At home, sort of

It's been a week since the movers left. It's time to say something, yet I find myself starting and restarting this entry, trying to find the right approach. A problem I rarely have at Mile High Apple, where my entries usually seem to write themselves, even if that does lead to a lot of windy, whiney self-indulgence and overwriting.

Home. It no longer smells like paint or echoes with silence. Now it smells like cardboard from all the boxes (I should be used to that smell by now) and the special caulk that plumbers use (don't ask). Some things are put away, some aren't. I have a renewed appreciation for the essentials. For example, I have managed just fine with two wooden spoons since the pots were found and I could start cooking again (I think that happened Saturday.) One would have been plenty, actually. Why do I have a million wooden spoons, spatulas, and various specialized serving implements? But that is a minor question. There are more important ones hanging fire.

It seemed, for many months, living in the old apartment and looking at apartments, that finding a place we could call our own was both vital and impossible. As if I was waiting for this for life to begin -- no, that's the wrong way to put it. Life was going on, as it usually does. But things had a temporary feeling, a transitory nature. I did not really notice my surroundings, except to maintain a minimal level of hygiene and order; did not worry if I liked the furniture arranaged as it was or the color of the walls. These things were not important the way they had been in the house in North Carolina, where the house seemed an extension of ourselves, or rather, was inextricably fused with ourselves.

This was a distressing feeling; now that it is behind me, at least for a while, I wonder if it was not also truer to the actual nature of things. Transitory: Is there a better description of life? I seem to have written a lot here about the longing for permanence, even as I admit to do so is to chase an illusion.

Maybe I am thinking about this too much. Pluses and minuses, what are they?

In the new apartment, the noise and stench of garbage trucks on the street outside no longer wake us up at 6 a.m. Here, no one next door is half-heartedly learning to play the piano. Nothing in the entire apartment is made of particleboard; it all has a reassuringly solid, heavy prewar feeling. There are windows in every room, even the kitchen; sunlight moves from corner to corner.

We chose the paint colors. Our clothes are no longer covered with lint after washing them in the ancient washing machine and hanging them on the pipes. (I will miss the pipes but not the lint.) Now the laundry is as clean as modern technology can make it, even if I do have to scrounge for quarters and descend to the basement. (But is a nice basement, clean and well-lighted, a positively Hemingwayesque basement.)

The dog has learned to ride the elevator and no longer must climb the stairs. (At first he used to stare in perplexity at the elevator door as it closed, but now he seems to have either solved the mystery, or to have given up.)

I miss the old neighborhood: the mix of yuppies, hipsters and Yeminis, the way Court Street got steadily more Italian as you went south and the stores odder. Brooklyn Heights, by contrast, seems staid, the people more uniformly prosperous and complacent. The quiet old streets are darker at night, the prices of everything higher, though it is astonishing that that is even possible. In this respect, like others, it is closer to Manhattan not only geographically.

But the view of the harbor, Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge from the Promenade, a short three blocks away, stuns me every time I see it, and now I see it several times a day, in all conditions of light and weather. I think I could never get tired of this view.

We are paying a ton of money. On the other hand, we were paying a ton before and it was all rent, never to be seen again.

E.B. White in "Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street" compares moving houses with a crab growing out of its shell; if I could find the book I would quote it exactly, but it's something about how moving makes you feel kind of fragile and exposed, and that is exactly right. I feel oddly out of place, ill at ease, noticing everything and questioning eveything and somehow seeming not equal to it. Not worthy. Where do I pick up the thread, to start living right?

Robin's roundup

First things first:



So the baby is nearly a month old now, the family has come and gone (and probably will be the subject of some other blog entry), and I FINALLY have time to sit down and write an update. That Kathleen is a persistent needler, and she’s right: I must get down to it.

So let me address some of the things she’s written here.
First: I must thank her for the birth announcement. Col (maybe I should call him The Colonel?) is a grand baby.
Second: I admire her fortitude for painstakingly typing out that which the Oxford English has to say about bouncing. My stars.
Third: I think the “finding stuff” phenomenon is a great one and, happily, not reserved for New York alone. I had a friend in college from Cary (NC), and her mother retrieved a fabulous Oriental rug in front of a chichi house, waiting for the trash collection; drove it straight to Chapel Hill; and put it in her apartment. I think this is what comes of growing up in a family of eight kids (which is something my children will find out about if we don’t watch out!). And I know that Dumpster diving is a great hobby of many Denverites. Since we got here, I have snurched a grill (complete with bag of charcoal and lighter fluid) and a vanity for my girls. But my booty pales in comparison with Kathleen’s. Dive away, girlfriend!
Fourth: I have seen photos of Kathleen’s apartment, and it is a thing of beauty. Even if its sticker price makes my blood run cold. But then, it’s Brooklyn. What would I expect? I just spend so much time kvetching about the price of real estate here in Denver, but I forget that there are places that are even more desirable, and Kathleen’s in one of them.
Fifth: Kathleen, remind me to send you Nigella Lawson’s mayo recipe. She swears it’s the easiest thing in the world to make, not that I’ve tried or anything. But I will agree, Deborah Madison can inspire one to great culinary feats.

I think that pretty much covers it, except to say again that I am so excited for Kathleen. Mazel Tov! Good things.

For two weeks, two homes

This week we closed on the apartment but have not yet left the one we are renting. The idea was to have time to paint and otherwise prep the new apartment, and properly clean and vacate the old one. Another hope was that the dog would be less traumatized by the move if he were able to be acclimated slowly to his new home: we could take him there, feed him treats and set up a little rest area for him while we painted, cleaned, etc.

The two apartments are about a mile apart, so we walk there in the mornings before it's time to go to work with the dog, laden with paint equipment and cleaning supplies. From one world to another, from Cobble Hill to Brooklyn Heights, from renters to owners.

One apartment is dark and cluttered, full of incomplete to-do lists and other people's FreshDirect boxes that we have been collecting in preparation for the move. One apartment is light-filled and echoingly empty. It seemed such a luxury to scour an empty refrigerator, unconcerned about the clock ticking as the interior heats up and the persihables perish. In general, there is such a strange sense of possibility in an empty apartment.

Mayonnaise mysteries

Today I tried to make mayonnaise for the first time in my life. Why? I don't even like mayonnaise. I blame Deborah Madison, who can make anything sound good. Or my serious need to procrastinate.

I carefully separated the room-temperature egg, dismissing thoughts of food-borne pathogens from my mind. Whisked the yolk. Added lemon juice, salt and mustard, and whisked some more. Oil: slowly, slowly, slowly, as it must be added. (I know this from my professional cooking days, such as they were, where I made all sorts of salad dressing but somehow skipped the mayonnaise lesson.)

The mixture become frothy, like eggnog, which was weird. It became one thing: there were no eggy bits floating in the oily suspension, which seemed encouraging. Emulsion, non? The sauce had not broken. I continued to slowly add oil and whisk, whisk, whisk, for a seeming eternity, until finally it was time to face facts: This stuff was not thickening. It was a smooth, frothy liquid, and determined to stay that way. I whisked and whisked, seeking to persuade myself that maybe homemade mayonnaise was supposed to be, um, thinner than the store-bought kind. Part of its charm. The sauce has not broken, I told myself. The sauce has not yet broken.

It is not broken. Yet it is not mayonnaise. So what, exactly, is it? Sitting forlornly in the refrigerator awaiting the decisive moment when I will either eat it over haricots verts, throw it away, or try again with another yolk as Deborah Madison advises. Except there are no more eggs in the apartment.