Getting around, part two

I must start with a couple of corrections. I’m not going to edit the previous entry; I’m going to let it stand as a monument to the confusion that is Getting Around in Denver.
First: I realized when I turned toward I-25 this morning that I do not, in fact, live east of the highway. I live west. If I get off the highway and go toward the house, I see mountains. That’s west. And therein lies the rub with “directional” directions: People sometimes screw them up. Once I was half an hour late to an appointment when someone gave me directions coming from the east, and I was coming from the west (“Well, I’m coming from downtown,” I had said, “so which way is that?”).
Second: I made mention of 1st Street, when what I meant to say was 1st Avenue. All the numbered streets are Avenues*. In Denver, there is a difference. I’m not even sure if there is a 1st Street, but if there is, it’s a completely different slab of pavement than the one I was talking about.
* See, 1st Street would be in LoDo. If you’ve heard of a Denver neighborhood, LoDo’s probably it (thanks ever so to “The Real World”). Once it was a warehouse district filled with ne’er-do-wells; now LoDo is cleaned up, a twentysomething’s paradise of cocktail bars and overpriced restaurants. My husband used to work in LoDo, and it is still the only part of the city where I absolutely require my breadcrumb trails still.
LoDo was the original city center, which was oriented along the South Platte River, which runs northeast to southwest. If you look at a map of Denver, you’ll see what looks like a jaunty beret of streets sitting cocked on the northwest corner of the city’s otherwise blocky self. That’s LoDo. The cross-streets, which are numbered Streets, are completely different from their Avenue counterparts. And as you approach LoDo, all the normal roads you know and love end, and if you get in the wrong lane, you end up on the wrong road.
Somehow, in LoDo, my sense of direction flies completely out the window. I’ll be convinced I should turn right, when, as it happens, I should have turned left. There must be a memorial doughnut-shaped path worn in LoDo that’s named after me. And so I really have no advice about how to get around there (and we won’t even discuss parking), but I’m happy to accept any offered.

Getting around, part one

Getting around Denver should be easy, as the whole metro area is on a grid. In theory, it ought to be easy to figure out which side of town you’re on at all times. So why is it so maddening?
The first thing that’s frustrating to newcomers is Denver Directions. Newbies to North Carolina are amused by country directions – “Turn left at the old tree stump in front of the Hicks house, and when you get down a ways, turn down by the light pole that’s over by the pond at the church cemetery. You can’t miss it.” And, of course, you always do.
I never thought much about peculiarities in regional directions until I got here and registered my daughters for school.
“As far as where to park, you can go to the west side of the school. Or, you can turn south and go down a block,” she said.
West? South? I had arrived in town the afternoon before and was still in the trail-of-bread-crumbs phase.
“That’s a right turn,” she said with a small smile.
“Thank you.”
Everyone here, almost without fail, gives, well, directional directions; and, for some reason, I can’t master it, even after almost eighteen months. A couple of days ago, someone asked me, “Oh, are you east of I-25?”
I looked at my friend John. “Help,” I whispered.
“Yes, you are.”
“Thank you.”
I say “thank you” a lot.
Here’s a hint, if you’re traveling to Denver: If you’re in the city and looking at the mountains, you’re headed west. (If you’re south of the city, all bets are off, as the mountains wrap.) So, after eighteen months, all I can tell you is: If I’m not looking at the mountains, I’m headed either north, south, or east. And I am a person who prides herself on having a good sense of direction.
It helps, with the grid system, to know whether the road you’re on is a northie-southie or an eastie-westie (that’s Robin lingo, not Denver lingo). Once you’re east of Colorado Boulevard (one of the main northie-southies), the north-south cross streets follow a pattern – flora-named streets with two As, two Bs, and so on until you cross the Zs and end up in Aurora. And once you’re west of Santa Fe Boulevard, the north-south cross streets go A-Z, then A-Z again until you hit Sheridan, and then one of several western suburbs. (Another Denver peculiarity: The main north-south streets on the west side of town are known, at least in our house, as the “Victorian poets” – Lowell, Tennyson and Wadsworth.) Aurora and the suburbs have their own grid; that’s another story.
The numbered streets run east-west and number well into the hundreds. I’m sure there’s a designated, nice, round numbered-street where Denver ends and the northern suburbs begin. What it is, I don’t know. I have discovered through trial and error (but mostly trial) that if you’re in the hundreds, you’re Somewhere Else.
There are loads of small clusters of streets that you’ll see over and over, all of which have names here at the house. There are the Civil War roads (Lincoln, Grant, Sherman), the Southern States (Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana – no North Carolina, but there is a Raleigh on the west side of the grid), the Presidents (Madison, Adams, Monroe), and the Ivy League (Yale, Harvard, Vassar). This helps me because I can combine Colorado Directions and Country Directions – our favorite Indian restaurant is in the Ivy League area of Downing, over by the hospital; Target is at one of the Southern States and Colorado, behind Shotgun Willie’s, the strip club with a sense of humor (they advertised green bean casserole wrestling at Thanksgiving!).
There is one more peculiarity about directions in Denver: If you’re sending something to an address south of 1st Street, you must write “South” before the street name, or it will never get there. And there is absolutely no correlation between a street and its southern counterpart. In fact, there’s little correlation between one block of a street and another.
Example: I can tell you that I live on South Forest Street and you will know that a) I live south of 1st Street and that b) it’s east of Colorado Boulevard (because it’s a flora-named street, remember?). Now you can find my house, right? Wrong. Because, as with every non-major road in Denver, Forest (and S. Forest) ends every three or four blocks for a park, or a school, or a highway, or a shopping center or some such. If you’re lucky, your road will pick back up a block or so down and roughly in the same place. If you’re not (which is more likely), you will wander around and around wondering where on earth your road begins again. Eventually you will find it, a mile or so away, and you will wonder why in the hell you didn’t just ask for directions rather than thinking, “Oh, South Forest, I know where that is.”
All it means is, you’re not a native. Only natives think it’s easy getting around this place.

