an end to wishing

It was hot today, but turned cool at night, finally a feeling of fall. Riding home from work in a cab, as I do when I work late enough, looking out at the life of Chelsea drifting past as we went down 7th Avenue, I had a strange realization: I was happy. Not because of anything in particular that had happened; it had been an ordinary day, now winding down. I felt happy in general, like it was the new background color of my life, the new normal. It wasn't only that I was happy, in a quiet sort of way, but it seemed that I had stopped being afraid of certain things and worrying about them. About getting older, for example. It was not happening less slowly but it had ceased to concern me. About suddenly losing everything, about life passing me by. I had not only stopped thinking about these things, but I had failed to observe when I had stopped, like an bruise you forget to notice until one day it's gone. I felt at ease. I tried to remember: When had I felt like this before in my life? In college, it seemed. Surely I had been happy and at ease at other times, other places, since then, but it had always been -- or so it seemed at that moment -- somehow tenuous, as if it could all vanish at any moment.
It almost seemed to me all this time I was waiting for something to happen, I thought, as I paid the cab driver and got out. And now it had happened.
Could it really be that simple? Does geography change a person?
I was happy like this in college, but I was young then, and frankly, an idiot. A person I hardly recognize now and find little in to admire. I was not crazy enough to think moving back to New York would erase the years and take me back to the person I was then.
But something else has happened. I can't say yet exactly what. I have nothing left to wish for, and somehow that doesn't scare me.

only in Denver

Here's the kind of stuff that makes news here. Man, they love Lance in Denver.

Spotted today: a man in an old-fashioned stovepipe hat a la Abraham Lincoln, with jeans and a T-shirt, walking into Target. It's not so much a sense of wonder I get here sometimes as much as amused befuddlement. If Jerry Garcia ever had wanted to be mayor, I'm sure he could have gotten elected in Denver.

funny things you see in New York

This morning, talking a walk on the Brooklyn Promenade, I noticed what appeared to be a small new island at the base of Manhattan. Looking more closely, I realized it was a little tugboat pulling a large barge, on which several full-sized trees were standing upright. I watched as the tree-barge made its way slowly up the East River, past the South Street Seaport, bound for parts unknown. And I thought of all the strange things that you can see every day in New York, so much so that the extraordinary threatens to become the merely routine. I hope that never happens to me, that I can always keep the sense of wonder that I arrived with.
Like that day we were strolling around in the 50's and came to a break in the buildings where there was a little seating area and a large artifical waterfall, one story high and a building wide, just sitting there without any explanation, at least not one I noticed. We sat down at two of the little white chairs next to the waterfall, close enough that the street noises vanished and the spray gently wafted over us, and rested from our sweaty walk, amazed.
And what about all the toddlers and little children wearing camouflage and other military-inspired fashion? I have seen too much of this to dismiss it as a fluke, and in many cases the children are barely past babyhood, not at the stage of choosing their own outfits, so I have to ask, what do the parents intend by dressing their children, both boys and girls, like little soldiers? I imagined at first perhaps the fathers were off in Iraq and this was the family's way of maintaining a sartorial link. Then I thought perhaps it was some sort of ironic antiwar statement: here, W., is your next generation of cannon fodder in the War on Terror. Now I just watch and wonder, no longer trying to make sense of it.
A handwritten sign -- a note, really -- attached to an iron gate that closed off a weedy lot used as a private parking lot. "I used to feed the stray cats here and then I moved away," it read. "Is anyone still feeding them?" A single word, in a different handwriting: "Yes."

