Breaking Up With New York

D O G

2011-12-30T22:32:00.001-05:00

He stands four-square, his big head slightly lowered, floppy ears akimbo and his great dark eyes tilted up, focused entirely on me.

D O G

"Come!" I command, in the sharp authoritarian tone of voice I've been taught to use by the professional trainers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Now, again, in a slightly higher tone, "Come, Carter, come!" And I crouch a bit, arms wide, a big smile on my face. Oh, that gets his engine running! Here he comes, galloping straight at me, thinking no words, expecting no thing: Perfect enthusiasm and trust on four legs.

"Goodoggoodoggoodaaawg," I enthuse, rubbing his head, his shoulder blades, his broad white chest. "gooooooddog!"
Carter is my first dog.

He is not my husband FF's first , though. FF was brought up with dogs, had dogs in his previous marriage, and indeed has certain dog characteristics himself, all of them positive, like loyalty and razor sharp intuition about how I am feeling in any given moment. How did the word 'dog' come into negative use in modern parlance anyway? It's a usage based on sexual politics and invented, I believe, by people who don't understand dogs and are apt to abuse them. Thanks to Carter, to me the word 'dog' is synonymous with the word 'good'.

I spotted him on a flyer in one of our local diners and was mysteriously and immediately attracted to his big black nose and huge dark eye sockets. A few days later, I was overwhelmed with emotion as I sat on the floor of his foster family's apartment with all 48 pounds of him seductively curled in my lap, leaning his great heavy skull against mine, breathing and snuffling into my ear. I was utterly taken by him as I have rarely ever been taken by another living being, with no words exchanged, only a kind of Super Soul Meet in which I understood that this creature was utterly innocent and one hundred percent good. When we returned to our car that night without him, I burst into tears: There was no other option than that Carter should come to live with us.

Carter is about a year and a bit old. He was rounded up by Animal Control here in Piedmont, lived in an Animal Control shelter for a while, and then was boarded by a foster family for six months. He owes his life to an unbroken chain of generous humans who quietly fought for him and believed that he ought to keep on living. He has had three names in the course of his short existence, so we let him keep the last one they gave him to spare him more changes. He's good-looking and smart, and we can't quite figure out how it is that he managed to stick around without being adopted for almost six months: He was waiting, apparently, for us. He was waiting for me.

Carter is a great dog; he is also a clear sign of my successful breakup with New York. It would have been both impractical and also unkind to keep this jumping, running, digging tribute to animal grace in a fourth floor walk-up apartment. Furthermore, we never would've found a dog like Carter in New York City: this mix-up of Akita, bull terrier, and typical Southern hound dog is a product of the liberal propagation of dog genes that occurs only in wider spaces and warmer climates. Carter, FF, this house and this garden are the tap roots I am sinking down, the visible artifacts of a decision made to become part of this place that is so very far away from the winter cold of Tiny Town, so very far from the hard, punishing surfaces of Manhattan where I strove for so many years. I look around me at the evidence of the work we've been doing here in the house and on the property and I know I've made some intelligent decisions lately.

I hear Carter's trademark shake in the other room: 7, exactly 7, shakes of the head and body that make his dog tags jingle-jangle. He's letting us know he's on the move, making sure where we are, checking what's going on outside. During these last two and a half months of forming our pack of three, Carter has come to see FF and me as his leaders, the givers of all good things, of all correction and praise. He wakes us in the morning, and he doesn't go to bed until he knows we've retired too, no matter how sleepy he is. He greets us when we return home with sustained enthusiasm evident in every tensed and quivering muscle that wants to jump up but has learned not to; he follows us down to the TV room at night, curling up between us and falling into a contented sleep. He knows what good is: praise, food, sleep, running, digging, sunshine, play, being together with the pack.

They say dogs don't think. Not like you and I do, anyhow. But Carter thinks and I know he does because we watch him trying to decide if he's going to obey a command he knows -- or not; we see him design squirrel catching strategies of different types and then modify them when they don't work; and his quick cleaving to our daily routines shows me his brain is working just fine. What he doesn't do is worry about tomorrow, dwell on the yesterday or have moral dilemmas. Training him requires me to be aware of his enviably straightforward world view, and be utterly connected to what can be understood without language; no assumptions can be made, consistency and clarity are the foundation of our relationship. Carter gives me big clues about how I might be a better friend and a better person.

Carter is also, oddly enough, helping me to become a better language teacher. In the first month or so of training him, I had regular epiphanies about how to work better with my students and I started to emphasize techniques I was using with Carter in my work with the human students. Among these techniques are:

Be consistent.
Smile a lot.
Repeat a lot.
Always reward good performance clearly.
Always indicate poor performance clearly.
Make sure the rules of the game are clear.
Don't make the game too complex.
Treat each element of a complex game as a skill in itself and practice it separately.
Don't play any game for too long.
Use body language carefully and with purpose.
And be consistent.

I already knew these ideas from 20-plus years of teaching, but Carter is helping me become more careful still because, unlike my human students who have an ego involvement in trying to be right, he invariably and shamelessly shows me immediately when I've screwed up as a teacher. Watching him, I've become more alert to my students' expressions and body language to figure out when I need to make an adjustment.

Carter is out in the yard now, enjoying the bright Piedmont sun, still trying to catch a squirrel. It's been two and half months and he hasn't caught one yet, but still he tries. I wonder at his optimism, his ability to remain stock still for as much as 15-20 minutes. Soon, I'll go out and we'll play a game in the backyard, and once again his doggy world will blend with my human one, each soul become finer for the time spent together.

Come, Carter, come! Good dog.

The Growing Season

2011-11-08T21:54:00.002-05:00

Comes the Growing Season.

And in Piedmont the autumn nights are chill and pungent with pitch and cut wood. Our shortened days shine in shades of true green, deep blue and butter yellow like Kodachrome memories of my Idaho childhood summers. Sometimes, a steady, massaging rain falls and percolates through the pine needles, the sandy loam and the firm nutritious clay, deep into the forest where you can hear the trees drinking deep while occasionally shaking themselves clean of golden leaves. More often, the sun shines and warms the steaming garden soil causing roots to expand in the dark mulch. This is the Growing Season.

When we first got here, weary from our titanic moves from the New York City fourth floor walk-up to Tiny Town PA, and then from Tiny Town to Piedmont (half a world away), the singeing summer sun was on high broil. Piedmonters, who are steeped in Southern hospitality (which is real, not some sort of kabuki mask as some Northerners would have you believe) apologized for the heat as if they themselves had been remiss and had left the thermostat up. It's not always like this, they said, mopping their brows in late July. You just wait, yes, you just wait 'til autumn! Why it's like a second spring 'round here!

Our turnip greens.

In September in Piedmont, everyone plants pansies and it's said that their multicolored petticoats will last through December. Lawns are fed and seeded, bushes and trees are pruned hard, and winter gardens are 'put in'. On our .79 acre and without benefit of mule, we have been working hard all summer and fall alongside our gardener Pinewood L. Palustris and his intense, silent Chiapan sidekicks Bendito and Jesús. It was Pinewood who first mentioned Winter Gardens, a term that for me had always before signified a concert venue in the Financial District of New York City. One day in late August gazing around the yard he said, "Well I guess it's time y'all be wantin' to put in the winter garden," and of course we obediently did; Pinewood is a descendant of the Piedmont's African Cherokees, and we follow his instructions to the letter.

Pinewood smiled tolerantly when he saw how many kale and cabbage seedlings I had bought; he knew it was too much. He showed up one morning unannounced and spread some secret seeds in the the dark, humid soil of the fenced-in vegetable garden. They sprouted within hours, glow-in-the-dark green and promising good things. It's a collection of root vegetables, he told me, probably some turnips and I don't know what else. Within weeks we began to harvest the intense green leaves, and we marveled at their tenderness and slight peppery taste when cooked parboiled and then sauteed with butter and garlic.

In the growing season the deer and other forest creatures are in rut, and in the early morning and even sometimes in the slanting sun of late afternoon they stand in our forest, still as plaster statues, watching us, unmoved even by the dog's attention. A red fox has taken to pacing the length of one of our fences. And suddenly hundreds of squirrels have descended upon us, as if brought in by buses to winter here. The bird population changes and grows, but the feeder won't be necessary until later because there's an abundant harvest of grubs and seeds for them; by November, petite acorns from the willow oaks stud the ground everywhere. Rabbits lope easily across the back lawn at dawn's early light. This is the Growing Season, when the gentle rains bless the earth and everyone drinks his fill. Cool nights smell of rosemary and pine and promise comfort and joy.

But how to break the habit of seasonal dread? The patterns of 22 years in New York City are built into my bone and muscle and I feel my spirit begin to contract with the old morbid fear of the harsh, concrete freeze to come even as my new garden expands into the soft Piedmont earth, here and now. I feel my habitual resentment of the coming winter and it persists in my spirit, conflicting with my actual knowledge that I have in fact escaped to a kinder, gentler place. It's as if the shortening daylight flips a fear and loathing switch in me that won't quite turn off despite my current circumstances; I remain alert to this old emotion, stomping out the bitter embers of the bad mood that habitually creeps upon me at this time of year, cleaning it off me every morning so that I don't poison the innocent creatures growing in my southern garden with my own dark, vestigial emotion. Slowly, Piedmont is taming me to see that the world's not so harsh after all.

Remember: There will be no blocks long sheets of ice to walk to work on this year; there will be no layers of always slightly sodden and smelling woolens, no grim-faced struggles against the unnatural wind gusts slicing through the iced canyons of downtown, the bitter winds that sucker punch pedestrians just for fun and offer constant resistance to every muscle in one's body. There will be no more resentful throngs jockeying for position as they stand waiting for ever-fewer and every-later subway trains on the frigid, filthy platforms. There will be no exhausted trek at the end of the day up four flights of puddled stairs to my small cell of safety, no brooding sense of the dark destruction of all life that turns one uselessly existential. I must remember: This is the Growing Season.

I must remember that here in Piedmont it's the Growing Season, and that we are working the earth. Here in Piedmont, the soil responds to our efforts; it gives us food. There is so much to do, that there is barely time or desire to write about it, a sure sign of contentment. We are writing our lives in this soil, planting our very selves in the woody stalks of pruned lagustrum and nandina, and the new mounds of turned earth around our young fruit trees; we participate in the great process of the earth with inexperienced but eager fingers and, sniffing the fragrant southern air, we slowly train ourselves to believe that it is safe to relax into this dark, soft, southern winter night.

Watching New York from Afar on 9/11.

2011-09-11T12:00:00.002-04:00

10:09, I am here with FF in Piedmont having turkey sausage biscuits for Sunday breakfast, a coffee for me and a sweet tea for him. The 9/11 memorial services are playing on TV and New York City feels oh so far, far away. I realize that I don't know that site anymore, the place where Mountain Sea and I played music for the workers in the big tent in the weeks after the towers fell. And I have not visited the memorial. Didn't want to. I breathe a great sigh of relief that FF and I have found a place, a nest far, far away from New York City; New York City, where everyone 10 years and two wars later must still live with TV banners that shout "Heightened Alert After Terror Threat."

Photo: AFP

Ten years ago today, I walked 90 plus blocks from the Chamber Street subway stop back to the Upper West Side to sit on the stoop of a brownstone on that preternaturally crystalline blue fall day and wait and hope that my best friend, Mountain Sea, would materialize. I did not have the strength to walk the next 63 blocks to my house, and the phones were out so if I didn't wait there on his stoop, I wouldn't know if he was OK or not. I was exhausted, and shocked, and afraid. When Mountain Sea came galloping around the corner, covered in sweat, I was profoundly grateful. Two hours later, his Dad returned too, pale and exhausted. Stark fear kept Mountain Sea and I inside that apartment for two days. For two days we did not leave, staying inside and talked about getting out of New York City. We decided in those two days to plot a tour to Europe, to take our music overseas and possibly even stay there. Within two years of that day, Mountain Sea and I were headed to Switzerland.We stayed in Europe for three years.

The feeling that New York City had become too difficult to live in, too much like a trap, and just too frightening took root in me then. The feeling has never left me. I could no longer see the magic of living in New York. And even after I met FF and started spending most of my time in Tiny Town with him, on my weekly trips to New York City I found myself thinking how I would escape if the bridges closed, if the tunnels collapsed, if this whole man-made labyrinth became uninhabitable. On the commuter train, I would meditate how I would make it back to Tiny Town, how FF would find me. I knew that as long as I had chattel and business in New York City, that was how I would live for the rest of my life, and I didn't want it.

When Mountain Sea and I returned from Europe, it was for Americans, not for New York itself, that we can home and stayed. How I love Americans! Our arguments, our passion, our humor, our music, our sense of fun, and our magnificent diversity which is the source of all our arguments and also all that makes us great. In Europe, in the beautiful historic cobble stoned towns, on the modern high-speed trains that we took from gig to gig, I thought how great it was, how advanced. While interacting with the astonishingly well-disciplined and well-socialized Europeans who seem so adult and well-mannered compared to Americans, I kept experimenting with the thought of living the rest of my life over there. But, in all of its beauty, in all of the romance of Berlin, in all the comforting order and social-environmental forward-thinking of Europe, it wasn't where I could see myself fitting in long-term. I missed America: No, I missed Americans. And I wanted to be home.

Today, Vice President Joe Biden gave probably the best speech of his life to the assembled mourners at the memorial park in front of the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and he said "The true source of American Power does not lie within that building, we draw our strength from the rich tapestry of our people." He spoke about the courage that lies within the heart of every person and how it is right that upon occasion that courage is summoned as it was on September 11, 10 years ago. He spoke of the irreplaceable nature of every person who was lost on that day, and as he choked up you could tell that he was thinking of his own irreplaceable ones lost in that auto accident on another ordinary, terrible day so many years ago.

We all love and we all lose. The hero that lies waiting within each of us of whom Biden spoke is honorable, whether or not we are called upon to race up the stairs of a burning building to save someone's life. It is the tragedy of our condition that someday all heroes must die, we all must die.

I would argue it ultimately doesn't matter when or how or where you lost your beloved. We project ourselves into the experiences of other people, especially those that we love, and it hurts to think that they hurt, it makes us cry to think that they suffered. Have we yet developed the wisdom to project ourselves into the experiences of people who are not Americans and feel their pain as keenly as we do that of our own? And if not, why not?

It seems to me as I watch these ceremonies on TV on this 10th anniversary, that there are less people crying out there in audience, less people weeping as they speak the names of the lost. That's good. As a little boy who lost his Dad in the towers said "I get a little agitated sometimes, because I don't want to be known as someone directly affected by 9/11: I want to be known for who I am." What wisdom! May the adults take heed, and begin to lay to rest our culture of victim-hood. Let's heed the words of a child and ease his burden. Let us know that it's wisdom to heal and it's strength to accept and go on, released of the binding chains of suffering, though informed by its lessons. I hope that this 10th anniversary comes with a lessening of pain in the world, not just in America, and that the culture of victim-hood that sprang up in the years following 9/11 will begin to fade away. Hanging onto anger, to hurt is ultimately not a creative act. It is possible to honor heroes without suffering. It is possible, and necessary, to make justice without hating. If we don't, September 11's will continue to happen both here and around the world until we perish from the Earth.

1 World Trade Center is finally going up. Mayor Bloomberg calls it a "symbol of our freedom," which to me is an absurdity. The Twin Towers were, and this new tower will be, symbols of American money and power which is why terrorists attacked them in the first place. It would behoove us to start telling more truths, and to begin being more clear-minded about who we really are. It would behoove us to get our symbols right, and to understand that freedom is not something that you build with steel and concrete but rather with wisdom, compassion and truth, and by defending the rights of your neighbors wherever in the world they may live.

