unreal estate

I approach the subject with caution: too much has been said about the state of real estate in New York, by too many people. Since the adventure of finding and moving into the Cobble Hill alcove studio 10 months ago, still in mourning for the house, I had to leave the subject alone for a time. Yet one must return to it, in all its ghastly fascination. Now we want to buy an apartment. How serious we are, I don't know yet. How long we will look, an open question. But it looks like we may stay in New York awhile, and it doesn't make sense to rent forever. Or maybe it does, financially -- with market conditions what they are, sale prices have risen far faster than rental prices for comparable properties, one sign of a bubble -- but not psychologically. One wants to feel there is a place that is one's own. However much an illusion that is.

We have started going to open houses. We go to open houses, in fact, as a form of entertainment -- or is it more like work? We don't skip work to go to them, we give up leisure-time activies like visits to far-flung corners of New York or the art museums. So I guess it's more like entertainment, though not terribly entertaining. What is it, exactly? You walk through spaces, echoing empty or full of other people's stuff, the evidence of their lives, and try to picture yourself there. This process of imagining, I guess, is what puts it on the border of work and entertainment. There is an element of -- romance, I guess you could call it, of chemistry. Some apartments speak to you. No two are alike. The ones I am drawn to, I realize only later, are the ones that remind me in some way of my house. Often something subtle, like the feel of an antique doorknob, or the view down a corridor.

Will I know when I find the right one? The other strange thing about my house was how we bought it. It was as if destined to be ours. We had loved it for years, living in an apartment across the street, and used to joke, in fact, that it actually was our house and interlopers were living in it. When it came on the market we were not really looking for a house yet, yet there we were, buying it. It is hard to imagine a similar situation in New York. Perhaps that sort of thing happens only once per lifetime. If that.

Falling

This morning I became a bit player in the human drama of New York stories when, racing down into the subway to catch a train (just as the signs warn you not to do) I lost my footing and rolled down the final one-fourth or so of the short flight of stairs. Points of impact included my nose, which promptly starting bleeding copiously, and the back of my head, where an impressive bump soon arose. I landed at the foot of a policeman standing guard in the subway; I had noticed his reassuring feet as I hurried down the stairs, little suspecting that in seconds I would be at them. Passers-by, including a few people I recognized as having passed on the street as I hurried to the train, threw concerned or horrified glances at me (I think the amount of blood was a little shocking) but did not stop to help; the policeman had me covered. In their faces I imagined I saw, this could have been me.

The falling itself was an odd thing. At first just a momentary feeling of unease, then an uh-oh, then a sense that this would be awkward; then knowing it would be worse than that. I can't quite reconstruct the sequence of events, where I was in space; I know I grabbed the hand rail and slowed down quite a bit at that point, bashing my nose into the side of the stairway; it was with a feeling of great disappointment that I realized at the next instant that I was not done yet and that it still remained to continue falling, hitting the back of my head next, until I ran out of stairs.

I never lost consciousness. I remember everything; I don't think I have a concussion. I went home, washed off the blood, iced the bump on my head, called my friend that I had been on my way to meet for coffee and told her I wouldn't be coming. Kept looking at my pupils to see that they remained the same size (they did) and thinking how scary it would be if they weren't. Not only because it would mean a brain injury, but how odd and disconcerting that would be, like having eyes that were different colors!

A Gloomy Entry

Freakish warmth last week was followed by freakish, bone-chilling cold made worse by Arctic winds. Homeless people froze to death in Greenpoint, in the vacant lot where they liked to hang out drinking. Horrible rain, and now it is cold and still again, so clear you can see the brightest stars, not an easy thing in light-polluted Brooklyn, and the world seems strangely scrubbed and peaceful, though I know it is just an illusion. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, last week a 7-year-old girl was beaten to death by her stepfather (while the mother stood by) for taking and eating a container of yogurt from the refrigerator; previously she had been confined to a room and tied to a chair, dunked in water, beaten, obliged to eat cat food and use a litter box, as if she were not quite human. Oh, and sexually abused; have I missed anything? Nixzmary Brown, at the conclusion of her sad short life, has briefly become a cause celebre in New York, as people ask, how could this happen? How could people behave so badly? How could social services and the neighbors fail to notice anything amiss? Thousands lined up to see her in death, laid out in her coffin, only a handful of whom had known her in life, as if to testify there are some things that shock even New Yorkers. As if she died for our sins, and we didn't even know it.