the news from here

It's colder and rainy and not stinky anymore. A few days I realized with a thrill that fall is coming. That's what happens when you live up North: Labor Day is followed soon after by cooler weather, shorter days, falling leaves. And snow! I am too old to be thrilled by the mere passage of time, yet the idea of another fall and winter coming around seems quite enchanting somehow. I think I missed winter more than I realized all those years in North Carolina.

I am still thinking about real estate. But maybe not quite so often.

I have got to stop thinking about real estate

Thinking doesn't help. And yet I do it all the time. Troll the Web for new listings of apartments I can't afford and go to open houses of same. The essential problem is that we can't afford to live where we want to live and we don't want to live where we can afford to live. It seems a hopeless situation. Perhaps by writing about it I can come to some sort of control over my obsession. But I doubt it.

If this were a dating situation, I would be like a 47-year-old short, unattractive man with no money who keeps falling in love with supermodels and wonders why things never work out. And refuses to "settle."

We don't want to live somewhere where we fear for our lives arriving home at 2 a.m. or walking the dog at midnight. Next to Superfund brownfield site. In a four-story walkup where we must carry the dog up and down the stairs every time he wants to pee. In a 250-square-foot studio. In Weeahawken (though I am told it is nice). In an apartment that doesn't have an actual kitchen.

We want to live in civilization, someplace with street life and shops nearby, and not spend hours commuting daily. Near at least two subway lines so one can still get home on nights and weekends when there is track work (which there always is; the subway is 100 years old). With more than one closet. A kitchen with a window would be nice. Am I asking too much? Obviously, yes.

Somehow I have come to feel like I am waiting for my life to start; that it will only really start when I am living in a place I can call my own. This is a dangerous illusion, pernicious, actually.

So Much to Say, So Little Time

I wanted to write a little about going to see "Faith Healer" on Broadway last week, just in the nick of time, because now it has closed. Three actors, four monologues, the opening and closing ones by Ralph Fiennes, better known for his movie stardom. A very intense drama that I would file under "Irish doom," although the reviews kept describing it as being about the struggles of the artist with his gift.