I fear that, in our passion and our willingness to be led by flag-wavers, we Americans are setting ourselves up to ignore the lessons of 9/11. What if we get it wrong again? What if we become only more arrogant, and not more wise? What if we become more deluded, and not more clear-headed about the world? What if we never learn that our very survival depends upon us caring as much about the suffering of a child in Iraq as the suffering of a child in New York City?

In Piedmont, it's a sunny day. Here, I am as safe and happy as I have ever been in my life. The New York City real estate is sold, Tiny Town is behind us, and I have FF by my side here in this peaceful little house in the Carolina forest. The break up with New York is complete, at least in a material sense. Behind me, the muted television continues to flash terrible images of a decade ago and views of New York City today where water and flowers fill the space where fire and rubble were before. In front of me, the big kitchen windows look out on our green back yard: The winter garden is sprouting in the autumn sun, and the wonderful deep, forest that stretches out beyond that, filled with things to discover and grow. I will go out to the forest today with my gloves and tools. I will go to tend to the Garden today. And if I remember what I've left behind, it will be with love.

Hurricane in Piedmont

2011-08-27T20:55:00.014-04:00

There was a moment this hurricane weekend when I thought, "I am afraid".

We have only owned this house in Piedmont for two months and we've lived in it for only six weeks. We only just got the custom blinds installed in the kitchen, and I know hurricanes: They mess stuff up.

When I was poor and landless and living in New York City, I loved hurricanes. I loved the mess they made, the hole they tore in the control freakiness of the big city. Once, I spent a weekend on Fire Island in the teeth of one of them, running around on the beach nearly naked, screaming challenges at the wind, and then creeping along the boardwalks behind the dunes where tiny white-tail deer were waiting motionless in the swamp for the storm to pass. I rejoiced then in the destructive force of the wind. I didn't worry about getting hurt, or things getting hurt.

But I have lost that urban brashness. Now I have something of serious worth that the hurricane could take from me. Now I am different. I have trees.

As we stowed the patio furniture, stacked the cushions in the living room, and packed the two-car brick garage tight with our two cars and everything else that might turn into a missile in high wind, what tore at my heart was the trees, these magnificent trees that have enchanted me from the first time we drove up to our new house. We have only just met each other, these trees and I. There are huge, mature willow oaks at the front and back, venerable natives of North Carolina with great, grey trunks. There are girly pink, bobblehead crape myrtles in the backyard with their slick, peeling skins, and the fluttering, lacy dogwoods who gather beneath the oak canopy. There's the row of Leyland cypress which somebody planted too close together some years ago along the northern border of our property and which I've promised to prune hard come fall, and there's the spindly, young pear tree standing tentatively next to the back deck. And then there are those old men, the native North Carolina long needle pines, straight backed giants in the woods out back, and our squat, bodacious Brunswick fig with its leaves like big flat hands, blowsily overspilling its protected spot in back of the garage. And there, there by the back gate, is the bay tree standing spit-shined and dark green, stiff like an obedient schoolboy in his brand new suit.

I cannot protect them from the hurricane. Neither, with all of our preparations, can we protect ourselves from this storm if she wants to take us. But in my heart, it's the trees, the trees. Will the trees make it through?

Before the storm, the air goes quite still. For a day before it hits, a gray wetness hangs in the air making the atmosphere heavy and motionless. The birds go silent, group by group, and all crawling and flying things shut down for business except for the frogs that start gathering closer in to the house, one very large one even appearing at a kitchen window as if sent by the amphibian world to warn us. Storm, says the frog with his googly eyes. And then he disappears into the bushes. Soon then come the wet globs of something not really rain, just drops of sweat flung from the brow of this monster dancer, hurricane Irene.

FF occupies himself assembling the new wet vac, taking the battery powered sump on a test run and reading the directions for our last line of defense against wet basement: the hand operated bilge pump. I flit and fret around the house filling water bottles and bathtubs, feeling unsettled, and worrying for the trees. In the calm before the storm they go still, gathering themselves as if taking a big, collective arboreal breath. And when the wind gusts start up, we watch as their great crowns sway and bend with the wind, tossing leaf clusters, dry twigs and needles down to the ground like candies from some massive piñata. The noble wood, more flexible than we could imagine, bends and bends hard. But it does not break. And Irene, who capriciously decides to pirouette just enough to the East to save us all, leaves the sky a wooly white, throws some trash on the ground and turns her attentions elsewhere.

Piedmont, it seems was just out of reach. And while the coast was slammed, we were merely put through our paces. Irene laughs as she lumbers on, gathering her wide skirts around her. The TV maps show her moving north, towards our friends and family up Virginia way and on to Tiny Town and New York City where some await her, huddled in apartments. There in New York City mass transit is shutting down and people are evacuating from low lying areas. I think of my friends, stuck uptown by the closed GW bridge and the shut-down subway system, and I am concerned. But my heart also does a little happy dance that I am here worrying about trees, and not there depending on the works of man to save me.

I am in Piedmont where people handle storms with chainsaws and and generators. I am in Piedmont, where the forest and the hills are my fortress, and where the trees are braver and wiser than I shall ever be.

Harlem to Hayti: In Which I Discover That I Have Stumbled Into Another Great Black American City

2011-08-13T09:09:00.031-04:00

My reading list is a trail of breadcrumbs set out for me by an unknown and apparently all-knowing hand. The choices in books I make are driven sometimes by nostalgia and comfort, sometimes by curiosity, and lately (though indirectly) by The BlogLily Summer Reading Program (this week's category is Men's Genre). At the best of times my library is a collection of bottled messages that hint about the journey I am on in this life. This week, Lewis Shiner's historical novel Black & White was just such a message in a bottle.

Here in Piedmont the rain is falling this weekend, soft and gentle. The summer rain here changes plans, but it's not unwelcome. I have been comparing temperatures during our last month here, and so far there's been not one day that's been significantly hotter than it was on the same day in Tiny Town, eight hours to the north. Indeed, because of the foothills we're in and the old mountains two hours to the west, it goes cooler at night and the humidity is never as oppressive as it was along the banks of the mighty Delaware. And it's never, ever as overwhelming as it was inside the concrete canyons of New York City.

But the sun. Well, this Dixie sun is something else. Piedmont sun is brash and unforgiving. It will take you down for the count in fifteen minutes or less if you let it. The Piedmont sun irradiates this red clay earth and bakes it until it cracks and screams for mercy. It makes the stones sing, stills the trees and hushes the birds and cicadas. You watch your flower beds wilt so fast it's as if your eyes had become stop-motion cameras, and only those ancient, great grandaddies, the Carolina long needle pines, appear unperturbed. You can imagine how that sun brought people to a boil in the summer of 1968 (the summer after Martin Luther King was assassinated) in Harlem and down here in our new home which, for literary purposes, I call Piedmont.

Reading Lewis Shiner's novel Black & White this week, I found out that our house is a short drive from one of the most promising black metropolises America ever had: It was called Hayti, named after the country of nearly the same spelling, but here in the South it is pronounced HATE-eye as Shiner significantly points out in the first chapter. If you try the sound of Hayti on your tongue a few times, you will also get it that this book is not only about the rough and tumble racial and economic history of Durham NC, apex of the Research Triangle, but that it's also an exploration of the self-hate and shame that are fundamental components of the psychologies of both racists and and their victims.

As in Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer (see last post), everyone in Black & White ends up related to everyone else, though in this book the biological links happen through incest, rape and infidelity rather than more cheerful biological urge. That sort of neatness, tied up in a nice bow by the end of the novel, might annoy you if you're feeling critical because after all life almost never happens just that way. But fiction don't aim at being life: It's designed to tell a story that goes beyond the often boring facts of regular life, and to reach toward a bigger thought. In this book, one of the bigger thoughts is that Urban Renewal was the inheritor of the spirit of Jim Crow: By leveling the old black neighborhood of Hayti to make way for highways and the broken promised of modern housing, the emerging Black American middle class in Durham, its self-sustaining economy and its vibrant culture was cynically and purposefully dealt a terrible blow.

The other big message of the book is that truth is not neat or well-ordered, and that black and white are just cartoon lines we draw in our minds to make reality easier to think about. The adjectives by which we group and segregate people like white and black, poor and rich, bastard or legitimate do not offer us any useful understanding when it comes to having relationships with real people.

In our story, (white) cartoon artist Michael discovers that his (white) dying engineer father Robert reluctantly participated in the flattening of the vibrant Hayti neighborhood of Durham NC to make way for the highway system being built in the 60s to connect the points of the newly-emerging Research Triangle. Reluctantly, Robert became part of the broken promise to build newer, better housing for the black residents of Hayti while he simultaneously fell in love with it and its (black) people, particularly a beautiful (black) voodoo priestess ironically named Mercy. It doesn't ruin the story if I tell you that Michael finds out in the course of investigating his dying father's past that he is color challenged, and that he falls in love with a charming (black) woman who runs the Hayti Heritage Center where, in modern times, the archives of the long-gone black metropolis are kept.

Parts of this fictional history are truly black and white and indisputable. The hand of organized racism continues to meddle in the affairs of the South and, indeed, the nation. Hayti existed in Durham, and now where it was there are restaurants, highways, and a baseball stadium. The summer of 1968 was a boiler all over America as black revolutionary groups decided it was time to take up arms. And yes, there probably are black revolutionaries like the book's Howard Barrett mummified in the cement pilings of bridges along with others like Jimmy Hoffa. Hell, the NJ Turnpike is probably one big mausoleum, if you think about it! And the careful narrative of Piedmont places and things in the book made for the best topographic introduction to our new home that I could have asked for.

That said, there are parts of the book that seem too cartoony, as when Michael naively wonders why you are considered black if you have even one drop of black blood in you. And why can't someone declare himself white for the same reason? Well, Michael, that would be because of slavery and the peculiar "one drop rule" invented by slave owners to assure that their own progeny born of their female slaves stayed their property. That rather obvious fact aside, the one drop reference is echoed later on when Michael can't seem to get the open-armed welcome he'd hoped for from the black people he befriends who aren't that ready to accept him as black, either. They make the same error, though for more understandable reasons of self-preservation, of suggesting that racial categories are actually useful for determining who should be your friend. Shiner implies a discussion going forward about how America should proceed as racial categorization becomes ever more impossible to usefully or truthfully declare on Ye Olde Census Forme. Could it be that it's time to just love one another, right now?

Regrettably, though, hate so often seems to have more force and staying power than love, no matter how earth-shattering that love may be. That is a proposition that I certainly fight against in my heart, as does Ruth, Michael's (white) mother. Ruth, daughter of the local klan-type wizard, ends up being the best-drawn character in the book and goes from being the most unsympathetic person ever to someone with tremendous depth of suffering and endurance. Ruth is ultimately shown to be the biggest warrior for the power and endurance of love in the book.

It is an interesting, and pretty convincing, argument that Urban Renewal was a tool of racists to mow down the burgeoning black economies in the South and in New York City (I am thinking also now of the Cross Bronx Expressway). Harlem, where I lived for over a decade somehow avoided the wrecking ball for the most part, and I hereby make a promise to myself to read up on why. If an aggressive desire to wipe out increasingly independent and prosperous black communities was part of the inspiration for Urban Renewal as Shiner proposes, then there must also have been an element of simply not valuing black culture, too. The (white) folks in charge of the building of highways, bridges and skyscrapers put them up where it made the most economic and geographical sense. Or was the destruction of these places indeed a more cynical and deliberate war against Black America? Or does it even really matter?

Out of our destruction comes rebirth, Shiner seems to say. Time, love and hate mold our environment and alter our gene pools, yes, but eventually we will have to die to our desire to see life in cartoon black and white if we are ever going to enter the Promised Land.

When the rain comes to Piedmont on one of these soft gray days, every living thing relaxes. The magnolias open their glossy plate-sized leaves to catch the water, and the long stalks of the Rose of Sharon bob up and down in the mist saying "yes, yes, yes". The silver gray daylight is punctuated by brief spots of sun that show that the grass has gone emerald and has grown half an inch overnight. Only the Carolina long needle pines are unmoved, unchanging, slow growing in rain or shine. The pines wait patiently for the destroying fire that they need to burn them down to the ground and make the soil just right for the germination of their hard, indestructible, primordial seeds, in their slow-motion, eternal dance of love.

Lush Tapestries and Scary Basements: Reading Kingsolver and Sebold, side-by-side

2011-08-07T21:44:00.017-04:00

I don't typically take such a businesslike approach to my reading, but since I am enrolled in the BlogLily Summer Reading Program I really have to keep on a tight schedule. The notion that summer might end without my having read the required 8 books in 8 categories is unacceptable to me, and anyway I am deriving great internal comfort from the exquisite demands of the Program. I am a freelancer and every effort I have made since 1989 has been at my own behest and it is nice to have someone else issuing the marching orders for a change. In The Summer Reading Program, Lily is in charge.

The outline of the Program is helpful. Instructions are given. And though the directions can be interpreted broadly, they provide a clear direction. While executing these directions, interesting things happen. A marble is pitched into the circle, hitting another marble and then another. Nothing is random.

Assignment by BlogLily: Read a book recommended by a librarian.

I had lived in Piedmont for a total of ten days and actually had to locate the library first.I found a branch which interested me because of its proximity and also its brag that it has the largest collection of books by Black Americans in the country, and I applied for a library card. It was difficult to get the card because my Piedmont Electric bill does not bear the same name as my maiden name driver's license, but I got the card anyway thanks to the mercies of an older librarian who clearly did not want to deal with me having a snit at her desk that hot afternoon. After that sweaty episode I asked the much younger assistant librarian for a recommendation.

Mariah, the assistant librarian, is stunning. Her café au lait complexion, enormous gray eyes, gently dimpled chin, and serious expression were frankly unsettling to me. Beauty sometimes is. I have stood in the Louvre weeping at the sight of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. Mariah's beautiful self was clothed in a nondescript gray pencil skirt, blue cotton t-shirt and an anonymous-looking blue cardigan. The plainness of her garb was like a toss away, the absolute certification that either she didn't know she was beautiful or, better, didn't care. I noticed that her fingernails were carefully trimmed and naturally very white at the tips which turned up at the ends like Dutch clogs, and I couldn't stop staring at them as she processed my library card application. When she handed me the card, I asked her for a book recommendation, and watched transfixed as she inserted one curly, white-tipped finger into the corner of her mouth and thought carefully. "Come this way," she said finally, and led me to fiction, K. "Prodigal Summer" by Barbara Kingsolver was her recommendation.

Lush and beautiful are the best words to describe this tour de force novel. I am sure you've all read it, but I hadn't read any Kingsolver. Having just moved to the thrumming, buzzing, fecund forests of Piedmont, I wallowed in this book and its images. But more than just loving it, I admire it for its formality and unashamed clarity of message. Yes, there are moments when the novel's carefully woven story lines about mating, hunting and forming mutual protection groups feel way too pat and preachy. And except for their differing ages and geographical locations, the three main women characters in the book might be the exact same person: Deanna the ranger who takes the side of coyotes over her own mate; Lusa the lepidopterist, who is widowed young by her farmer husband who had used poisons to kill insects and kills honeysuckle; and Nannie Rawley, the elderly but spirited apple grower who gets on just fine without a man. All these are utterly self-determined Earth Women who don't really need the galumphing men around them much, and who are much more in tune with the interconnectedness and magic of nature than their gun-toting, pesticide spraying counterparts.