the long and winding road

Playboy magazine has called Colfax Street in Denver “the longest, wildest street in America.” It’s long, all right – 26 miles, which makes it the longest city street in the country. But wild? Well, kind of seedy in some parts; but like Denver itself, it’s all things to all people.
It’s an east-west road that actually goes through four cities – Golden, Lakewood, Denver, and Aurora. (I’ll save the bizarre “flowing grid” system of urban planning, which makes this place so confusing, for another day.) The western end of the road is near Lookout Mountain, where Wild West icon Buffalo Bill Cody is buried. Past Colfax, you have the sensational drive into the mountains or down into Morrison and Red Rocks Amphitheatre. But stay on Colfax, and you go past the very upscale Colorado Mills mall on the edge of Lakewood. It’s kind of like Triangle Town Center, with outparcels for high-falutin’ chain restaurants splattered helter-skelter all over the place. Like Denver, this stretch of road is a microcosm of everything west of the Mississippi. Looking for a bit of the old west? There’s a diner, complete with a fake horse on top, that offers “chuckwagon breakfasts” for a reasonable price. If the Southwest is more your thing, there’s plenty of adobe, Mexican restaurants, Spanish-tailored businesses, and stands on the side of the road selling “real ancho chilis from New Mexico.” Or if your idea of “Western” goes along the lines of “California hippie,” there’s Heads of State, which sells, um, alternative tobacco products; Vitamin Cottage, the natural food store; and a few herbalists and earth-goddess-type joints.
For you jingoistic “We’re number one” types, there’s a run-down hotel with a huge sign that says, “PROUDLY OWNED AND OPERATED BY AMERICANS.” There are a few strip clubs. You go right past the Colorado capital and the city offices of Aurora. It’s also home to Denver’s best record shops, music clubs, one great used bookstore, and several funky boutiques. Unfortunately, this is also the stretch where Colfax earns its reputation because, as everyone in Denver knows, this is where you go to buy smack. Or where you go to use smack. Or where you go to prostitute yourself for smack. Or where you go to die from using smack. As much as I love peeking into the shops during the day, I confess I’m way too much of a chicken to visit them at night.
Once you’re on the other side of Aurora, closer to Denver International Airport, the claustrophobic city detritus falls away, you look around, and you realize: Once you got into Aurora, this road was pretty flat. And now you can see that there’s just nothing around you. This is why, before it was known as the Mile High City, Denver was called the Queen City – because it was (and is) the largest city in the Great Plains. It’s easy to forget once you’re in town. But travel ten minutes or so east and you realize, this place is frickin’ flat, just an expanse of tan grass and blue sky. And then Colfax dumps you, without warning, onto Interstate 70. The End of the Road.

So, to sum up: Long, yes. Wild, well, OK, but obviously Playboy hasn’t visited Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville. Now, that’s wild.

things to do in denver when you're dead

I was thinking of this before I read Kathleen’s entry, the strangeness and separateness of New York and New Orleans. I think that’s why both cities tend to attract the creative masses. New York’s palpably alive. As I have (and I know this is unbelievable) NEVER BEEN THERE, my lingering perception of the city comes from Woody Allen.* The bookstore Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey visit in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” with its narrow passages and stacks of books to the ceiling, occupies a special place in my mind. I don’t know if Kathleen ever visited the music library in Hill Hall at UNC,** but it was similar, and I spent most of my study time there in its comfort.
And New Orleans, of course, has an energy and vibrance all its own. I speak in the present tense because it will again. I found that confluence of cultures so stimulating. I can’t wait now to go back. How many songs and books can you think of that are about, or mention, New York or New Orleans? I can think of a single line in a single book (albeit a classic, “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac) that mentions Denver: “Down in Denver,/Down in Denver,/All I did was die.”***

It’s not that it’s not stimulating. If you’re into the outdoors, or sports, or outdoor sports, you’ll never leave. But creativity … I don’t know why – you would think the mountain spires would inspire the greatest books, the sweetest songs, the wittiest films. But it’s so earnest and earthy, which makes it fine for living but makes artists feel maybe a little guilty if their work doesn’t include something about hemp or tolerance. Maybe it could be the subject of a Christopher Guest film parody, a la “A Mighty Wind.”

*One of my favorite old Woody Allen movies, “Sleeper,” was at least partly shot just outside Denver. The famous round house, where The Leader (and his nose) lived, is for sale. If you’ve got $5 mil, have a look at it.
** There is a UNC here – a University of Northern Colorado. It’s very frustrating to me to hear reports about UNC and not be able to figure out what they’re talking about.
*** Although that line did inspire a song by Warren Zevon and the name of the aforementioned movie. Kathleen knows I've been dying to use that. And there’s always “Rocky Mountain High.”

you know what it means, to miss new orleans?