I did not sit down to write about Nixzmary, yet somehow she haunts me. Her face all over the tabloids. Yet how soon she will be forgotten! Replaced by the next strange or shocking event, even as she displaced the fake fireman, who in turn routed the Chinese deliveryman stuck in the elevator. A million stories, and nobody gets too long.

Look homeward, Mrs. Umstead

Overall, I feel about Southern Lit much as Kathleen does, and that comes as someone whose education was 100 percent Southern. I'm getting ready to reread the short stories of Flannery O'Connor, and I would add Carson McCullers to the "like" list too.
And I share the abiding dislike for Faulkner, which began about the same time as my affinity for Thomas Wolfe: my senior year of high school in Apex, North Carolina. This came during AP English, on a trip to the Apex Public Library. AP English was the first class I ever loved; I remember all the papers I wrote for it. It was run as a college course, and high school had begun to bore me, so this English class probably set my destiny. My teacher, Mrs. Umstead, a large woman with a hearty laugh and mischievous eyes, had a wicked and politically incorrect sense of humor she loved to share. (When she would misspeak or drop something, she would slap her chest with the side of her hand and say, "My name is Ricardo and I am a retardo." I guess it's probably good she wasn't here in Colorado; she surely would have been tossed out on her keester.)
My main term paper was on Virginia Woolf's The Waves, which I loved precisely for its inscrutability. I felt very mature that I "got" it. Also wrote one on a contemporary Southern novel (I selected Jill McCorkle's July 7, because it was already on the family bookshelf and it had a biker on the cover, and it turned out to be a lot of fun), then a "classic" Southern novel, then one on any subject we selected (I compared the Tao Teh Ching with some New Agey, '60s spiritual book, the name of which eludes me).

Back to Wolfe. We had a list of Southern novels from which we could select, and As I Lay Dying and Look Homeward, Angel were both on the list. My best friend, Nicole, and I stood in the library along with many of our classmates, and she had the Faulkner book. "Not sure if I want to read this," she said. "But most of the other stuff's getting picked over."
It was true. The classic Southern lit section of the Apex library was looking sparse. Nobody wanted to read the Wolfe book because it was so large. The Faulkner was slightly smaller, but I looked over her shoulder, read two paragraphs, said "Frell that stuff" (in so many words) and picked up the Wolfe book. She took the Faulkner book. She went to accounting school, and I'm sure that As I Lay Dying had something to do with it.
LHA was terribly pompous, of course. But I was much more pompous then, in the way that only high-school seniors can be. That I could read such a long, pompous book and get enough out of it to write an A+ term paper made me Smart, and I was very proud of myself. I haven't read it since, and I'm sure I would have a much different opinion about it. Kathleen knows how I feel about pomposity.

The Wolfe at My Door

I did read Look Homeward, Angel, in a Southern Literature class in college (at Barnard, about as far from the South, geographically and spiritually, as one get). I mocked it the whole time, and it's a long book. A friend who took the class with me and I would, for years afterward, sarcastically intone: A stone! A leaf! A door! for no particular reason.

The whole Southern Lit class was a mistake. The professor annoyed me. I had never been to the South and had a typical Yankee arrogance about it as backward, rascist, pathetic. The only writers we read in that class that I liked were Erskine Cadwell and Flannery O'Conner; the rest of them seemed impossible to get, like I was reading them in a bad translation from the old Icelandic. I developed a particularly strong dislike of Faulkner that has persisted to this day.