But after I relaxed into the world of Zebulon Mountain, after I gave in, true admiration set in. Kingsolver's book is a formal composition in which the interconnectedness of all life is a theme that is expressed in different ways, rather like a simple melody is embellished in the movements of a symphony. The interconnected stories weave a lush tapestry that, after all, makes sense and it very entertaining to read. She has a flawless ear for her characters' internal conversations, and I loved learning about the ways of coyotes, moths, American elms, cockle burrs and a variety of other things that Kingsolver describes with great precision Also fun is that the sex scenes are quite yummy. After I read the sweaty opening mating scene between Deanna and her much younger lover, I kept turning to the demure photo of Kingsolver on the back cover and wondering where in heaven's name she came up with this hot stuff. What we don't know about lady authors could, well, fill a book!

The New York Times really slammed this novel when it came out. Snootily, Jennifer Schuessler wrote:

''Prodigal Summer'' has its plot twists, few of them surprising. As in any ecosystem (and any soap opera), everybody turns out to be related to everybody else, and just about everyone's fate is determined by the aftershocks of a collision of sperm and egg. Lusa comes up with a novel solution to the Darwinist's famous problem of explaining altruism, and Deanna realizes she may not be the evolutionary ''dead weight'' she has imagined. In the end the expendable males have disappeared, and the women and children band together in their own blended families, like the coyotes of Zebulon Mountain. This may be an attractive fable, but it doesn't make for the kind of psychologically complex literature Kingsolver is well capable of. Biology may be destiny in the forest, but good fiction -- like good sex -- happens mostly in the head.

As someone who has broken up with New York, I also reject Jennifer Schuessler's whole anti-fable trip. Am I nuts? I have read the last sentence of that paragraph about twenty times and I still can't get what the hell she's trying to say. Sex also happens in the good old flesh, Jennifer! And what, pray tell, is psychologically complex enough? Did she not find the sex in this book good? Or did everything in this book just end up too sort of happy and OK to be good writing? Clearly I am missing her point.

BlogLily Assignment: Read a book in Women's Genre

I have a notion that "psychologically complex" for many modern critics might be Helen in Alice Sebold's novel "The Almost Moon". This is what I took out of the library after turning in Prodigal Summer as my "woman's genre" choice. I figured it must be women's genre because of Lucky, the story of her own rape which I read years ago. I am telling you true when I write that Moon is the first novel EVER that I nearly gave up on in the first 10 pages, despite its being very well-written. First of all, it's depressing as hell. Second of all, there were places, landmarks and human frailties in the book that felt a bit too eerily close to some crumpled pages in my own life to feel happy reading about them in a novel. Enough said.

Yes, books about screwed up people and the horrific acts committed by them in the bright, clean light of suburban America are ones I generally want to avoid. I think that for a lot of literary critics declaiming from on high at important magazines and newspapers, however, "screwed up" is synonymous with "interesting" and "psychologically complex". I often felt when I was living in New York that unless I suffered from some awful, life-destroying mental problem, I could not possibly be spotted as noteworthy or interesting. I worked at Interview Magazine and, believe me, I know what I'm talking about. Interestingly, the further from New York I get, the more interesting other people seem to find me despite the fact that I am less screwed up than I used to be. Here in Piedmont, it appears that many people think that just being kind and pleasant is quite enough without being, well, Interesting.

In "The Almost Moon", the central screw-up is Helen's mother Claire Knightley whose agoraphobia and obvious narcissism make her an awful mother and wife, and even cause her to allow a little boy who's been hit by a car to die in the street because she simply cannot move outside her property line to help him. Helen, Claire Knightley 's damaged daughter, does her best to become a wife and mother, but ends up getting divorced, having iffy relationships with her own daughters, and smothering Mom to death with a hand towel and stashing her in the basement. This horrific act happens quite early in the book and is the only really positive attempt to help herself that Helen attempts in the the whole rest of the novel. The father is passive, helpless in the face of his life and his wife, and he lives a shadow life in his destroyed boyhood home which he populates with wooden sculptures of the people in his life. Creepy.

Yes, I almost closed this book forever. After all, who needs to add more ugly to life? This book was all death, as much death as Prodigal Summer is all life, and I really like life better. That said, after setting it aside, I picked up Moon again. And again. Because Sebold is such a very good writer that she seduces you into a kind of lull in which you feel that the outlandishly bad world of her characters is really not so abnormal after all. In that hallucinatory lull, you can really appreciate Sebold's stand-up good writing skills, and before you know it, you've reached the end of the book which is, mercifully, short.

Would I recommend Prodigal Summer to a friend? Yes, absolutely. It's like a warm bath in pheromones and honey. What about The Almost Moon? Yup, as long as the friend has been in therapy for at least 6 years.

Did I learn anything from Prodigal Summer? Yes. I learned about coyotes, moths, goats, elm trees, and lots of other cool things. Lesson from The Almost Moon: If having crazy parents is awful, killing your Mom with a hand towel is even worse.

Painting: "Coyote", Marilyn McQuarrie

Going on about things elsewhere

2011-08-05T12:59:00.005-04:00

Not apparently content with writing about my interior world in Breaking Up With New York, I have gotten involved with a new community where interesting things happen and where I am having conversations about the outside world. I recommend HASTAC to those who want to get in on the fun! I defend the Virtual Plaza here . Some resent my defense.

Whatever I Want

2011-07-25T21:53:00.010-04:00

I am subscribed to BlogLily's Summer Reading Program and I recommend that you subscribe as well. It is free. If Lily has more packets left, you will get one in the mail and start your lovely, literary summer trip, keeping a list of your reads like you haven't done since you were in gradeschool. You must read (at least) 8 books before the summer is over and, one hopes, write something about each one of them. I am not sure what date Lily marks as the end of summer, she did not say. I am shooting for finishing my 8 books by the end of August, but you may wish to inquire with her further.

I received my packet from the BlogLily Summer reading program in the mail, and put it on the kitchen windowsill where I could see it often. I left it unopened for two days in order to heighten my excitement. I waited for a quiet, sunny early morning, until I was alone with a hot cup of coffee, before I slit open the envelope with a real letter opener and sorted through the contents. I am impressed with the small patches of stick-on Velcro that hold the little handmade booklet closed, and I am impressed also with the carefully constructed little paper triangle that you slip over the top corner to keep it all neat together. The glassine sleeve, reminiscent of those used to protect the fragile outer-skins of aged and fragile books, was the piece de resistance, making of the booklet and its accompanying bookmark something clearly meant for keeping. Well done, Lily!

Naturally I, who have zig-zagged through life in a way that would make most people nauseous, started with the category "Whatever You Want". After all the hubbub of the move from Tiny Town, what I wanted most was a bit of wisdom and a pale finger pointing at the moon . So here you have it: My review of Diary of the Way: Three Paths to Enlightenment by Ira Lerner (A&W Visual Library, 1974).

First, I am delighted that a company that otherwise spends all of its time making and marketing root beer should take a moment to contemplate The Way. What fun!

Diary of the Way is not fiction, but rather a meditative medley of text and photographs that takes the reader with the author as he gets to know three Asian masters: An old Japanese man who is a judo and Aikido master; a beautiful young Chinese woman with a sad past who is an herbal healer and Qi Gong master; and a young Chinese-American man who is a Taoist and master of Tai Chi Chuan. Lerner follows his masters around the island of Hawaii where they were all living in the 1970s, and delves into their practices and lives, writing down what they say and photographing them. Ultimately, he paints very personal portraits of three very distinct, profound and memorable people.

It strikes me that while this book came out only 5 years after the Summer of Love, it doesn't have that patchouli smell or texture of fake Indian clothing that so many spiritually-oriented books of that period do. It is rather a landmark exploration for Western readers of a cultural and spiritual approach to life that was all but unknown to most people at the time and which holds up very nicely today as a kind of primer to Eastern philosophy.

What I like about this book, beside the great photographs and tasteful editing, is its refusal to be a how-to. Lerner allows his masters to make their points themselves, and he stays out of their way except to make a few, marginal editorial comments that put some of their ideas into a historical context. He is the omniscient observer, not inserting his personality much, though I got the feeling that he fell a bit in love with the herbal healer whose name, by the way, is Lily.

I also like how Lerner lets his masters be human beings, allows them to discuss their own trajectories not only in their arts but also in their personal lives. The older master who took up Aikido in his 50s is an inspiration to me. Lily, who lived under a repressive Chinese regime which "stole (her) childhood" from her, sometimes forgets to eat, works way too hard, and occasionally regresses to the childhood she never had, hiding in her favorite peach tree and refusing to come down. The young Taoist master is a classic portrait of the first generation Chinese-American who brings his ancient art to non-Asian seekers with a distinctly American flair and energy.

Ira Lerner's book is a finger pointing at the moon, not saying what to do, but merely gesturing in the direction of a path you might want to consider. Enlightenment is not a destination, the book emphasizes, but rather a journey that is won every single day by working with the raw material that fate has dealt us within the context of a discipline.

Who is this author/photographer, Ira Lerner? I have no idea and neither does anyone. I have looked for him everywhere on the web, and I do not see that he has written any other books or put forth any other works of note, though the photos in this book are really quite unusual, ranging from the purely documentary to the metaphorical level of high art. Despite Lerner's own lack of notoriety, his little book has become one of the classics of Asian spiritual practice for Westerners.

I recommend it. It will go well with a beach vacation, a curl up on the sofa on a rainy day, or as a book that you keep in your bottom drawer at the office to grab a few pages from when no one is watching.

Point Structure: I do not currently know how many points this review has gleaned me for my Summer Reading Program booklet. I know I get 10 just for writing down the title. Probably I get another 10 for blogging about it. And I should probably get 10 just for mentioning Lily's name a bunch of times and embedding a live link to her blog on this page. For now, I will imagine this effort is worth 30 points. And now I must go find my local library, which will be fun since we've only lived here for 10 days, and get myself a recommendation for a new book to read.

Good way to spend the summer, ¿nu?

In Which the Caravan of Gypsies Arrives, Quietly.

2011-07-20T08:22:00.015-04:00

It is now officially a week that FF and I have been inhabiting our new house, placing things, installing things, washing things that couldn't get washed before we left Tiny Town, throwing things that evaded throwing before. I can see already that inhabiting a house, a house that is our own, is going to be a drawn out process and, as much as we'd like to complete the job in the span of a few days and find ourselves in richtig gut order, that desire is inconsistent with reality. No, inhabiting a house will be a longsome thing, and the house's secrets will emerge but slowly.

The move from our "big, big bed in the tiny, tiny house, in the tiny, tiny town on the BI-I-I-IG RIVER" went smoothly because of the joint forces of FF and me (hard workers, persistent packers) and our three movers from the Joseph Holy Trucking Company. Joseph Holy himself is a rosy, golden haired man, boyish in fact, who claims with a rakish grin that he is much older than he looks. He was recommended to us by a friend who was moved by Holy to Greensboro and had nothing bad to say about the experience. The other members of the Holy Moving Squad, Anthony (who drove my car down) and Faluzzo (a dark brooding man with soul and evident smarts), were rhythmic workers who punched and kidded each other like schoolboys all the way South. They kept their deal, hauling us down to our new digs without breaking one darned thing, as far as I can tell.

I had imagined that our Caravan of Gypsies would lose a few items along the way. I imagined us, a cheery band, clattering down the road with pots and pans clanging on their iron hooks against the sides of the painted wagon, a few dishes slipping out the back and crashing to the road behind us amidst howls of (our own) laughter. But as so often has happens, when I fully prepare myself for the worst with a detailed pre-story, disaster does not happen. Not that losing a plate or two, or even my beloved, spindly bedside table that Mrs. Vega brought to me when I was bedridden in Harlem, or the blown glass bowl I gave FF for Christmas that looks like primordial waters swirling through the air, would have been a disaster. But it could have hurt a bit to see a favorite thing not make it to the new house, to the new life, to the Ark that will carry us going forward.

The Ark. Perhaps that will be my name for this place, but I am not sure yet. Not at all. Our petite Georgian brick sitting demurely on nearly an acre of peaceful, wooded North Carolina land, the lot spanning the distance between Monticello and Woodridge, has not revealed it's name to me yet. She is too occupied with adjusting her sturdy haunches to the inevitable added weight of our lives, accomodating us on her resolute floor boards and sturdy old beams. She is too focused on the settling that's going on to have casual chats with me about such apparent trivialities as names. But both the house and I know that names are of great moment, and that is why we have silently agreed to wait to find hers. Don't rush! I hear her warn. All in good, good time.

I know that just a month ago the Passage family lived here with their skibble of children and tiny collie dogs. And before them, Dr. and Mrs. Johnston were here and they installed various modern conveniences in impeccable good taste. And before them, there was Judy who was good friends with the next door neighbor, the neighbor who brought us a bouquet of flowers cut from her garden last Thursday, Judy who planted a sturdy hedgerow of arbor vitae right between herself and that very same neighbor. And in the prehistoric days, before ranch houses were built, there were others who left signs of themselves buried deep in these fragrant, wooden closets and walls, buried deep in the cool cement of the basement where simple cleanings and changings of the guard never dislodged them. In our house, for it is our house now, we will find notes, marks, pieces of yellow, brittle tape stuck inside cabinet doors, papers stuck between bricks, perhaps a toy. I will find signs of them in the garden, where trees were planted and beds dug, out there beyond the dog fence in what I am now calling The Uncharted Territories, an overgrown foresty part of the property where the surveyor says there is an old wood shed, a pump-house, and what used to be a formal boxwood garden. They are still here. I can feel them. I can hear them. I will find them.

You never pass anywhere without leaving a mark, whether it's in a house or a person's heart. I want this to be a fresh start, like my fresh start with FF. I hear myself whispering to myself as I place clothes in drawers, may there never be a cross word in this house. And like all hopes and pre-histories, reality will be different. But it is good and right to try, and if one must leave marks, may they be gentle ones.

As for this town, we do not know it yet. But we sense that it has big shoulders, a strong sense of purpose, and a purposeful desire to move forward in history with long, muscular strides. We also sense that it carries in its hip pocket a Southern past, like a well-used and sweated on notebook, a Southern past with all the graceful, awkward, very beautiful and very ugly parts that that every Southern town has. We are part of the spicy swirl of outsiders coming in, the mutt-mix of harsh and OK, foreign and American, seekers and settlers. Then there are those who have always been here with their soft accents, their dangling arms, their dogs, their quick smiles and their steady, milk blue gazes. Those are the ones I am keeping an eye on most: I am wondering what they have to teach me.

The Caravan of Gypsies has arrived, oddly quiet and unbroken. Treading lightly. Watching. Alert.

Photo: Bulgaria Magura Cave Paintings, flickr.com

Breaking up is (so strangely) hard to do.

2011-06-29T09:08:00.022-04:00

How very odd.

Our break up is now official, New York. The closing of my Harlem apartment happened this week. Without me. Because I had already evaporated, New York. Sorry, I simply could not make it. And as you are well aware, the fact that I was not physically present at our final date was most definitely your fault. So, so typical of you, New York.

So very like you, New York! We had made three dates, marked in ink on our calendars. But they came and went while three lawyers, two real estate agents and a co-op Board argued and prevaricated. Finally, one of the three lawyers suggested a date that I had already said was impossible for me, so I just sighed, sucked it up, signed the POA, sent it to my lawyer and managed the break up with you. Remotely.

So amazingly typical of you, New York, that we simply could not find a mutually convenient time to meet! Next time have your people call my people, OK? You remind me of all my New York "friends" who I only "see" on Facebook because nowhere in their high-powered New York lives is there ever a free moment to meet in the flesh. Ooh so sorry! So wish I could be there! Call me soon? Love you lots. (X bloody O.) You, New York, have been consistent from beginning to end.

