right at home

Robin's post raises an interesting question: When does the strange become normal? When does the weird new place become home? Some people ask themselves this question all their lives; some people never ask it, never straying very far from where they were born. I fall into the middle of those two extremes. Places I have lived more than a few months are: Rural Connecticut, New York City (Morningside Heights), Hong Kong, Chapel Hill, N.C., Raleigh N.C., and New York City again(Cobble Hill, Brooklyn). Not a very exhaustive list, actually. When I was little I wanted to go everywhere, to spend a few years living in every place I could think of. This idea seems less attractive to me now.

I know what Robin means about waking up and being confused about where you are. I miss my little stone house terribly. The renovated kitchen that I still hate to think about, for it makes me sad. The peaceful back yard where the dog would roam as I sat on the stone steps warmed by the sun. The first place I lived in that I ever owned, and perhaps the last if NY-area real estate prices don't moderate. It was home in such a profound way. Seven years. I truly expected to grow old and die there, in that house, surrounded by a lifetime of memories. For what would ever be worth leaving it for?

Oh, how life can surprise you.

For the odd thing is, of all the places on the list above, the only place where I ever truly felt at home was New York. And I feel that way again; memory did not deceive me on this score. This is home: cold in winter, stinky in summer, grumpy, difficult, too expensive, full of surly, sidewalk-spitting people and stirring sights and an atmosphere dense with possibilities both bad and good.

You give up so much living here; rationally it makes no sense. Sometimes when the city seems particularly irritating, full of people whose only purpose in life seems to be to enrage me, I fantasize about chucking it all and moving back to Raleigh. Of course, we could not get our house back. We would have to live somewhere else, but I am sure it would be OK. We could be rehired at our former employers, I am confident; we burned no bridges there. It would be warm and pleasant and easy; everyone would understand our explanations of why we came back. "New York was great, but it's just too crazy."

My fantasy fades to black at that point, as it has to. It's just something to think about, to feel better, the way one imagines winning $5 million in the lottery and never worrying about money again. North Carolina in retrospect was like Arcadia: Easy, dreamy, peaceful, no real worries, so I had to make up fake ones, because the human mind cannot exist without worries. An idyll. But like all perfect worlds, exacting a price in tedium.

Reflections

This morning, as I was driving down Broadway (yep, we have one too), I watched the Volunteers of America homeless shelters, the bus stations and Denver Hitting Club ("Rule No. 1 about Denver Hitting Club: Do not talk about Denver Hitting Club") meld into the upscale hotels and offices that characterize most of Denver. I decided it was time for reflection.

I've been here nearly seven months now. I can't remember the exact date because it was such a slow process. Usually, you move and one minute you're in one place, the next minute you're in another. For us, we were in Smithfield a day longer than we were supposed to be, then in Asheville; then we drove through Tennessee, Kentucky, and Illinois, and made it to Lake St. Louis, Mo.; then through Missouri and Kansas to Burlington, Colo.; and finally we were in Denver.
I can't believe it's been eight months since I saw Kathleen and seven months since I saw my friend Erin. I still have the wrong pictures of home painted in my mind. I expect each morning for my eyes to open and look into my big closet with all its shelves -- I still remember what went where -- and not into my tiny closet that must accomodate all the belongings I had room to unpack as well as the dirty clothes, because there's just no other place for them. All I have left of that house is the photos. One of our bedroom sits on the desktop of my laptop. It was taken after everything was out of the house -- my big closet is open, the room is freshly vacuumed, and the gossamer curtain flutters as if kissed by a ghost. Putting this photo in such a conspicuous place is my way of trying not to cry when I think of my room, with its sunny yellow walls and its view of the daylilies (I wonder how they did this summer?) and the pond, where turtles sunned themselves on a log and egrets dipped low to fish. I missed the poplar's blooms this year, and the old-fashioned rose too. I missed everything. And my son will never know the simple pleasures of fishing in our pond, or of going on a nature walk with Grandma around the yard, or of an Easter egg hunt where the eggs sit in the bricks and on the trellis, where only Daddy can reach them. I have spent an inordinate amount of time grieving the pleasures we will never have again.

Having said that, I realize that it is time to find new pleasures, to accept that which I cannot change and have the courage to change the things I can. Hot chocolate in winter (it's snowed twice this week) is nice. So are s'mores. And the other day, I saw a picket line, something you'd never see in right-to-work North Carolina, and it did my heart good. But try as I might, I haven't found anything to replace the joy I once found in the egrets taking wing over the sparkling water, soaring toward the sun. Nothing.

crime and punishment

I live in Gotham, but I haven't been robbed yet. (knock on wood) Maybe I have Giuliani to thank? But then, in this town, you would never contemplate leaving your milk and bagels outside the door. That seems so Mayberry. Even the newspaper arrives in the lobby, behind two locked doors. I have not yet figured out how the paper guy gets inside because I have never been awake and in the lobby that early. We have a super, who deals with the packages that arrive by UPS, FedEx and USPS, but no 24-hour or even part-time doorman.

I have seen a car window broken in Cobble Hill, though only once. And late one night not long after I moved here, entering the F line station at Bryant Park, I saw a man being arrested. Or detained. He was a young man, black, normal-seeming, not gangsterishly dressed. He ran down the stairs, passing me. I thought he was just in a hurry to catch a train. Then he glanced back, a look of abject terror on his face. One policeman ran past me, then another. The first one was trying to yell Stop! but he was so out of breath it was just a gasp. By the time I got down the stairs, to the long open corridor on the way to the token booth and the turnstiles, the two policemen had the man facing the wall with his hands up. They kept saying something, the same thing, and sort of pushing him up against the wall, but I couldn't understand what it was they were saying, which scared me for some reason. I kind of wanted to linger and see what would happen, but I didn't. It was late, and if you miss one train, there might not be another for half an hour, so I kept going. There are a million stories in the Naked City, and I never got to see how this particular one ended.

Crime has declined drastically in New York since about 1990. That's what the numbers say, and you can see it in other ways, too. The liquor store we go to sometimes at Court & Baltic with the plastic bulletproof glass -- you can't actually touch the bottle you want, you have to just point at it, and you pass your money through a little slot -- seems like a survivor from another era. I shop there sometimes simply for its oddity.

And yet -- last weekend, we walked some friends visiting from out of town, who had spent the night, to the apartment of some other friends. We live on the edge of genteel Cobble Hill; they live on the edge of genteel Park Slope. What we walked through inbetween, due east on Baltic, through several small housing projects, was a scary no-man's land of broken glass and desolation. Four adults, one fox terrier, early on a Sunday morning. No one challenged us; there was no there, practically. But it was the most frightened I have been since moving to New York.

ROBBED!

Someone pilfered our breakfast out of the dairy box on the front porch. I feel like the ranger at Jellystone National Park. My pick-a-nick basket has been filched.
There's about $10 just gone, escaped from our grasp. I had to wake my husband up to go to the bagel shop. Gone are:
1 gallon of milk
1/2 gallon of orange juice
1 (6-ct) package Sara Lee bagels
If you know who committed this crime, please comment forthwith and return the items ASAP. No questions asked.