In North Carolina, Wolfe is almost as holy as Dean Smith. I picked up Look Homeward, Angel one day from my neighbor's bookshelf when I had gone to their house to take care of the cats. Unfortunately I found it, although more moving, to be every bit as ponderous as I remembered it, and soon put it down again.

When I arrived in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, I discovered that Wolfe, when he came to New York in search of literary fame, lived in this neighborhood, within blocks of me. I picture him roaming the same old streets of 19th-century townhouses, and wonder if he liked them as much as I do. Decades apart, we share the bond of being transplanted Tar Heels set down in stony, leafy Brooklyn, and I feel an odd affection for him. My link to North Carolina, a place where I was very happy. But to me, no longer home.

Home

Are the children of Colorado raised any better? Oh my stars, no. Our children have been coached to use their manners -- especially in someone else's house -- and to refrain from interrupting. People comment on how well-mannered they are; and I fight the urge to say, "All it takes is a little coaching." (Although I confess my children always have rejected most foods served to them, by me or anyone else, and it seems the best I can do is to get them to do so politely.)

So we are back from the mammoth road trip home. In the span of ten days we saw 11 states, covered 4,000 miles; and used 180 gallons of gas. We saw Kansas City, St. Louis, Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, and Amarillo. We drove down part of Route 66. In Oklahoma, we saw a wind power plant (I will post photos at some point). My favorite part of the trip (not the visit home) was walking down Beale Street in Memphis. Kathleen might know that I am a tremendous jazz and blues fan, and I picked up an R.L. Burnside CD that entertained us the rest of the way home. I almost got ditched somewhere in Arkansas, an event that has provided the seed for my next short story. We saw two wildfires, both in Texas. A wonderful, epic time.

And home. Being home. The whole time I was gone, I tried to distill the experience into written word. I came up with two sentences. Here they are:
I had forgotten how gray and turgid the sky could be. I had forgotten the feel of wet cool on my cheek.
Maybe it is as my fellow North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe said -- can you not go home again?* It was nice to be back, to listen to NPR again (Denver lacks an NPR station on FM radio, believe it or not), to go to the Around the World Market and to the Whole Foods in Cary where Kathleen and the kids and I would grab lunch on Saturdays. I saw the spot where Dan Krakauer, the main character in my novel, dies. I did not see his dream home, which was, not coincidentally, the house where I spent my last four years in North Carolina. I couldn't bear to look at it. I would want to be back in it, and I might feel compelled to criticize what the new folks have done with the place. It's no longer mine. I have decided, at long last, to let it go. It's Dan and Ellie Krakauer's place now.

*Has anyone but me actually read Look Homeward, Angel? I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A cultural divide

Geography does make a difference. At least in one respect. I have noticed over the months I have lived in New York that children here in the North have shocking manners, compared with their Southern counterparts. And I am not speaking of impoverished, disadvantaged children -- I haven't encountered too many of those kind, so I can't really speak of them. These are children of educated, affluent parents, children with advantages, who can confidently expect to go to the best colleges and get good jobs without a terribly heroic effort. They speak to their parents without respect, mumble, reject food served to them, ignore the minimum social graces. (The only exceptions to this I have observed are children of foreigners.)

You might say, they are just children (or teenagers) -- what else can you expect? The parents seem to be saying this, with a certain roll of their eyes. Just kids.

Perhaps I would have thought the same, had I not lived so long in the South, where parents still drill certain habits into their children with a persistance that is relentless and that seems almost brutal, when you are are watching the process under way, for example in toddlers. The quaint, charming custom (or so it seemed to me at the time) of insisting that unrelated adults be addressed with a courtesy title plus their first name, for instance. The ignoring children who break into adult conversations unless they ask for permission to interrupt. Now I am seeing the results of not doing all this, and it is rather distressing. And I wonder, is this a Northeastern thing? Are the children of Colorado raised any better?