Until three hours before closing, I was still getting calls from your lawyer regarding changes in the contract of sale (details which cost me money, of course), but by that point I was already with FF in the car speeding purposefully towards our new life, down way south of the Delaware Welcome Center. "They want to change the XYZ to the PDQ", my lawyer said. Yeah, yeah whatever, I shot back. Just. Do. It.

So in true New York fashion, I let my person meet with your people, and he stood in for me at what might have, could have been,most certainly should have been an important and defining moment. He called me at 5:10 to let me know it was done and that he had deposited the check in my bank account. By this morning there were some extra zeroes right there in my balance, and in those cold, silent numbers was written: The End.

I had hoped for some kind of ritual to end our time together. I had hoped to pass the certificate of shares for my beloved, sunny co-op apartment to the nice French people who had bought it, perhaps offering a little speech, thanking everyone, and going out for drinks afterwards to raise a glass to you, New York. Then I would have boarded the NJ Transit express train to Trenton for the last time, and I would have enjoyed those 57 quiet minutes, pondering what we have been to each other, getting thoughtful as I always do as the train glides across the Meadowlands which are impossibly, unexpectedly beautiful at sunset. Instead, the end came with a 30 second phone call: "OK, I've deposited the check. See you!" Great. Thanks. Click.

So that's how it is, New York, huh? After all we've been through together? After 22 years? A sigh and a fat check?

I know that it's over, New York, but I still can't quite feel it. I guess all big love dies hard. The truth is that as of now I never, ever have to go back to see you again. I am free of you. Sure, I may return someday to visit the few luminous souls who made my 22 years with you worthwhile. Perhaps I will stand once again in the cool, gray silence of the Guggenheim spiral near closing time when all you hear is your own breath and the shuffling steps of the security guard coming to kick you out onto Fifth Avenue. Maybe someday I will again sit motionless in Bryant Park, watching the human comedy speed-walk by in its custom suit and tie. Yes, maybe I'll see you again, New York.

Someday.

But for now, I think it's best we spend some time apart.

Photograph: Untitled (crowd 1), 1992, Alexey Titarenko, Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York

Going, going, gone.

2011-06-10T08:08:00.018-04:00

The past few weeks have been all about the acceleration towards The Big Move. I am physically and emotionally tired. Breathless. Excited. Torn.

FF and I have agreed to buy a house in North Carolina where we will start a very new and different life together, and that feels radical enough for a troubadour like me. Next week it is likely that the New York apartment will close and I will hand over the keys, forever losing my "foothold" in the New York City. That too is breathtaking change, even after all the build-up as remarked upon in this blog. And we are also leaving Tiny Town after two enchanted years and two months here, and it feels surprising and shocking to me though the leaving comes from plans long in the making.

I do not do all that well with change. Viewed from the outside, I am efficient, organized and admirably energetic in the way I organize people, re-locations and projects of all sorts. My image is especially shiny right now in my circle considering that I am closing on two residences and moving from two residences in 90 days time while still rather hobbled by my recently broken right ankle. Yet I appear to be a whirlwind of forward movement against all obstacles. Within, I am straining to slow down, bending against the existential speed of it all and I am in mourning over the places and people that I am leaving behind. Again. Only FF gets to see the tired, the occasional flood of tears, my existential struggle. Poor FF. But that's one of jobs of a mate.

While I patted dark, powdery coffee grounds into my little silver Bialetti espresso maker this morning in order to rev up the old engine, I was contemplating my mother. She has lived in the same house in the same town that I grew up in for half a century. She has no intention of leaving, not even for a short trip. My mother has been there so long that, in some ways, she has become the place while the place has actually left her. She has been the constant, living in that house, opening her bookshop every day, going to the Acme market, the post office, the local bank, the local privately-owned pharmacy. For many people in the area, including old school friends of mine, Mother is more of a constant than the streets and buildings themselves.

Every so often she will tell me how another store has closed, another person has died, and some other has moved away. The other day it was the Acme supermarket that she's been shopping at since I was a little girl. She knows everybody there, and calls them by name (first) and they call her by hers (title and last). When that store closed recently, it was a death for her, the loss of another piece of her life, and until my sister took her over to the Penn Valley market where she saw most of the old staff had been relocated, she didn't brighten. She walked through the market like a union shop steward, reported my sister with an audible grin, checking in on everybody to make sure they were OK. Yes, my mother has been where she lives long enough to have actually become more the place than the place itself.

That has not been my experience. I've moved a lot. Even the moves within Manhattan Island have been like moves to other countries. I separate my Lower East side period from my Harlem period with a thick black line. My trail has gone from Mom's house to New Haven, New Haven to the Lower East Side, Lower East Side to Upper West Side. Upper West Side to Long Island. Long Island back to Upper West Side. Upper West Side to Harlem, Harlem to Berlin, Berlin to Cologne, Cologne back to Harlem, Harlem to New Jersey, New Jersey to Tiny Town. And there are missing bits in that chain of events, too. Now this move, perhaps my last, is from Tiny Town to North Carolina. That's a lot of boxes, baby! Of course, material things have been lost along the way, though I have always tried to be careful to place my belongings with care and not leave a trail. Always there are people lost along the way, jokes, a place that made good tacos, and lots of other bits and rituals. As we get ready to make this Great Leap South, I am already conscious than many of the faces that now furnish my world will not remain in my ken. As it has been and ever shall be, a very few stick and many fall away.

Why have I moved so much? Why have I embraced constant change when I love so deeply, and lose the familiar so hard? Like Esperanza in Sandra Cisneros's excellent book, The House on Mango Street, I have always carried within me the ideal of My House. It would be a house with two floors and an attic, not too big and not too small. It would have a fireplace or two, and it would not be new but would have the wonderful scars and beauty marks that age brings, and its basement would offer the cool, mineral smell of the earth and unperturbed air. My House would have land, not too much and not too little, where I would grow fruit trees and a vegetable garden and perennials that would surprise and delight me every spring with their faithful coming. And (here I am different from the highly independent Esperanza) it would have in it a man who loved me very, very much.

None of the places I ever lived before were My House. I knew it when I lived in them. And though each of these places had its clear purpose, they were like passageways to another place and I lived lightly in them. I would never really settle in, never fix those cracks in the wall, choosing instead to cover their defects with a bright cloths, pictures, temporary furniture and my gaze left deliberately out of focus. I adjusted my eyes to not see the imperfections, because the inherent and more important imperfection of all of these places was that they were not My House. I knew, I always knew, I'd be moving on.

Ironically, my life as a traveling musician made me feel as "at home" as I have ever felt. The migrant life of the troubadour suited me as nothing before ever had with its sensation of constant motion and novelty, aided by the occasional revisiting of familiar stages and favorite hotels. While I was on the road with a guitar on my back, a suitcase in one hand and an amplifier in the other, I was at home in the whole wide earth and I did not have to feel the constant tension of seeming to be living in place while knowing that it was not my place. I was truly transient, an acknowledged outsider. On the road with my huckleberry partner in music, Mountain Sea, nowhere and everywhere was our home, and we took possession of our world with our songs, our rituals, and our laughter. Anywhere the wandering troubadours arrived was good enough for us: a favorite hotel room, a stage we liked, an isolated railroad station near the Black Sea, or a first-class cabin on an ICE train going 300 KMH. We knew the ropes, knew how to sleep on trains, we knew how to pack a bag -- and we were always on our way by check out time, leaving to others the hard job of staying in place.

Coming back to New York after traveling the world, both Mountain Sea and I felt a bit lost for a while. Lost were the familiar rocking motion of the train and the rituals of the road that made everywhere seem like home. Coming to a stop, we felt completely uncomfortable. Sometimes motion can calm you down, and stopping can make your mind race. My mind raced a lot, until I realized that what I needed was FF, and I set off to find him.

Each move brings with it loss. Each move brings with it some gain. Mother says she hates long goodbyes, and I think both of us suffer any length of leave-taking. I learned it from her. But isn't all life and every moment a sweet goodbye to something? And isn't any thought of permanence an utter illusion?

FF and I so look forward to moving into Our House in a month. We are happy. I know there are cool, empty rooms holding their breath and waiting for our coming, waiting to be filled with new music, new spirit, and new love. We go there knowing that the walls have held other loves, other lives, other sorrows and, if all goes well, we will make it a better place than we found it and, after we are gone, Our House will stand sturdy, ready to hold other hearts.

It is Our House now, the one I have been waiting for all my life. The door is opening to so many possibilities. We are almost home.

Photo above of artwork by Nils Udo: "Das Nest"

Poor man's justice, rich man's justice

2011-05-24T09:23:00.018-04:00

If indeed it is true as the New York Post and the Daily Beast report today that associates of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, recently of Riker's Island the the IMF, are trying to buy off the family of his victim, that is both gross and illegal. True or not (and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it were true), the whole incident made me think about Americans' relationship to money and power.

And here's more gross for you: A smattering of cynical commentators on the web advise the victim of this crime to "Take the money...(because) justice is thin soup." This comment, read in The Daily Beast, is not unique. I'd bet that no one who has actually been raped would ever make such an ignorant comment, but I think it's also a symptom not only of how little abuse against women is seen as a real crime and how deluded Americans can be in regard to the value of money.

It is a critical error to suggest that the victim, a Guinean-American chamber maid from a poor family, should accept a payout to drop the charges and it is an error to imply that justice is an individual matter. Society has a mighty stake in the process of meting out punishment for crimes. The prosecution of criminal acts is not a matter of how much one person can get out of it, either in retribution or payout: Rather it is the fundamental process of maintaining a social order that reflects the commonly held values of fairness, compassion and equal protection under the law that are promised to us by our constitution. It is incumbent upon every citizen to understand that a crime against one of us - including immigrant African chambermaids - is a crime against all of us.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a bully and, now, an (alleged) criminal bully. Personally, I am glad he had his perp walk, despite French objections to that American tradition. I am glad he tried out the room service at Riker's Island and, unlike Jack Lang the former French Minister of Culture and Education who simply couldn't understand why Strauss-Kahn had been denied bail because "no one had died" (!), I think he should still be in jail. I consider it a class issue that Strauss-Kahn (like Schwarzenegger and Clinton et. al.) went after the hired help, and for me it is proof of the continuing war against women, especially poor women. I think there should be more perp walks of rich criminals. My only disappointment was that Strauss-Kahn was not wearing an orange jumpsuit! Quelle horreur that would have been, no?

Americans have been hypnotized to act contrary to their own good. I notice how Americans generally complain more vocally and angrily more about crimes committed by poor immigrants than about those committed by the rich ones who breathe the air of hushed executive suites. Americans assume (falsely) that there is some sort of basic difference between them and the folks coming from Guinea to work as chambermaids, while they are more apt to feel a connection with the powerful and wealthy. The categorization of poor brown people as the "real" criminals or the undesirable element (as in Arizona), and our group failure to punish wealthy criminals as they deserve is symptomatic of the American obsession with material wealth and our fantasy of personal power.

The big fat foible of the so-called American middle class is that it has so far failed to realize that by the economic standards of the 1960s, it no longer exists. The American middle class has had the very earth cut out from underneath it, along with its unions and its educational system, while it was distracted by a daily diet of American Idol, Real Housewives and McDonald's. The average American lives with an illusory sense of his own access to wealth and power, perhaps because of the availability of impossibly cheap goods, including a hyper-abundance of granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances, but he hasn't figured out yet that he has quietly slipped down into the lower middle class in the last 40 years thanks to -- you've got it! -- the crimes of the very rich. The very rich that they idolize. The irony is nausea-inducing.

As it is, Strauss-Kahn can buy his way out of Riker's which makes him different from the rest of us less wealthy people. If the Guinean chambermaid had stolen something from his room, you can bet she'd still be in jail without bail! It's unfortunate for Strauss-Kahn that he will be fairly unpopular here because he's French, and if there's one thing Americans instinctively dislike (for the wrong reasons), it's French people. Oh, and Jewish people, too. But that's OK, I suppose, because the French dislike us just as much and anti-American sentiment is already brewing (among French men) because of our rough treatment of their guy.

As for the advice from some irresponsible parties to the chambermaid to "take the money and run", I hear the voice of The Big Me in all this. I repeat: Justice is not an individual matter, no matter what the cynics write in commentaries in the Daily Beast. Average New Yorkers (perhaps all cosmopolitan populations) believe everything to be an individual matter, purchasable and available for resale. Maybe living in cubes, wedged in between 7 million other people does that to you. The Ego of the urban dweller is trained to be selfish by the pure inconvenience of city life. In my experience, the average city person sees everything in terms of how it affects Self: Self's personal space, Self's job and Self's commute to work. The reality is the exact opposite, of course. And the prosecution of real justice is not and never should be about Self, but rather about Society vigorously protecting itself from those who do it harm.

Me? I'm breaking up with New York and the illusion that of being a few degrees of separation from money and power is an actual goal or value. No, I'm moving to a humbler place where the public transportation is green and free, where small farmers still have a chance and where, I hope, no one ever suggests that justice is for sale.

By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea

2011-05-20T09:17:00.019-04:00

FF and I have decided to greet The End of Days in a lovely cool, green and blue penthouse hotel suite overlooking the sparkling Atlantic Ocean in Virginia Beach. This morning, sunshine poured through the glass curtains in the living room, and we rose early. We intend to sit in the nice deck chairs on the balcony tomorrow and wait for raptured souls to pop up out of the ocean like champagne corks.

In the parking garage across from the hotel, we saw a silver PT Cruiser with neat signs in the back window indicating Saturday, May 21 as the date of the Rapture and a web address to which one could refer for more information. We also noticed they had fishing poles on the roof rack. Apparently, if you fear you might not be raptured, fishing poles are good to have so that you can feed yourself and your family until October when the whole Earth will be destroyed.

Personally, if the whole Earth is going to be destroyed, I think it's a bit late for me to take up fishing.

But a lot of people apparently want to survive for those last five months: In bunkers deep in the Arizona desert, or here in Virginia fishing on the beach casting a line with one hand, while fighting off the less prepared with the other. There will surely be those who didn't go to the web site who will want to eat your food after all the supermarkets are looted. Well, I am in awe of the Survivalist spirit of stubborn resistance to the fiery chimera they have conjured up themselves!

Armageddon can be fun!

The eagerness for an imagined end to all things, expressed so publicly and at such great expense not only of money but eventually of credibility and reputation, is something we should all take a good look at. No one can say these folks aren't sincere: Some have sold their homes and quit their jobs though, as FF remarked, being raptured seems like the best excuse ever for taking a sick day.

Why the enthusiasm for imagining us all wiped out, and why such great investment in money and effort in surviving in the aftermath?

When little children are tired of a game, their instinct is to knock all the blocks down, boom! Or sweep all the piece off the game-board, whoosh! Could it be that many Americans are just tired of the game they are playing and have decided that mass destruction by an unseen Deity would be the best way to finish it all off and start a newer, better game?

In a land where Free Will and Liberty are supposedly the bedrock of our body politic and our much-heralded "way of life", it seems clear to me that many people don't want to be free at all. For the best take on this, check out Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, which is in my opinion the most careful analysis ever of the lemming aspect of human nature. People want to follow, and are terribly disturbed by the thought that "winning the game" (that is, fixing society's ills, improving our human condition, achieving personal fulfillment) will require the kind of work and dedication that they simply haven't got the heart or attention span for. Much better to just start over! Better to just wipe the board clean! Harold Camping, the main "prophet" of this dark scenario, is pretty old now: Perhaps this current End of Times hysteria is simply the extremely powerful projection of Mr. Camping's own ennui and end of life depression?