I was meeting a friend who had gotten half-price tickets on a Web site that morning. Not wanting to be late, I got to the Theater District early and strolled around. A beautiful summer evening, not too hot, raking light down the streets, it seemed a particularly pleasurable moment to be alive. There are lots of theaters in the Theater District, as its name might lead one to suspect -- it's amazing, in fact, how concentrated they are. Many of them, in mid-August, a relatively quiet time culturally in New York, were "dark." This is the term for a theater where nothing is playing at the moment. It had always struck me as rather overdramatic, but walking by a few dark theaters, I understood it better. Deserted lobbies, locked doors, blankness where the posters would be. Not even any ads of coming attractions. There seemed nothing more desolate than an empty theater. Only people can bring it to life, and there were no people; the rest is just quietness and waiting, empty velvet seats. I found myself thinking of all the performances that had gone on in these few square blocks, the famous actors that had passed through the doors of the Brooks Atkinson or the Booth or the Lunt-Fontaine, leaving no trace but in people's memories, which themselves are very fleeting things. The connection between theater and superstition is not hard to understand: there is something so spooky about it, conjuring something out of nothing, which then quickly fades into oblivion again.

But on 45th Street, where my theater was, there were several other shows still running. At 10 minutes to 8, I walked down a street thronged with theater-goers lining up to get in to their respective shows. (Even though lining up actually makes little sense; since you have an assigned seat, there is no profit in getting there early. I read an article about this -- it seems people have picked up the habit from movie-going.) Others were just milling around. There were so many people that I wondered how I would find my friend. Fortunately, I live in an age of text-messaging. I texted her to say where I was standing. She texted back to say she was still in a cab. Freed from the need to concentrate on finding her for the moment, I stood and watched the crowd line up and enter the theater; this was as entertaining in its own way as the play I was about to see.

Who goes to the theater? In an age of DVDs and computer games and TV and shopping malls and other rivals for entertainment time, it is amazing that this archiac, expensive and highly ineffcient form of amusement holds its own. But the evidence on 45th Street was hard to ignore. People were thronging in. The out-of-towners had lined up first. But I realized this only later, as the people passing me grew progressively more elegantly dressed and jaded-looking; here were the New Yorkers. The tourists looked cheerful, expectant, and slightly reverant. The New Yorkers looked rich. Nearly everyone was white.

The last of the long line had vanished into the maw of the theater and the street seemed oddly empty when I saw my friend, just on time.

Our seats were in the very last row of the lower section,on the aisle. Handy for nipping out and having a gin and tonic at intermission, which we decadently did. Although I could hear them perfectly, the actors seemed far away and small; I longed for opera glasses to see their expressions more clearly. When the curtain came up, Mr. Fiennes was standing alone on a stark stage, head down, in a hat and winter coat. The audience immediately began applauding, which I found most annoying. He hadn't done anything yet! Or were they trying to say he was so famous, they would love it, whatever he did? If theater is about magic, this broke the spell. Annoyingly, the audience also clapped, like trained seals, at the first appearance of the only-slightly-less-famous Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid.

It was great acting. I am all for applause. But why not wait until they are done?

hot!

When I was younger I was prone to fainting. I remember the moment just before losing consciousness: how your hearing goes, and your field of vision shrinks to a tiny point, like the world glimpsed through a tunnel. Being in Brooklyn like that today was like that. Like a hallucination, a fever dream.

How hot was it? High 90s, weather.com says, "Feels like" more in the 108 range. The streets were busier at 6 a.m. than at 11 a.m. A doorknob in the sun was noticably hot, just short of painful to the touch. I kept seeing the same few people on the streets in my brief forays out for an errand or to walk the dog: a middle-aged woman using an umbrella like a parasol, another with pale green capri pants who wrapped her head and upper body in a beautiful scarf, as if we were in Islamabad, not Brooklyn. This coincidence heightened my sense of unreality, as if the buildings were only plywood stage sets like in a Western and would crumple as soon as I turned away.

It was hotter in North Carolina on a regular basis. But there nearly everything was air conditioned. Mall, car, house, office, Harris Teeter. The periods of really dealing with the heat were mercifully brief. There, I never feared for the power grid. Mayor Bloomberg has warned everyone to conserve. The necklaces of lights on the East River and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridges went dark; so did the lights at the top of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler. The lights in my office were also turned alarmingly low, creating a dreamy, sleepy atmosphere that no amount of coffee could combat.

So far, the electricity is still on. Fingers crossed! I am turning off the computer now.