wee, all I can get in there is our teeming recycling bins (they recycle everything here!) and our coats and shoes. We, too, have a creaky washer and dryer, which came with this house. I’m pretty sure it dates back to “Who Shot J.R.?” and “Pac-Man Fever.”

Here today, the rain is coming, and I can't wait. I don't think it's really, truly rained all summer, not since we had flash floods at the beginning of June. It threatens to rain about five times a week, but usually it evaporates before it hits the ground, which creates the unusual phenomenon of seeing it above you and never feeling it. When it does actually make it down, it's like taking a cold shower with a Water-Pik on its lowest setting -- spit spit spit -- and it lasts about 30 seconds. Those are the days when people around here whine, "It's so humid today." Weenies.
Water is such a scarce commodity here, it's hard to justify watering anything but ourselves, the flowerpots and the Sea Monkeys. I admire people who have lush summer lawns, but with a perpetual drought I just can't justify it. It's going to be cool tomorrow -- 68 for a high, with steady rain. Hold on for just another day, my gasping brown grass.

Time and Tide

This morning, doing laundry, I finished a 10.94-lb. box of Tide, the first one that we bought in Brooklyn. It must have been one of the very first household supplies purchased in those cold, dark, uncertain days in mid-March. As milestones go, this is not a particularly dramatic one, but it has a certain poignancy. Every time I do laundry now I mourn my wonderful front-loading washing machine, which got clothes very clean without destroying the fabric. In these respects, the opposite of the current washing machine, which probably dates from the days when Ed Koch was mayor of this town and Tom Wolfe wrote "Bonfire of the Vanities." Although I really shouldn't complain; it's unusual to have a washing machine of any kind in a nonluxury apartment in New York. We have a dryer, too, which we never use; it has the peculiar feature of not venting outside, so it fills the apartment with lint and hot air while drying clothes with a pititful slowness. The apartment's open layout, its 11-foot ceilings, pipes running along the ceiling at the 10-foot mark, and ceiling fan have proved perfect for drying clothes the old-fashioned way. In North Carolina I had a sleek, folding clothesline, made in Belgium; I miss that too, and the wonderful smell that the line-dried fabric took on, though I do not miss being eaten by mosquitoes while trying to hang up the laundry in the summer. I miss the peaceful backyard... oh, I miss so many things, it does no good to enumerate them. Taking a taxi home at 2 the other morning across the Brooklyn Bridge, I looked down at the East River and the magical view of lights reflecting on the water and realized there is no place I would have left North Carolina for, except here. Not Paris, not Rome, not San Francisco, not Tuscany nor Mongolia nor Montana nor Maine, nor any of the other places I have at times dreamed of living in. There is no other place that would have been worth what we gave up. I don't know if this is really true, but it seemed so at that moment.