In my last post about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, I wrote about the Death Pill that Americans seem so eager to take, and I will continue to ponder and write about the morbidity that permeates our culture. Because I wish it were not so. I wish America were happier. Because happy people don't imagine destructive, horrifying scenarios, and don't cheer when people are shot in the head, or get hot and bothered about a number of ugly scenarios that are common content in our popular culture. And yet Death is one of the favorite hobbies of Americans, both in life and on-screen, closely followed by pain, violence, misery and aggression. Why are Americans so unhappy? And how can we get happier?

I promise to think about this, but not today. Today it is sunny, and the glittering ocean calls us away from our seventh floor balcony and bids us to play in the sun! FF and I might go to Pocahontas Pancake and Waffle House for breakfast and then lie by the pool for a little while. We will go to the soft, sandy beach, I will make a sand castle by the sea and, when I am bored with that, I will watch the waves wash my castle all away into the big, wide ocean. And then we'll have a nice nap.

This week's fun, in print and online

2011-05-15T17:56:00.014-04:00

Urban Exile thanks our local Tiny Town county paper for publishing (in lightly edited form) Exile's post-before-last concerning the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. (See page 19 of the electronic edition here.) Exile sent it in, having developed a rather keen taste for seeing her words printed on actual paper, and received this nice little note back from the publisher: "The Herald says nothing about Osama bin Laden but what could we say? What you sent may be what we can say."

I find the question "what could we say?" an interesting and thought-provoking one. Does Tiny Town's local Stag County print outlet somehow feel that this momentous world event doesn't affect us here, that it somehow isn't pertinent to the lives of country squires? Did she think that there was really nothing really to say? Or did she simply not have a personal opinion on the topic? Do we really feel so isolated from the world here in Tiny Town, so very safe from terrorism and the rest of the world's sturm und drang that our response to such events is a genteel silence? I am wondering how many hamlets in the USA are like this, living with a sense of detachment from major world events, because if that's so, the Internet has really failed to do its job.

Somehow there always needs to be a nice dollop of global in your local.

And speaking of the Internet: Exile's very talented and handsome but also fairly obscure mate FF has started to post some of his writing and photography online. (The snow photo above is his.) For fans of poetry, great photography and deep thinking, I warmly recommend The Randall Project. He is looking for your comments, and you might welcome a view from Tiny Town completely different from my own.

In other online news, Exile is rather thrilled to have joined the online community HASTAC. Let's see what kind of cool conversations will ensue! Even cooler, my first comment to a really well written blog by Duke's DeVarney Professor of English and HASTAC co-founder, Cathy Davidson, actually provoked a lengthy and thoughtful response from her. Davidson's article "Has Life Become a Reality Show? And Is That a Bad Thing?" makes some incisive points about online living that are very much worth a ponder. In her response to my post in which I complained about the manipulative effects of algorithms on online relationships, she points to the possibility of deliberate, Dadaist online behavior as a possible route, finding new ways to confound the machine and mix things up a bit. David writes and thinks with the kind of amazing fluidity to which Exile aspires.

That is all, my dears. Exile must be off to prepare student work for the week and face down her Quick Books which has never yet turned out right on the penny.

Remember, walk carefully.

The Best Spanish Teacher in Trenton

2011-05-04T19:05:00.005-04:00

Apparently I am. The top-rated Spanish teacher in the Trenton area. The truth, of course, is that I never teach anywhere but Tiny Town anymore and while you could consider Tiny Town part of the Trenton area, let's face it: The bus just don't come here anymore.

It's nice to be appreciated, though.

Spanish Lessons - Trenton, NJ

No Time to Celebrate

2011-05-02T09:09:00.016-04:00

On this gray day when all the media is awash with news of the assassination of 9/11 architect Osama bin Laden by US Navy Seal Team 6, I am solemn.

I was a New Yorker on Chambers Street the day the Towers crumbled to the ground, but I do not join in these celebrations. I broke up with New York City in part because of an ever-increasing sense of unease at the security risk of living in a densely populated urban area, but I do not join in these celebrations.

I find unseemly and disturbing the jubilation in the streets, the flag waving and the vulgar language on the front pages of certain New York newspapers. I wince as the families of the victims of 9/11 are trotted out (again) on the major networks to admit morosely that justice has been done but to also reassure all of us that their wounds will never, ever heal. I am also wondering, as does Chauncey Devega of the intelligent blog We Are Respectable Negroes how right wing strategists are going to find a way to deny credit to President Obama for this momentous event.

Joy over the death of anyone is a bitter joy indeed. The solemn face of our President as he reported the death of Bin Laden last night might have been a guide for us as a nation, if we respected our elected leaders enough to model ourselves after them. As long as we maintain our passion for revenge, our delight in the suffering and death of people of whom we disapprove, our determination to hang on to our personal wounds as if they were badges of honor, and as long as we continue to rapture in violence and death, we invite Death and War into our homes and hearts.

Inevitably, the Fear Machine is already cranking up in the wake of this "victory". Already the commentators are warning us that alert levels will be higher, and that once again we should fear what comes next. The cycle of Death and Fear, uninterrupted by wiser thoughts and higher consciousness, is never ending. The human ego, which wants everything for Self and has never learned to share, continues to eat the Death Pill despite our professions of Christian charity and belief in eternal life. We remain prideful of our supposed liberty and free will as Americans while still living as unconscious prisoners inside this maximum security facility of Fear and Separateness that we have built for ourselves with our grim celebration of Death and our belief in the rightness and inevitability of Violence Ever After.

It is not just history itself but how we react to it that counts. Are we only able to mourn for our own? Must we celebrate the demise of our enemies? Can you imagine an America filled with generous people, candles lit, praying for the souls of the dead in this battle and remembering with love those lost in the attacks of 9/11? Can you imagine a silence falling over New York City, a thoughtful silence, in all American cities and towns far and wide as we collectively prayed for Peace and the end to assassinations and war? Can you imagine an American public and media awake to their own fundamental role in and individual responsibility for the creation of a world free of hate?

I can hear you scoffing. Don't scoff. That is what the Dark One wishes you to do so that he can keep you incarcerated in the prison you currently inhabit. Do I believe in a Devil, you ask? No, not "just so". But I know that if you want peace, you have to Be Peace, Breathe Peace, Live Peace in every act, every day, and I am certain that the frenzied chest-pounding over the death of Bin Laden is not that.

Is the death of Osama bin Laden a victory? Certainly it is an important victory for the US Armed Forces and the President: A mass murderer has been run to ground. But for global humanity it is a complete failure that we continue to settle our differences this way.

What To Do When You Break Your Leg

2011-04-10T11:46:00.021-04:00

This post emerges from the truly shocking discovery that neither doctor nor hospital staff gave FF and me even one jot of advice about how to deal with me, a newly disabled person, at home. All we got was a poorly xeroxed set of discharge instructions designed for a person who had just had ACL knee surgery, a document that was utterly useless to us. This post is my letter in a bottle for anyone who has just broken a limb, especially a leg, knee, ankle or hip. Here's a list of things to do that will shorten your timeline to getting better and improve your experience of being disabled at home. I hope it helps.

It is two months since my accident. My main social events of the week are a couple of visits to physical therapy, assisted by my fabulous neighbor Denton, and dinner at the Eagle Diner with my patient husband and, lately, caretaker FF. One of the thing I deal with most is loneliness. Poor FF said the other day, "But are you lonely when I'm here?" and the answer was no and yes. Of course, his return from work is the high point of my day. But there is another loneliness which comes from the loss of freedom, the loss of random artist walks to nowhere, the loss of random conversations with strangers and less random, deep conversations with true friends and kindred spirits. By necessity, this has been an experience of going inward and though my mind says it will end someday, right now my isolation feels eternal.

Life is slow like healing is slow. I cannot see the slow knitting back together that is going on in my ankle, now anchored together by two titanium screws and a couple of nuts. “I had to put nuts on,” my young orthopedist said in an odd boyishly amazed way, as if normally he can screw other people back together without nuts.

I still cannot walk. I hump around on crutches, and we took the rental wheelchair back yesterday. We used it so rarely that it didn't seem reasonable to keep it for another $80 rental: We are looking forward to seeing me walk again, and soon. We hardly used the wheelchair because the streets here in Tiny Town are too darn out of whack with level to make wheelchair transportation possible, though every corner has the legally required ramp. The one foray we made with the chair almost turned into a squabble between poor FF and me since I kept shrieking in fear as he pushed me down brick sidewalks that sat about a 30 degree angle to the street. “Don't ever yell at me!” he admonished, in totally uncharacteristic annoyance as he sweated bullets trying to keep the chair going forward. “I will if I think I'm going to fall, you bet I will!” I retorted, wiping the cold sweat of fear from my brow.

But truly FF and I have done pretty well with this massive interruption to our lives. We've adjusted to a new schedule, new tasks (for him), new isolation (for me), and most of all We Are Getting Through It. I am not going to pretend that shattering your ankle and breaking your leg is a recommended route to intimacy, but once you get there you will either find that you manage it with your partner or you don't. And once you've gotten through the worst of it, you realize that you've actually achieved worthwhile together.

FF and I had to change things around a lot in order to make the house manageable (at all) for me, so here in this post I offer you a checklist of the first things you should do when your partner breaks a leg or becomes non-ambulatory.

Put on your seat-belts: This is going to be a long, bumpy ride. Caretaker, things you are used to from your now-injured partner like smiles, laughter, sex, encouragement, house-cleaning, laundry, companionable shopping trips and more, will absolutely disappear from your life. You will either tend to start feeling resentful about all the care-taking, or you might like FF become the best caretaker the world has ever seen and start ignoring your own health and well-being. Neither of these options is preferable. The caretaker should try to keep some of his own self-care routine going, despite the fact that there is a person stranded at home in bed who you know needs help and attention. You have to keep yourself in good shape in order to be useful to your partner.

Caretaker: Take the first injured week off from work. The patient is going to need you in every possible way, and unless you can afford home health care, you have to be there. There is a lot of set-up to do, and you are both going to be exhausted from the many nights of interrupted sleep (pain meds every 3-4 hours), the worry and the whole change in your routine as you learn to handle all the household chores alone AND take care of a sick person. Make no mistake: You will need the time to adapt.

Buy, do not rent, a toilet seat riser. The first time I laughed after the accident was when I saw that the toilet seat riser FF had bought was called DRIVE. It made me feel as if we were going to go somewhere, and fast! Here's a picture of it (above): it screws easily onto the toilet. Get just one for the toilet that the injured person is going to access most often, especially during the night. It is easy to install, does no damage to your commode, and it saves the patient from long painful (and dangerous) descents to low toilet seats, and even offers hand grips to make the descent easier. Oddly, you will get used to it and eventually wonder why toilet seats are so low, anyway. One drawback: The seat may loosen after a while, so keep tightening the plastic nut at the front of the unit to prevent accidents.

Buy, do not rent, a plastic and aluminum shower chair. The thought of renting such a thing is pretty grotty, isn't it? Even though of course you could clean a used one within an inch of its life, but somehow....ick. It will be a while before the patient can shower at all, but when he can the warm water and soap will feel like really good sex, the first pleasure he has felt in seemingly forever. So it's important to get a good steady, comfortable one with big, fat rubber feet so it doesn't scratch your tub if you have a shower tub. This little gray shower chair (also by DRIVE) continues to be helpful, even though I can now lower myself into the sub to take a soak. I use it to sit in for my evening ablutions and its sturdy, four-square frame never wobbles or makes me feel afraid.

Buy multiple re-freezable ice packs. The injured person is going to be icing for MONTHS multiple time a day, and is going to need to cycle ice packs for use at all times of day and night. We recommend the flattest re-freezable packs you can get. Traditional ice bags are OK for the road (because you can refill them anywhere), but flat re-freezable packs in small cloth bags are the best because they don't leak, they are thin enough to wrap around the offended limb, and they freeze up again quickly.

Buy an extra pair of crutches. Aluminum crutches are cheap and it is valuable, especially if your house has more than one floor. Ours has FOUR floors, so one pair of crutches lives on the third floor where the bedroom and master bathroom are and where I've been spending most of my time, and the other lives on the first floor where the kitchen and guest bathroom are. Proximity to the bathroom and easy access thereto are things you will start thinking about the first time you realize that you have “waited too long” on a floor with no bathroom. Which brings me to my next point:

Get a quality bedpan. Sure you can take the cheap plastic one from the hospital (for which your insurance has already paid top dollar anyway), but get a slightly better one for the home. First of all, you don't want to pee all over your bed in a place where there are no nurses to quickly change the sheets. Secondly, at the beginning of your ordeal there will be times when you are too exhausted, too in pain, or simply too drugged up to make it the 12 feet to the toilet. Which means that you will have to...

Get over your shame. Injured person, you have no shame anymore. Before this incident, I did not even brush my teeth in front of FF. And after this is over, I will likely go back to this formal approach to our relationship. But no one knows if he will ever be able to scrub from his mind the image of me shifting onto a plastic bedpan in the middle of night while moaning in pain, and him carefully carrying off my effluvia to the bathroom for dumping. We were only six months married when the accident happened, and I really felt as if the honeymoon had ended quite too soon. But there is nothing you can do about this aspect, and trying to preserve humility will only cost you valuable physical and emotional energy. Just remember: You have no more humility. You've been carried screaming down the street by EMTs, had you leg opened u up with a knife, had a stranger change your menstrual pad, vomited for 5 hours straight in public. You have no more humility. Accepting this reality will feel liberating.

Drink prune juice. Lots of it. Everyday. They will give you Colase in the hospital to counteract the constipating effect of the insane amounts of narcotic flowing through your system, but that's like using Drain-O on concrete. Really. Take the Colase, sure, but for that first month you better be swigging down the prune juice like a prune-aholic because if you don't, you will not, er, eliminate. Which will make you feel sicker, grumpier and more screwed up that you could possible imagine. An elderly woman and I were actually bonding the other day at physical therapy over this experience. "I was so plugged up I was vomiting," she remarked in a normal tone of voice, and we rolled our eyes over the shared experience. I understood because my first satisfying trip to to bathroom happened a MONTH after my surgery, OK? So heed my words. Prune juice. Lots of it.

Buy high quality clotheslines rope as a crutches elevator. It's a simple fix but it works. Firmly tie a long piece of clothesline rope on the balustrade of each floor in your house so that, as the injured person begins to push himself around the house on his bottom to get from floor to floor, he will be able to move his crutches up and down easily by lashing them to the rope and pulling them up or lowering them down. In our four floor house, this was absolutely essential and was also useful for lowering and raising shopping bags of items up and down the stairs when my partner was not there to help.

Rent a small refrigerator or at least have an Igloo cooler available. You are completely immobile, which means you will not eat if food and drink are not within reach when your caretaker goes back to work. I, the patient, resisted the refrigerator because I didn't want another humming thing in the bedroom and I was concerned that it would leak on the floor, smell and be difficult for me to access (too low). As a result, however, FF had to pack a cooler and a snack bag every day for me so that I had something to eat and drink when he, eventually, went back to work. FF's little love packages of yogurt, berries, tiny whole wheat breads and cheddar Goldfish crackers made my life worth living for a while there. But if you have room, by all means, rent a small 'fridge to save the caretaker the effort of packing a picnic cooler every day.

Rent a wheelchair. It's true, we didn't use the wheelchair much (also made by DRIVE), but hell it's only $60 a month plus $20 for the leg lift thingies. The few outings we made were absolutely necessary for my sanity and, after we learned that the best outings were to evenly paved places that we'd never visit normally (like school parking lots), it gave the patient a chance to feel fresh air, see the sky and feel a little hope. A wheelchair could also be used on a trip to the mall, if that is something you like to do. For me, injured, going to a mall seemed even less attractive than it usually is (which is to say, almost not at all). But it may be good for kicks and giggles for you!