New Orleans is more an idea than a place to me, yet it's a pretty powerful idea. I was there only once, in 1991. January. I went there by train from North Carolina, to meet a friend who was traveling on business. She had come all the way from Japan, so surely I could make it to New Orleans? I took the train because being unemployed I had much more time than money, and I seem to remember it took 24 hours -- is that even possible? It was evening when my housemate dropped me off at the amtrak station in Durham that would barely pass for a bus shelter in many towns. And night was falling again when the train pulled into New Orleans. (Someone had just come into the train compartment and said, "We've just started bombing Iraq." The first Persian Gulf War! How long ago it seems now, how innocent.)
I remember best the wonderful strangeness of New Orleans, how it was like nothing in my previous experience. It did not seem like America at all to me, with the strange tropical vegetation and the iron balconies, the excellent food and the eccentric graveyards and shotgun houses, the Louisiana accents and the French place names. It was a place I always meant to go back to and never did.
Another friend moved there about a month ago, to start a job at Tulane, and then I was sure I would go back. And then it was just a disaster scene on television, a place of unbelievable horror, something to avert your eyes from or watch in horrified fascination. Unreal city.
What made it real for me again was listening to NPR, the earnest reporters talking to survivors and refugees. I could hear it in their voices, their wonderful accents and odd turns of phrase, what never survives in newspaper accounts: the strangeness and vitality of that place, its refusal to be like other places despite the attempts to homogenize it and Disney-ify it. I seemed to hear in my head Louis Armstrong -- has any other American city named its airport after a musician? -- the muse of New Orleans, the man who told the world of his hometown's strange beauty, its joy and melancholy. (Though mostly at a safe remove actually from New Orleans, and that's part of the reality too.)

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

I think New Yorkers have had a specially strong reaction to the New Orleans disaster because of 9/11 (though perhaps that is just an illusion created by being here). Because they also know what it means to have the place they know and love turned into a strange, terrifying disaster zone, to have everything change in the blink of an eye. And because New York and New Orleans, as different as they are, share a common bond of strangeness, of not really being part of America, though for reasons that are for the most part, entirely different. And of being beloved by outsiders, who see in those two cities ... well, something. Something exotic and otherly and a little dangerous.

But Robin is right, every place has its ghosts. Littleton has its own cross to bear, a disaster perhaps less spectacular in terms of body count but unusually horrible in its own way. If you are inclined to believe unquiet spirits roam the earth anywhere, you have got to think it's there. (And in Poland! Where the unquiet spirits are practically coming through the windows. But Poland is another story, and one I don't have the energy to tell right now.)

ghosts

I found Kathleen’s entry moving. I, of course, remember the day well. My husband called me to give me the news while I was on my way to drop the girls off with our daycare provider, who happened to be a good friend of ours. She and her husband were from Long Island, and her brother lived in Brooklyn and still does (Kathleen, I’ll give you his name if you want – he’s a great person). He worked at the World Trade Center, on one of the floors that suffered a direct hit. He was on vacation. Talk about your guardian angels! He lost a good number of friends, though, and he was without a job, and it was a terrible time. When I got to my friend’s house, she was crying. “I just called Jimmy to make sure I could hear his voice,” she said. “I just keep thinking, what if he had been there? I could have lost him.” She has since lost her husband, and Jimmy was a rock during that miserable summer. What if he hadn’t been there to hold her up?

One of my most vivid images of September 11, 2001, is one that exists solely in my mind, and it came courtesy of Kathleen – or rather, her friend, who took a ferry into work each day. She told Kathleen about the cars she would see on the boat each day, cars that belonged to people who would never pick them up. I formed this vivid and painful image of riding into and out of the city on a ghost ship. What does it do to your mind, to begin and end your day with ghosts?

We have ghosts here in Denver too, of a different sort. I went to the Littleton Historical Museum recently. My girls love it there – they have a working 1860s farm that’s manned and run as a pioneer farm would be. I took the opportunity to tell the girls all about the show “Frontier House,” which I’m sure Kathleen will appreciate (she remembers my obsession with that show). But as I toured the museum’s indoor exhibits, I thought, “Why is there nothing about Columbine?”
Columbine High School still stands in Littleton, of course, and perfectly normal kids go in and out of there each day. The terrible school shooting could have happened anywhere; but the fact is, it happened here, and some aspect of it makes the news every day – kids dealing with residual trauma, lingering civil cases, kids who attend Columbine now going out of their way to extend their hands to those in need. People here will always talk about where they were when they found out about the shooting. Like the people of New York and New Orleans, the people of Denver know what it means to live with ghosts.

Unhappy Anniversaries

Almost forgotten amid the gloomy memories of this day, the four-years-since-everything-changed day, was the realization that it is exactly six months since we left Raleigh. March 11 was the day we walked out of our house forever, turned the key in the door and dropped it in the mailbox. The memory of that day seems both incredibly clear and somehow distant -- like something that happened to someone else, on another planet. This weekend we saw our former next-door neighbors, who were visiting New York. They told us about what had been happening on the street, about the new people who live in our house, about how they miss us. Seeing them was very wonderful -- for a moment it was as if we were back there, in that world that seems in retrospect so small, so green, so cozy. "We envy you a little," my neighbor said, "for taking such a bold step." I said I wasn't at all sure that they should. It's still quite unclear whether this was bold or crazy. Some days I feel like the stupidest person in the world. Like I threw away everything. Everything.