Learn to meditate. And if you do already, meditate. Every time during this process when I have had the presence of mind to listen to a Pema Chodron tape or a talk by Krishnamurti on You Tube, or just simply sit and follow my breath, it helped a lot. The difficulty is getting yourself to do it if it's not a habit. Try to make meditation part of your healing routine because you, the patient, also have a responsibility to not go completely wacko on your caretaker. I can tell you from first hand experience that going wacko is something you will most definitely do at some point or another. So...

Learn to forgive yourself . At various moments during recovery from an awesome injury like a broken leg, both patient and caretaker will lose it in some way. When you do, because you certainly will, calm down and forgive yourself. Of course, being kind to one another is always important, but now you need to be really conscious of it. Caretaker, try to imagine the outlandish pain, fear and frustration your partner is enduring and show compassion. Patient, try to imagine the outlandish pain for you, fear for you and frustration your partner is having and show compassion.

Develop healing rituals. FF and I now have a variety of healing rituals that were developed through all the aspects of this process. I won't detail all of them here because, darn it, some of them are pretty personal. But, for instance, he bought little flash lights with red flashers on them and would set them up in the path to the bathroom so I could see in the middle of the night without having the deal with the blinding overhead lights, a little nicety that meant the world to me. We have our own method of getting me upright which is like a cozy hug from behind, and the way we got through the worst of the pain by repeating the Lord's Prayer together was an unexpected development and remains for me one of the most profound spiritual experiences I have ever shared with anyone. There is no need for me to tell you more, for you will develop your own rituals and they will enrich your connection and intimacy with your partner/caretaker.

Insist upon a removable brace. We did, and though my orthopedist resisted at first, we got what we wanted, a nice big black Don Joy boot which I've been able to take on and off at will since the surgery. Plaster casts are medieval devices, and limbs waste and die in them. Skin, completely deprived of light, falls off in sheets. They are heavy and burdensome. You have to take Benadryl to stave off the awful, un-scratchable bouts of itching that occur beneath the cast from sweating inside the awful thing, and skin peeling off. And, if you're like me, you may get a panic attack from being trapped in this thing you can't get off and that will be another really bad experience that you and your caretaker just do not need. Insist on a Don Joy from the beginning. You will sleep in it at first, but as you feel your limb starting to recover you can start massage and other gentle therapies that will shorten your rehabilitation time by weeks and make you just feel better too.

Organize a support team. Your partner cannot do this on his own. As soon as you are able, reach out via phone calls or Facebook and emails if you can't bear talking on the phone, and get people rallied to help you. Some will be able to deliver food, either personally or, as MOE and SOE (Mother and Sister of Exile) did, send huge styrofoam crates of goodies from Omaha Steaks or other such food delivery services. This was a HUGE help to us. The life-giving pumpkin and raisin loaf that Denton and his wife Anke brought us the first week was my breakfast for a while. Some friends will volunteer to drive you to physical therapy and doctor's appointments: Those people are gold, especially if they will commit to days well in advance. Some people will make other offers, like my student (now friend) Graciela who wrote me an email saying “here's what I can do: vacuum floors, clean your kitchen, clean your bathroom. The only thing I insist, however, is that you not feel weird about it!” That last condition freed me, and for those of you trying to figure out what to do to help, stuff like that is the best. Someone who does a load of laundry. Someone who cleans the potty. Someone who just says, here's my cell number, call me if you want to talk.

Note to the support team: please realize that recovering from a broken leg (hip, knee, ankle, etc.) is a long-term project. Everyone and his sister is going to rally in the first weeks after a bad accident, but most helpers drop off after a month or so, thinking somehow that the patient should be healed by now. I've actually had clients who, after 4 or 5 weeks were genuinely surprised that I wasn't ready to take a trip into New York City to take a meeting! The best support is the most faithful support: Keep caring and helping out until the patient is really better.

This is my best advice for now. I've got to go, as the medical bills are starting to flow in from this little incident. Fortunately, Urban Exile is armed with FF's Cadillac Insurance Policy from the National Bank of Tiny Town. Even so, the bills are shocking and Exile is coiling for her upcoming conversations with Goliath Insurance Inc. More later.

Until then, tread carefully.

The Emergency Room

2011-03-17T17:16:00.036-04:00

As you know, this wasn't the kind of breaking up I had in mind. No not at all.

And by now you know that I tumbled down the stairs of our quaint house in Tiny Town while trying to do laundry and broke my leg severely. In this post, second of a series, I will set down some thoughts about the Emergency room and what happened there as a kind of cautionary tale. Because you know what? The minute you injure yourself severely, you realize that you are utterly uninformed about how to deal with such an emergency! So, I offer my story.

After the fall and the excruciating separation of several pieces of bone in my right leg, I was extricated from our stairwell by a fabulous trio of EMT's who used their extreme savvy, calm voices and a fair amount of rippling muscle to hoist me into the air, onto a gurney and into the ambulance. I saw my darling husband FF out there in the driveway and yelled "don't leave me!" and then for a couple of minutes it seemed to me as if he had. But he had only jumped into the front seat of the ambulance. The big EMT hooked me up to a morphine drip. (Yay morphine.) The young skinny EMT just sat there and for some reason (perhaps it was the morphine?) and I became unduly preoccupied that he was too young to be around so much pain, and I felt sorry for him.

In the emergency ward, I was wheeled into a cold, white room with featureless walls that were pickled by the florescent light. FF, who was still in a state of shock and awe from the whole event, sat in a chair giving me brave smiles occasionally and at other moments just sat with his head in his hands. We were left there. For a long time. A very long time.

First Lesson: No one in the Emergency Ward will ever tell you what's going on or how long you are going to be there. It is apparently an unwritten law of emergency room staff to remain mum about why you are lying there unattended for so long, who is going to come if anyone, and how long you might be there. FF and I were in the emergency ward for nearly 10 hours, and by the time we wheeled out I was almost unconscious from exhaustion and he was ready to faint from hunger, thirst and general anxiety. No one ever offered him a snack.

Here kudos go to neighbor, J., who picked us up in our car, drove us to get some drugs on the way home, handed me the throw up bucket in the back seat, and who helped FF hoist me up to the bedroom when we got home. J's wife, L., was the only person I allowed to touch me when I was in white hot growling mode at the bottom of the stairs, so kudos to L. as well. The fact that she is very good with dogs probably has something to do with how she handled me when no one else could. But, back to the throw up bucket...

Second Lesson: Narcotics are very good, until they are very bad so hold off for as long as you can. Nausea is as bad as pain. Maybe worse. At least you can sort of grasp pain like a challenge, as if it were an enemy. But nausea just inhabits you, and makes you sit there with your head in a basin, sweating cold sweat, dreading the next wave and wishing you were dead.

The first morphine was a lifesaver. The next morphine was like a warm blanket. And the next dose of morphine hit my stomach like a bag of yesterday's shrimp. So there I am in the Emergency Room vomiting copiously, and a nurse comes in and shoots me full of some anti-nausea medicine. This did not work at all. So they tried more anti-nausea medicine. And more. By about 6 hours into our Emergency Room experience, I had had three drips of morphine and three doses of industrial anti-nausea medicine, and I had been continuously nauseated for at least four hours.

There is much to say about narcotics, including how grateful I have been to have had them, how much I learned to beware them, and the workmanlike way they slowly ate away at my sense of emotional well-being. Indeed, about 3 weeks into this experience, I finally decided to start backing off the Vicodin because I started to get frightened by my 24-hour fog and the surprise bouts of crying. The drugs blessed me with some of the weirdest, coolest dreams of my life, but they eventually seemed to be sapping my will to do or care about anything.

So, in short, be careful of how much drug they give you, or you give yourself. Ration. Put up with a bit of pain. It is, however, a delicate dance : You have to learn how much pain to let yourself experience before you've gone too far. "Going too far" means that even if you take the drugs, they won't help you out as well as if you'd taken them a little earlier. So, stay awake to when you need to take a pill, but don't take it one minute before you have to.

Third Lesson: Water Will Not Kill You, No Matter What They Say. First, a disclaimer: Always do what the doctors and nurses tell you. That said, in the ER I was denied water for nearly 10 hours by nurse's orders. I had not had anything to eat or drink before I came, so I guess I was around 12 hours with no water, and vomiting regularly. In an unbroken person, this would be a bad thing, right? That would be dehydration, right? So just imagine the debilitating effects it had on me, an injured person! But still, requests for water to sip were denied. So FF would go secretly to the sink and wet a paper towel and let me suck on it when no one was watching. I can still taste the cardboard flavor of that water and will never forget the gratitude I felt for it.

Fourth Lesson: It Is Not Your Imagination: The Doctor is a Child and You Need to Pray. At one point, I awoke from my narcotic haze to discover that Dr. Doogie Howser himself was trying to set my ankle into a splint. What's worse, he was making bad jokes of the type that people make when they're nervous, jokes that were utterly inappropriate for a boy of 12 to be making. I am almost sure that when he tried to force my foot into a painful right angle by bracing it against his soft, child-like belly, he made some crack about "if this hurts, please don't kick me in the groin", at which point the nurse had to shush him. When this happens, you are too weak to protest and at that point you must accept that you are in the hands of God. Close your eyes. Learn to pray.

Fifth Lesson: No One Tells You How Bad It Will Be When You Get Home. I guess they figure it will be dispiriting. Or possibly none of the doctors or nurses really think outside the chill, florescent atmosphere in which they work. So let me tell you: The first two weeks will be Hell. And your house is absolutely not set up for someone with a broken leg. And your mate will become ragged from lack of sleep and taking care of you. And you will feel bad about it all in addition to just feeling like crap.

But those are stories for another day. Soon, I'll post something about how to prepare your home for a broken-legged person.

Until then, by all means, watch your step!

Breaking My Leg, Discovering My Growl

2011-03-08T21:34:00.015-05:00

The Exile has been somewhat scarce to this blog lately. And though I can't blame it entirely on recent dramatic events in my life or in the world, I do have an excuse: I broke my right leg good and proper.

I have never broken a bone before, so it was necessary for an overachiever like myself to do a real number on her first break. I spiral fractured my right tibia, and I made mincemeat of my right ankle, slicing off the posterior meleolus and deranging and dicing some pretty important ligaments in the process.

Turns out the ankle is a complicated and delicately-made item. I had always suspected as much: Of the parts of my body that I've ever looked at with suspicion, that is, with the sideways thought that they might fail me one day, chief among them are the ankle, the wrist, and the knee, in that order. For some reason elbows, hips and spine (mine, anyway) seemed sturdier to me. But the ankle has always been an iffy proposition in my opinion: It takes too much weight, too much abuse and, in my case, is way to slender for the job it has to do. Fundamentally, an ankle is two long sticks (tibia and fibula) tucked into a kind of tripod formed by bones called meleoli which are, in turn, sort of rubber-banded together by a complex criss- crossing of ligament and muscle. The design has always served me well.

Until a sunny Saturday three weeks ago when I heard my husband come home from the gym. I skibbled down the stairs with an almost empty laundry basket of things to iron, when I simply missed one of the very irregular 220 year old pine steps of our house in Tiny Town and crashed. Half of me. The other half (the right one) remained hung up in the balustrade in a most unnatural position. That's how it happens: One moment you are thinking hoagie, the next you are screaming and your mind is awash with pain.

It's amazing to me how in one split second a person can turn from a happy, lunch buddy to an animal trying to free itself from a trap, growling at all who come near and wailing in an odd tone that even she herself does not recognize. It's a shock. But this is what happens, and do not be surprised if one day this happens to you. Do not feel ashamed about it. After the worst is over and you're lying in bed well-medicated you will look back and, if you have any sense, you will realize that the critter you met at the bottom of the stairs is an important part of you that you had simply never met before. For beneath all the clothes, manners, education and culture there is an animal body whose only aim is to protect itself by any means possible. This is when you hear your own growl for the first time. You hear the growl, your mind asks, "What the hell is that?", and you realize it is yourself. And then you growl. And growl. Growl.

In the next several posts, I will be offering some wisdom from my own all too raw experience about what to do you when you break your leg. I am discovering that there is little true information available about what really happens during this process, and that the saw-bones and hospitals in general do not fill you in on some really important things you'll want to know. I hope this will come in handy to someone, somewhere.

In the meantime, be careful on the stairs.

What the city can teach this country

2011-01-09T11:12:00.015-05:00

Everyone agrees that shouting fire in a theater is a crime. It's a social agreement that emerges from the culture of congestion.

Yesterday FF and I sat sorrowful and silent watching the news coverage of the massacre in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona while Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford lay in a hospital having a bullet removed from her head. I called my friends in Tucson, Mountain Sea and his girlfriend, to make sure that they were O.K. They were as O.K. as any two really sad people could be. They have been thinking, as has the avuncular Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, that Tucson has become the epicenter of bigotry and hate speech in America. And they are thinking of getting the heck out of there. This is the same state where armed posses of citizenry have been armed by a sheriff (not Dupnik) to go after illegal immigrants in the desert. Who can blame them for being, well, a little down on Arizona?

On Saturday, Pima County Sheriff Dupnik remarked ""The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry." Then, refusing to moderate his speech on the topic on Sunday, he continued: "I think we're the tombstone of the United States of America." And he seemed to be suggesting that our country is on its deathbed and Tucson will mark its grave. Pretty strong words. But unmerited?

Who will be called to account for Sarah Palin's "target practice" propaganda previous to the midterm elections in which a rifle site was placed on Congresswoman Gifford's district? Who will bring Bill O'Reilly to justice for repeatedly spouting hate against Dr. George Tiller, murdered while attending church in 2009 by a crazed anti-abortion activist? And what about Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman's infamous line delivered at a Tea Party rally in July, "If ballots don't work, bullets will"? And then there is the ongoing hum of vitriol which is the stuff of talk shows and certain TV hosts.

As FF is quick to point out, Keith Obermann has the talent to be as odious and over the top as Glen Beck. And the horrific season of political ads previous to the midterm elections is something I still have nightmares about. We have become a nation of bullies, kids who humiliate each other on Facebook and adults who, unable to express ideas in complex sentences and ruled by their fears and prejudices, lower the tone of public discourse to "screw you!" "Yeah, well screw you too!" Thomas Hobbes, the ultimate federalist, claimed that the life of the average man was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Now the only difference is we imagine we are not solitary because of Twitter and, oh yes, we live a lot longer than we used to. But the brutish, nasty and poor are qualities in which we have come to revel and make good money on TV deals. The nastier, the more newsworthy.

Legally, speech inciting others to violence goes unpunished unless a direct causal relationship can be determined between the speech and an act which results the deprivation of another person's civil rights, among them the right to remain alive. But in a world of rapid individual broadcasting and widespread editorializing, is it fair to hold ourselves to those standards meant for a slower world, or practical to expect the torrent of electronic messages to be traceable to those angry, deranged recipients who decide to actualize their hateful words?

People who live in cities understand something of the difference between free speech and saying whatever you want whenever you want, and if there were no calibrating forced at work in America's cities, they would have exploded a long time ago. In New York, we understand this because we are in unusually close contact with millions of other people on a 23 square mile-sized rock. On each square mile of Manhattan real estate is living an average of 75,000 people: The average US town/city has less than 7,000 people in the whole town. If Mr. New Yorker always said what was on his mind, he'd be in the hospital or dead within a week, which is another way of saying that good walls and closed mouths make good neighbors. I would say that by and large the New Yorker is more tolerant and restrained than the average American citizen by a long shot (pardon the expression).