I thought, too, of the day four years ago. I remember it vividly too, in an odd, freeze-frame sort of way. How unreal it seemed at the time, and for a long time afterward. Today, we went to the Village on an errand, strolled around in the late afternoon torpor, the slanting sun hot on our necks. The East Village was packed with posers, so we walked north, aimlessly, up past Gramercy Park and up Lexington and then Park, a ghost town of shuttered offices, mostly, with here and there a sidewalk cafe, the bustle (a subdued, weekend bustle) of Grand Central Station. I tried to imagine how it must have been four years ago. A sort of shadowy impresson of that lay over my views of the normal scene, like a photographic double exposure, but perhaps it was only my imagination.

Six months. In the ordinary course of things, it can fly by. But this is the longest six months for me in many years. Sometimes I forget and all this seems ordinary, as if I had always been here, riding the subway, figuring out which items recycle, navigating my way through the new MoMa. As if the years I wasn't in New York were just a dream.

California dream

Yes. I can see Robin in California, even though my ideas about California come mainly from books and movies and a week I spent in San Francisco 15 year ago now. Not L.A., not anywhere in Southern California. There is a kind of quirkiness, a free-spirited quality and a concern for others about her that I associate with Northern California, with redwood forests and dramatic cliffs along the sea shrouded by fog. San Francisco. Organic farmstands and wine country and hybrid cars. I can see her there easily, living that life.

But it's just a dream. How can any normal person live in California these days? Real estate is so absurdly expensive that it makes even New York look cheap.
It's so nice here now, the fetid summer air giving way to gentle indian summer, and I walk around drunk with joy at the beauty of the streets, the old buildings and the things that they remember, the little architectural touches in each house, the funny things I overhear people on the street saying, the sidewalk restaurants. I think, I would happily stay here forever and never get tired of it. Except, of course, I can't afford it.Unless I win the lottery or the housing market collapses there is no way, even with jobs that pay fairly well, that we can buy an apartment. And I am not dreaming of a penthouse, or a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights or the West Village. I cannot afford 700 square feet in Cobble Hill.

The prices reflect the fact that lots of people find it nice here, feel they belong, just as I do. But I found myself wondering, why can't the market react and make more Brooklyns? If so many people want to live like this, why can't they? Why is new housing all faceless subdivisions? New Urbanism, sorry, is no match for the real thing.
And then I thought, Brooklyn is like that old-growth timber that was chopped down 150 years ago, fell to the bottom of lakes and rivers during transport, and is now being hauled to the surface at great trouble and expense because there is no wood like that in the world anymore today. The conditions that produced it no longer exist, any more than the conditions that produced Cobble Hill do.

Where you belong and what you can afford: two very different things. The solution, obviously, is to become very wealthy. Yet this isn't as simple as it sounds, or everyone would do it.

house and home

Kathleen writes so lovingly about New York, like it’s like falling in love every day. I knew Kathleen would love it, and I knew she would kick herself every day if she didn’t go. She exudes New York cool – in the way she dresses, in the way she thinks. I am reminded of another friend I loved in college (Eve, are you out there?), who told me, “When I see you, I think you belong in California, not in the South. When I think of me, I’m not sure where I belong.” She didn’t enjoy the South. She had moved to North Carolina from Philadelphia, enthralled by the idea of Southern charm; and instead, what she found was backstabbing, two-faced, faux-genteel sorority girls who turned her off the place altogether. “You’re not like that,” she would tell me. “I can’t believe you come from this place.”
She was the first person to whom I ever tried to defend my home, but it was no use. And when she left college – she graduated in three years, just so she could leave more quickly – guess where she went? New York City.

So, when I see Kathleen, I think she belongs in New York City, not in the South. When I think of me, I’m not sure where I belong. Was Eve right? Do I belong in California? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not in Denver. As we drove back last night through Wyoming and saw the Rocky Mountains to the west, it felt like another numbingly pretty piece of scenery, not like we had finally made it home. And when we finally got into the house and I checked the mail, and I saw yet more bills and a letter from my mom, I started crying and told my husband the only thing I wanted for Christmas this year was to go home.