New Yorkers know something about the niceties of free speech, because our daily safety depends upon it. I think that cultural artifacts like rap and hip hop developed in the cities precisely because of a strong need to find an outlet for angry self-expression that won't get you killed. This sort of contained, organized creative expression is unknown in rural environments where you can say what you want when you want to and populations remain either homogeneous or self-segregating. There's no particular need to practice tongue-holding in the land of the romantic country ballad, Nascar and caribou shooting with the Mama Grizzlies.

Most New Yorkers know from birth that "straight-talk" is not the same as shooting your mouth off, and freedom is not doing whatever the hell you damn well please. If you'd ever been standing in an attitude of studied restraint on the platform at Lexington and 53rd with a hundred other people while an evil-smelling, homeless prophet of doom preached loudly that all women were whores, you'd know what I'm talking about.

But in this Brave New World, country becomes city and city becomes country, geography is leveled and foreshortened by the video game landscape of modern digital media. Suddenly non-urban people who don't have experience with getting along with others in a crowded subway are in sweaty, close proximity with fellow beings the world around, thrust into a crowded virtual Metropolis for which I believe they are ill-prepared. Both the new broadcasters of opinion and the recipients of their virulent messages on MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter are swimming in unfamiliar waters, newly puffed up with the ability to throw their voices long distances, and desperately uneducated to the grave responsibilities of doing so. Indeed, as in the case of the Tucson gunman, many are simply desperately uneducated. Period.

As Congresswoman Gifford fights for her life in a Tucson hospital and others in that desert town grieve the loss of their loved ones, the difference between free speech and criminally irresponsible speech has to be considered carefully -- and soon.

We have failed to recognize that everyone now lives in a culture of congestion thanks to the all-inclusive aspect of modern media, but most are unprepared to deal with it. The messages that are broadcast now are unfiltered by wiser minds and voices of reason, and the air is full of the egotistic buckshot of hate speech and irresponsibly provocative imagery. Most of the citizens of this country are utterly unprepared to deal with the new media. And many of them will defend to the death -- maybe even your death -- their constitutional right to shout "fire" in this very crowded theater.

This Moment

2010-12-31T22:37:00.006-05:00

This is the last post of 2010.

Just as when I was a child, I feel a sense of momentousness as the old year ticks away and a sense of foolishness, too. Momentous it is, for this year 2010 was a wonderful one for me and FF. It will now become an entry in a blog, some photos in a binder, perhaps fading little by little from memory as new concerns and events take hold in my mind. Foolish it is, too, as I realize that these clumsy time markings of ours are just man-made attempts to observe, control and even to stop the mystifyingly quick passage of our lives.

Time is not real. Only this breath, this moment. Only this room in the old stone house in Tiny Town is real. Only this fire in our little hearth is certain. The fire itself is a wonder, never staying the same for even a second, the gases released from the log leap and dance while the spirit of the tree it once was rises up, igniting and extinguishing itself simultaneously. The orange, mumbling fire, never still, is the very essence of constant change.

Once a year we watch midnight come, as if this time we might hold it in our hands and have more time to examine that moment, turn it over and really look at it, and perhaps make the world stand still. I think we all have a deep urge to find a way to make time stop, to take one moment and to be able to understand it fully and quietly before pressing that play button again that sends us hurtling into the next, barely comprehended moment.

As a child, I always felt as if my moments were tumbling by too quickly for me to understand them. Vacations, school days, holidays, birthdays, or just nice days in brief space of time seemed to appeal to me to keep them, to not let them slip through my fingers. And worst of all were those decisive moments like graduations, a golden summer afternoon, a twilight whiffle ball game, hearing mother say "They've shot the President", or saying goodbye to Grandpapa for the last time. Those were mad days when I thought "This here is important, wonderful, irreplaceably great and/or terrible, and I must pay attention." And yet, despite the gravity of the moment, the time slipped past as if it were any day, as if the importance of things to me was, ultimately, of no importance at all to the universe.

And so the moments, consequential and ordinary, flew by at the same incomprehensible speed for me, and I was lost to nostalgia for the day before the sun even set.

Now, right now, I am sitting in front of the fireplace with my husband. It is our first New Year's Eve as a married couple, and we are spending it in our house in Tiny Town. There is gentle music playing in the background, an orange fire in our grate, and we are writing our way towards midnight in companionable silence, sharing the old red desk chair to prop our four feet up in front of the warm grate. Oh yes, this moment of contented domesticity is one that I would stop and turn over and over like a pebble in my hands. He sighs slightly as he writes, the logs crackle softly, the wooden flute music fills our living room, and all is well. Such moments would be worth stopping not because they marked a grand separation, but just because they were full of ordinary sweetness.

Certainly, as I get older I am less drawn to those spotlighted, decisive moments and more to the ordinary and everyday. In the quotidian moments of our days here in Tiny Town I have flashes in which I achieve a sense of timelessness, in which I understand that there is no then and now, only this moment in all its perfect roundness, eternal and comfortingly real, always accessible. When I have this glimpse of eternity, I do not need to hold onto any moments, not even the moment this year when FF and I said "I do" or the dropping of a ball on Time Square. Not even this lovely picture of two newly married people in front of a fire. I let them all go, because at last I see that not only can I not hold them, but even more wonderfully, they are not really going anywhere.

So there will be no goodbyes, 2010. You've been a great year, but we both know that you're going to accompany me on to what we'll agree to call 2011, and on and on until I grow tired and have to stop contemplating time and become part of eternity again. Time isn't going anywhere: It's just us, always on a train to somewhere, like the fidgety creatures that we are and always were meant to be.

Happy New Year from Tiny Town to all of you. Peace to you, wherever you may be.

The Seasons of my Soul

2010-12-21T15:20:00.007-05:00

If there were no Starbucks, I might freeze to death in New York City.

It was Tuesday, my New York City day, the air was bone-achingly cold, and I didn't have many classes. My teaching schedule tends to fall apart in December. And although I keep showing up faithfully, my students tend to get sick, flake out inexplicably or suddenly realize that, by golly, they are too busy at Christmas to study Spanish! Suddenly my schedule sprouts holes, unprepared lessons, confusions about billing, and other miscues of various sorts. So in the gaps between cancellations and hectic subway encounters in the frozen urban tundra, I seek refuge in Starbucks.

I am deeply thankful for free WiFi and hot tea.

FF and I are about to celebrate our second Christmas in Tiny Town and our first as husband and wife. This weekend, he helped me string up fir garland around the stone and timber walls of our pre-Revolutionary War living room, patiently looking for the nails I had driven with care into the old timbers last year. He hung the garland as I stood there holding the donut roll of connected fir boughs, fragrant like a sylvan feather boa. And as I stood watching him loop greenery around our cozy room, I suddenly had a mental picture of my Dad, now almost 11 years deceased, putting up the big old-style colored Christmas lights on the big yew outside Mom's kitchen window while she stood on the snow crackled lawn in her embroidered shearling coat giving him instructions.

That mental picture of Mom and Dad is one that surprised me. It was a "new" memory, if you will, one I don't remember ever having remembered before. Coming as it did in that moment of decking the halls of Casa Tiny Town, it showed me the continuity between my life now with FF and the world from which I come. For if there is a rhythm and logic to the life FF and I are building together, there is also another deeper logic that comes from our past and it provides a comforting synchronization between now and the other lives we lived when we were young trees. When I was a girl in the suburbs of Philadelphia, when I was still wondering who FF would be, I was watching this very scene unfold. Now here I am doing the Christmas decoration dance in another time and place, and it makes me feel as if I am living right.

There is a comfort to my life in Tiny Town with FF that is based on sameness. Our life has a schedule that involves our individual and cooperative activities: My Tuesdays in Manhattan, fish on Wednesdays, diner Fridays, welcome home notes, and countless small gestures and activities that through happy repetition make our life take shape and assume a form at once reliable and comforting. When we said our vows in August, the unspoken subtext was that for a long while now things are going to continue in basically the same way and that we two are really OK with that. This sameness is like a favorite record (yes, I wrote "record") that you've played hundreds of times before and, though the songs are always the same, the pleasure is new each time. In the soothing warmth of good love, I am finding out, the fun comes from observing the slight variations that emerge as we dance to the same old song.

Early on, before the wedding, the sameness of this rhythm here in Tiny Town irked me in a way I couldn't quite locate: I felt kind of jittery. Life was delightfully, annoyingly, enchantingly, maddeningly peaceful here! It was as if I were afraid that life would outrun me, as if there were something I was supposed to be doing but wasn't doing while I was here watching the leaves turn color and the river rise and fall. It was as if I could not feel truly engaged in Being writ large while quiet, as if I were going to miss my stop on the destiny train without the onslaught of the City's obstacles and energies. Constant change, of personnel and place, have been my life in New York City for the past 28 years. And constant change is not only inevitable, but also good, right? Keep pushing forward! Change keeps you young!

But I am no longer just about myself and my own quicksilver dreams: I am profoundly anchored to Love with a man who is himself as rock steady as a sustained G below middle C. Deep and kind, tired but tireless, he keeps a steady rhythm for me that quietens me. Is it this countryside or is it the man himself that soothes my heart so? No longer does the whim of change intrigue me, nor does it seem like the way towards any destiny worth having. I want to gather myself up like a thunderhead, like a great tree silently exploding from its roots in centennial slow motion towards the heavens. I want to feel my roots beneath me as I move with deliberate dawdle. I want to know the depth of my life, not just its speed, and see how it is always the same and ever-modulating in microscopic ways that I -- finally -- find worth noticing.

I no longer need a world tour to make me feel alive. I lose myself in the profundity of one single square foot of Right Here, Right Now.

Tradition, sings Tevya forever, tradition! I have discovered here in Tiny Town with FF that Tradition is not something that you do alone: You do it with other people, people you love. Tradition is not merely a series of parties and holiday shopping lists, but rather it is a conscious, cyclical exchange of feelings based on a continuity of identity and a shared passion with specific people. Now, in our first year of marriage and our third year of knowing each other, FF and I get to say, "Remember when...?" and we get to laugh together in a way that presages a future that will be equally, satisfyingly ours.

Somehow tradition never happened for me in New York City. People were coming and going too fast and they were too occupied with getting the project done, the better job, the invitation to the networking party, or whatever they were off trying to do. I, too, was coming and going too frantically to really know where I was headed. The spirit of strive and conquer, which is at the very heart of New York City's reason for being, discourages silent nights and it does not care about the quiet contemplation of one square foot of snow crackled ground.

Here in in Tiny Town, Christmas creeps upon us with a tree lighting in Revolutionary Square (our tree is about 15 times smaller than the one in Rockefeller Center), and a frozen hush that is so deep you can hear the very thoughts of the few passersby. When I shop on Main Street I get a 10% discount because I am a local, but I would shop here anyway just to share some encouraging smiles with the local merchants whom I now know by name and who continue to tough it out in this very contracted economy. The local weatherman promises a white Christmas, so I will pull a tarp over the short-cut logs from the old buttonwood tree we had to fell this autumn. Those logs will require some seasoning before we can burn them, I think. And I am satisfied that this pile will keep us warm. Next Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a very Happy New Year.

Soft Is Not Stupid

2010-12-19T21:37:00.019-05:00

The recent news of pitching ace Clifton Phifer Lee, aka Cliff Lee, turning down the New York Yankees' offer of around 150 million for the Philadelphia Phillies more modest 120 million dollar offer had me exultant. Crowing. Ebullient.

I'm a lifelong Phillies fan, and of course I was thrilled that we now have probably the best lineup of starters ever in baseball history with Lee, Roy Oswalt, Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels. And if we can only remember how to hit the ball, the 2011 season is shaping up to be a humdinger for Phillies fans. But the story really got to me because Cliff Lee, in his very polite Arkansas way, said "no" to a big steaming wad of money and "yes" to a lesser wad and the team and city he really wanted to play for. Cliff Lee said no to New York City.

Texas Rangers General Manager Jon Daniels remarked to MLB , "He was very appreciative of the time he was here (in Texas) and how he was treated. He and his family enjoyed his time here. He also enjoyed his time in Philadelphia and liked some of the things that opportunity had to offer. People rag on players for following that last dollar. Cliff didn't do that. I have a lot of respect for him."

Me too. I also admit that if anyone offered me 100 or so million dollars for anything I would be really OK with the "lower" amount. But in the professional sports world, saying no to money is unheard of and saying no to the New York Yankees, the Rolex of the MLB, just doesn't happen.

Did Lee turn them down because he likes the team in Philadelphia? Apparently yes. But there were also some factors weighing against the Lee family going to New York, like the fact that during the World Series some Yankees "fans" decided to spit, throw beer and shout obscenities at Lee's young wife Kristin who was sitting in the visiting team's seats watching her husband play. Nice, huh? And not too darned surprising to me. Yes, there's dumb fans everywhere who do mean things. But this particular bad had the stink of New York on it and, sorry folks, but no way that would have happened in Benton, Arkansas where the Lees are from. Neither in Philadelphia, I'd wager.

Said Kristin Lee "The fans did not do good things in my heart. When people are staring at you, and saying horrible things, it's hard not to take it personal." The fans did not do good things in my heart, she said. I am utterly charmed by that one sentence which is a gentle rebuke from a southern lady who was truly hurt by the uniquely barbarous behaviour of New Yorkers. That meanness, coupled with the arrogance and swagger of the city that considers itself the center of the universe, is one of the main reasons I am breaking up with New York. And it is fortifying to have my experienced verified by a pitching legend and his wife.

My lifelong friend Mary Elizabeth is a style writer and was born in the south. She was transplanted as a teenager to Connecticut, shared an apartment with me on the Lower East Side for a while before marrying her painter husband, also a southerner by birth. Mary Elizabeth and her husband woke up one day to discover they were sincerely and deeply unhappy in New York, though both were pursuing careers that would have dictated that they stay near the supposed center of art and fashion. But, she told me, they had an epiphany one day and left New York soon after, with a sense of great urgency. Says Mary Elizabeth, "We (Southerners) are genuinely hurt when (New Yorkers) mistake our friendliness and outgoing natures for falseness or stupidity." They went South, to Charleston SC, a place where you can be friendly and not be despised for it.

Not long ago, Mary Elizabeth and her husband bought a home in beautiful Altamont, NC. She only has to endure that peculiarly New York meanness when her career as a freelance writer brings her back to the city for conferences with the sharp-clawed denizens of the fashion and design world. It's not as if Mary Elizabeth can't have sharp claws when she wants to, it's just that she prefers not. Just like Kristin and Cliff Lee prefer not. Just like I prefer not.

It is not a sign of stupidity to smile, or to be generous or kind. But New Yorkers as a tribe seem to think so and if you have even a scrap of graciousness in you, you will eventually be hurt by New York's brand of mean. Beauty wears a frown in New York City, and she has sharp elbows and knees that she won't hesitate to jab into you if you show the least bit of softness. That is why I am leaving New York.

And that is why Cliff Lee said "no thanks ", in the softest, nicest, Southern way possible to New York City.

Help! (or, How The City Kept Me Skinny)

2010-11-17T09:14:00.030-05:00

When I was younger, so much younger than today,

I never needed anybody's help in any way.

But now these days are gone, I'm not so self assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Opened up the refrigerator door, more like it! My life in the country is comfortable. So comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable? This week Exile went to the doctor, a new one only a short drive from our little stone house above the creek in Tiny Town. I found out that I have higher than normal cholesterol and I need to lose weight. Bummer.