Big Sky

How beautiful! I'm so envious! I, too, want to go where the West commences, gaze at the moon till I lose my senses, etc. New York has its own strange mysteries, especially as glimpsed from the back of a cab at 2:30 am, speeding down Fifth Avenue, but I am ready for some different mysteries.
When you cross the Brooklyn Bridge with the windows open you pass over the Fulton Fish Market and you can actually smell it, or you used to be able to. The fish market, which operated in the same location since 1838 or something, moved to the Bronx this summer. But maybe the smell remained. Something is always vanishing here, and yet strange vestiges of the past linger on, a stretch of Joralemon Street that still has cobbestones, here and there a little wooden house that time forgot.
When I want to feel part of something larger I go to the promendae. Here you can see an expanse of water and sky and Governors Island, Ellis Island, Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty, New Jersey, the cranes at Red Hook where they unload container ships, and of course Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Brige. A plaque informs us that Abraham Lincoln stood here and looked at the view. (He was impressed.) Of course, it looked a lot different when he was here, and in trying to imagine that I seem to see not so much the cityscape bfore me as the past in my mind's eye. There are boats in the water now: ferries to Staten Isand, water taxis, little sailboats, the Circle Line cruisers. But in Lincoln's time -- I try to imagine it: a forest of masts, wharf after wharf along the shore of Lower Manhattan. Fishing boats, ferry boats. No Brooklyn Brige. No skyscrapers. No helicopters.
And when I am dead as long as Lincoln, what will people stand here and look at? The stars over South Dakota looked the same to the settlers 150 years ago, to the Indians 1,500 years ago, and that's the enchantment of them. Here all is restlessness, change, ferment.

I’ve gone to look for America

If East vs. West feels like an international rift, then Wyoming and South Dakota might as well be the moon. I feel so insignificantly small in this stark, erosion-chiseled landscape, barely punctuated by a tree or spot of green. Amazing to think that in this country, where tremendous storms can destroy the lives of thousands of people, we are in a place that gets 100-degree heat, minus-20 cold, and scant rain (save for 60 to 100 inches of rain a year, plus a brief rainy season in spring).

“Now I understand the expression ‘dotting the landscape,’ ” my husband said. “Look! There are cows dotting the landscape.” There were. Huge black cows that, against the distance on golden hills, looked like dirt specks. At a wild horse sanctuary, we petted young mustang colts (the baby hugged them). And we saw Mount Rushmore because, well, when you’re in the Black Hills … Sadly, we will be unable to make the Corn Palace on this trip, but we should be able to go to the almost-equally legendary tourist trap Wall Drug.

high plains drifter

There was nowhere on the East Coast, or in the South – or, for that matter, in the Great Lakes states or in Appalachia – where I felt like I had stepped into a foreign land. Sure, there were differences, but the world seemed close. When we could cobble together a three-day weekend, we could go to Washington, D.C., or Atlanta, or the mountains, or the beach, or colonial Williamsburg, or wild horse country. We didn’t have to go far to get away from it all.

When we moved out here, it felt (and feels) as if we had moved to a different country altogether. You never get a sense of how vast this place is until you drive it. When you drive it, and when you realize it took the pioneers at least ten times as long to traverse this place, you get a sense of the journey. You watch the land roll and list and finally flatten; and then, finally, you see the mountains in the distance. You realize how Denver got as big as it did: When those pioneers, who had traveled for months en route to California or wherever, saw the seemingly insurmountable Rocky Mountains up ahead, and they saw a clean and fertile river at their feet, they said, “Um, this looks good, right here.”

And after a few months of feeling as if we were close to nothing else, we realized we’re just close to different stuff. To wit: We just spent the night in Lusk, Wyoming, en route to Mount Rushmore (the geography majors will tell you it’s outside Rapid City, S.D.). There are things you see in this part of the world that aren’t a part of life on the East Coast. The trains, for one. Just when it seems as if train travel is all but dead east of the Mississippi, here you see trains that stretch for miles and miles, that need engines in the back and middle just to keep them moving. And once you get out of the city, you see them all the time. We drove four hours last night and must have seen three or four. And gates on the highway, which are up right now to allow travel but close when the snowdrifts make the road impassable. And grates across the bottoms of egresses and ingresses to the interstate, which serve to prevent cows and horses from getting on the highway.
And the stars. I have never seen so many stars. We pulled over on the exit, somewhere between Wheatland and Douglas, on a dirt road called El Rancho Road (I am not making this up) to look at the stars. It was so black, and so flat. My oldest daughter and I watched the curve of the earth, saw the cloudy and distant bands of the Milky Way, saw Mars low and orange, saw a shooting star.
“This is amazing!” she said.
“It is amazing,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget this moment.”