I was pleased with myself on a sunny morning scooting along in my suburban car to the nearby doctor's office, presenting my shiny newlywed Cadillac Insurance Policy card to the receptionist, and getting all my tests, prods and pokes done before 9. I was less pleased with myself when yesterday I got the message on my cell phone telling me that my cholesterol - "*BAD* cholesterol" she said, audibly shaking her finger at it - was high. "You need to go on a low fat diet," she remarked seriously, and then suddenly perky, chirped "Good luck!" and rang off. Good luck. Indeed, good luck. Perhaps just a bit too much good luck?

I have spent my life either underweight or just right. I have always taken a quiet pride in my low blood pressure and excellent blood chemistry. I was the quietly despised one you knew in high school and college who could eat anything and get away with it. Of course, in those days I also yearned for a bit of body fat in very specific, womanly places, and I was afraid I did not have enough of it. But those fears aside, I could EAT and I did. I see in photos from that period how thin I was, how slightly downcast-looking; a bowed young plant, too pale green as if lacking in adequate sunlight. When I was not long out of college, MUE (Mother of Urban Exile) gave me "A Half Day of Beauty " at Elizabeth Arden in New York City for my birthday. The well-muscled Swedish masseuse who said her name was Helga and had blonde braids wrapped around her head like a crown, kept telling me to relax my belly muscles as she pounded away at my front. And then she realized that they were just naturally that thrillingly drum-tight and rock hard. Ah.

These days are gone.

It's not as if Exile has been utterly unaware that things were getting, shall we say, a bit tight in the inseam? I have taken repeated, if short-lived, stabs at cutting out the extras and getting on the old gym horse. But physical activity for its own sake has never been my habit. The family still jokes about my single-handed revival of the archery team in high school and the odd group of misfits who joined me out there behind the gym getting their ya-ya's out by repeatedly assasinating a straw target, perhaps imagining it to be the face of their adolescent sorrows. It felt so much better to be shooting a real weapon than it did to get clocked in the shins by a hockey jock! I wanted to flow, not run with sweat. But still, I was thin.

I moved to New Haven, and college was a wash-out athletically for me. Old Eli did not have a physical culture requirement, thank Heavens. So I remained in the library and off-campus among the musicians, writers, outlaws, stoners and fringe elements. I don't think I attended even one football game at the Yale Bowl, not even one. I was romantically involved with boy-men whose main characteristics (besides having adequate smarts and/or money to be at Yale in the first place) were a passion for guitars, sex, marijuana, and being very adept at passing academic courses without apparently ever picking up a book. My lungs suffered in this period. And I stayed thin.

Help, I need somebody,

Help, not just anybody,

Help, you know I need someone, help.

I launched into post-College life armed with Wealthy Boyfriend (WB), his emotionally scary family, and a job at a major media company. Exile began to notice there was trouble in her ivy-covered paradise: WB's obsession with weed, his Fender electric guitar and his subsumed anger at his mother caused problems in our relationship. Meanwhile Exile was anxious and unhappy because WB's family used their connections to get me the job and because I was living in their carriage house in Westchester rent-free and driving theirVolkswagen to the suburban train station every morning, and because I could not figure her way out of this horrifically dependent situation. WB slept in every morning while I sallied off to my New York City job wearing uncomfortable linen suits and high-heeled pumps. WB did not have a job -- besides being WB. And the green corduroy blanket that covered us at night smelled of a heady perfume of body and bong. Exile was wracked by worry in this period and I became, if possible, even a bit thinner.

Help!

WB abandoned me by moving quietly to California and simply never returning. I discovered that I was living completely alone rent-free in someone else's estate house in Westchester and, after the fashion of only the very rich, nobody said anything or even suggested that I move out. But a few months later I moved permanently to New York City, found myself a sublet on the Upper West Side (with a two-octave, out-of-tune antique upright piano, no less) and thus began my New York City period. The phone went silent. And alone in my flat, I ate spaghetti and scallions with garlic most nights, hardly drank at all, stopped smoking weed and started writing. I joined a gym. I was still thin but a bit worn out.

Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors.

There used to be a weight gym called Women's Health and Fitness near the major media conglomerate where I worked, not far from Times Square and the Pink Pussy Cat. It seemed to me that the trainers were all awesomely well-muscled lesbians with Brazilian waxes, sculptural hair cuts, and unshakeable sang froid. I aspired to their form. I began to go there every day after work, crunching and moving and tightening my body, and I developed some serious muscle on my thin frame. I began to cultivate a more positive world view and I felt as if I were arming myself, for what war I have no idea. I knew that this new, sculpted me wasn't any more really Me than the bent reed Me with the slight cough, but I liked the sculpted Me better. I was incarnating, thin and tough.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down

And I do appreciate you being round.

Help me, get my feet back on the ground,

Won’t you please, please help me.

Yes, New York City kept me lean. Overwork, lack of money, a challenging public transportation system, and generalized anxiety kept me on the thin side and on the down-low with the old cholesterol. I didn't have enough money to build up any plaque in my arteries anyway. Long after I quit the major media company and my membership at the Lesbian Power Gym had lapsed, and after Mountain Sea and I went touring in Europe for several years playing music and collecting Euros in a hat from our German fans, I was still thin. Humping from city to city in Europe with my suitcase, a guitar on my back and lugging an amplifier on a rolling cart kept the pounds off and my muscles stretchy and tough. I ate fresh herring and fresh juices several times a week (that's fast food in German train stations), sprouted grains, dried fruit and yogurt and doses of thick European espresso. And when I came back to good old New York City after three years, I was tough, strong – and thin.

That was three years ago before I decided to find a mate. I found FF and we fell in love. And that's when I started the slow unsticking from New York City, the careful move to the countryside of Tiny Town, and now – though Exile's apartment is still not sold as of this writing - I have moved to the country. For the first time in my life, I felt the pounds going on, felt the pants a bit uncomfortable. But when I asked FF about it he didn't seem to mind or notice at all. And when I whined about my weight gain, MUE said, "Don't worry so much! It's because you are finally *happy*."

But my doctor cares. And I care. A lot. If life has become good for me, it has also become a bit myopic and less challenging. I no longer have broken escalators that I must mount or remain trapped in the subway, no longer do I have a fourth floor walkup to live in and miles of pavement to cover every day. I no longer have stick then New York model types around to suggest the way of lesser flesh, nor my chronically overweight black and latino neighbors in Harlem to remind me of the dangers of Doritos. I have only this happiness of mine and a fair dose of prosperity. Can I get my body back in the midst of all this fresh air and plenty?

Perhaps if my gym had an inner city obstacles course, complete with runs to the subway, tenement walk ups and a subway to stand on all the way home...? Or? Maybe I'll just have to learn to push away from the table.

Vote.

2010-11-02T21:36:00.007-04:00

There was a hard frost on the windshield on election day 2010. It was 8 AM when headed out on the old Southern Road. The median was bristling with political signs, and when I arrived at the polls, a Sarah Palin lookalike on the left side of the main entrance of the Volunteer Fire House thrust a pink sample Republican ballot at me. To the right, a mousy woman with a receding chin clutched the yellow Democratic ballots to her chest as if she thought someone might steal them from her.

I was shocked to see such partisan behavior right at the door of the polls. In New York, the law says 250 feet away from the door of the polls, but here in Pennsylvania there they were, just 10 feet away. 10 feet. Like so close I could smell their hairspray, you know? I had the sinking feeling of being on the losing side already. I snarled at the Palin lookalike when she thrust her bit of paper into my hands. "I'd rather shoot off both my knees than vote Republican," I said with what I hoped was quiet menace. She didn't blink. Neither did I. She withdrew the ballot.

Inside, my name was quickly found on the rolls by the powder-white 2.0 versions of the elderly black ladies who have found my name on the rolls every year in Harlem for the past 28 years. Those elderly black ladies in Harlem are so good at their electoral jobs that sometimes they find my name on those rolls as many as three times! Now that takes talent. The machines are the old kind made of the same kind of gunmetal gray steel that armors the Intrepid in the New York Harbor. The red rubber handle that you pull is industrial strength. Oh, dirty old New York! Oh home of Charlie Rangel! But in Tiny Town I was found neatly registered only once, and I was led to the shiny new touch-screen voting machine which gave me less privacy than a public phone booth and less feeling of security than a parachute packed by Osama Bin Laden. I voted straight Democratic ticket. I strode back to my car. I was energized. Which is another word for really pissed off.

I know that voting Democratic in Tiny Town is about as effective as peeing down a well. But I have fantasies of Change. Yes, I do. I wondered idly what kind of candidate I would make? I'd never survive the beasts in New York City, but in Tiny Town....?

I am shocked by my own fantasy of taking on Stag County politics. After all, in a quarter century's time it had never occurred to me, even in fantasies, to enter political life. I was in New York and it was always clear to me that the New York political beast was way too ferocious for me. So why now? Could I really feel imagine myself becoming a bigger fish in this little pond? Has righteous indignation taken hold of me? I've thought a lot about what's going on in my corner of this nation, I have pondered campaign reform, I could fix some things. I have ideas.

Will Urban Exile don her form-fitting turquoise and orange super hero costume and dive into the blood red fray? If not me, who? If not now, when? If not here, where?

I am delirious.

Dark Country

2010-10-24T19:29:00.078-04:00

Here in Tiny Town on a Sunday night it was already dark at 6 in the evening, and I had pretty much lost my will to go on. I had spent hours on the help lines of both Apple and Dell trying to figure out why my new Apple DVI mini adapter was not bringing a picture to the Dell 1800FP analog display that FF gave me, and my "unresolved issue" seemed to have quite destroyed my desire to accomplish anything. That, and the darkness.

It is very dark now in Tiny Town. A velvety black darkness falls upon us earlier and earlier out in Stag County as autumn creeps up on us and our gardens. It gets to 6 PM and we are stunned that it is night already, and even though we know the winter's coming on like it does every year, we say to each other "what happened?" Behind closed doors, we talk about what it would be like to move to South Carolina, or anywhere south where the light and the warmth hang on a little longer. Oh sure, we can stroll to Main Street where the colonial-style street lights cast a dim yellow on the brick sidewalks, and where twinkling strings of Italian lights illuminate the faces of the faithful huddled around the gas heaters at the Lenape Inn's outdoor tiki bar. But the feebleness of the illumination only serves to emphasize the vast depth of the darkness and does nothing to cheer it. Chill autumn seeps in through the cracks in the old wood of the the garage siding where the virginia creeper goes scarlet, and works its way into the drying leaves of the hydrangeas and burns the cheeks of the maples along the Delaware. I check the shed for the shovels, the salt. I wash sweaters, and I realize I don't have any that I like very much.

It is dark in Tiny Town, and the elections are almost upon us. FF and I watch the TV in the evening and are left speechless by the dumb viciousness of the political attack ads that all the commentators seem to agree "work". But to what end do they "work" except to mislead the voting populace and fan the flames of generalized middle class anger? If that is "working" I'd rather have disfunction. When FF and I have the energy, which is rarer now as the light fades, we check out Politifact and research the inflamed statements delivered to us by the candidates themselves and the rabble-rousing "non-profits" that place their ads on Comcast: We find that most of the accusations made are either "mostly untrue" or "pants on fire". Our airwaves are absolutely gummed up with deliberate, nasty lies. Oh, did I say "our"? Yes, I know, the airwaves stopped belonging to the American public year before last and now Exile's Mom doesn't have TV because she refuses to pay for cable. The political stank smells pretty bad here in town, and it almost overcomes the perfume of the drying leaves. FF and I might just start leaving the television off, which will make the house a little bit darker still.

Next week, I will cast my ballot at the Tiny Town Eagle Fire Company Engine House where we keep our bright shiny fire trucks and the new EMT ambulance bought with funds raised from the Wednesday night spaghetti suppers and a few private donors. It will be the first time in over 25 years that I have not voted in New York City and (as you all have reminded me) my vote will likely count more here. I am taking the morning off to do it, and I plan to hang around the polling place for a while to feel the vibe. Tiny Town is proud of its spirit of self-reliance and its spaghetti dinner fundraisers. Here, there is a piquant mix of extremely wealthy country squires and very middle to lower middle class workers and immigrants. Our county is the third wealthiest in Pennsylvania, and Republicans outnumber Democrats by a long shot. There is a fair rumble of Tea Party sympathy though we have no Tea Party candidates in this upcoming election. The Tea Party is too extreme and declasse even for Republican Stag County. Anger at and distrust of government in general has reached hissy fit on the dial, and that's the most popular sentiment you hear over the counter at the Eagle Diner where the less wealthy gather. The problems of society have become too complex and overwhelming for the intellectually impatient and those unprepared or unwilling to bend their minds to ideas, and so comes the bitter call to "get all the bastards out". At any cost.

I am afraid of these sentiments, afraid of the apparently growing feeling that we can just emote our way out of the problems in which our society finds itself. I am afraid of our willingness to be attracted to mean, sarcastic bombast and dismissive of subtle thoughtfulness which, by its nature, is quieter. Yes, our problems are complex, but not too complex to think out in a reasoned way. But that kind of thinking takes patience and a kind of intellectual attention that is hard to come by in this time of deficits, both of attention and money. Social, economic and, indeed, personal disappointments weigh hard on the people of Pennsylvania, and if we drive west to York County where FF's parents live, I can see the discontent-o-meter rising on the faces of the people with each mile west we drive. They wouldn't say so out loud, but the people farther west and north of Tiny Town don't understand why their kitchens don't look like the ones on HGTV, and they're sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Free-floating discontent feeds free floating anger feeds "get the bastards out". At any cost.

I want to go see it for myself. I want to go northwest where the Alleghenies meet the border of upstate New York and maybe stop at a diner in Dimock, Susquehanna County where it's 98% percent white, 60% registered Republican and dirt poor. That's where Norma Fiorentino's house blew up because methane gas leaked from the drilling in the Marcellus Shale into her well water. The utilities, all part of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, are sucking the natural gas out of the good Pennsylvania shale around Norma's house and out of vast tracts of Pennsylvania countryside. They promise jobs. They promise to turn dirt farmers into millionaires with royalty payments, the kind of overnight "success" that the people yearn for. The voters of Susquehanna County are grabbing for that gold ring and, after all, who wouldn't? Things have not changed in Dimock at all in over a century except that the buildings are older and dirtier now. The folks in Dimock don't take kindly to the thoughtful suggestion made by the Democratic candidate for governor Dan Onorato that we need to take another look at this shale drilling thing, regulate it, and fund the EPA properly to keep an eye on the drilling companies. No, "Drill, baby, drill" is the motto the people can get behind in Susquehanna county. And if someone's house blows up, well, that's just the price of progress.

Somewhere where they tell you to open the windows before you take a bath is not somewhere I want to live. And the idea of flaming tap water is downright Apocalyptic. Oh, yeah, it's getting darker in Susquehanna County.

The Dark Ages began when the Roman Empire fell. Go read it for yourself, Gibbon is still waiting for you, all six volumes. You connect the dots: Superstition, ignorance, desperation, the decline of cultural artifacts, the rise of belief over knowledge. Oh, for the darkness of the womb! But I want to have that discussion, Susquehanna, about why you vote almost straight Republican when the same corporate cronies that brought you the trillion dollar boondoggle called the Iraq War where your sons and daughters got their arms and legs blown off, are now trying to bring you methane-flavored water so that you can blow up your own own house by taking a bath. Can we have that discussion, Susquehanna?

In New York City, where it is always bright and the night sky takes on the comforting aspect of a soft violet pink dome, I was sheltered from this darkness for so many years. We heard about it, read about it in the New York Times, but in New York City you can always go downtown and forget all your worries, forget all your cares, just like Petula sang. There, in the glittering 24-hour midway of writers, hipsters, Rockefeller University wizards, university kids and the lords of hip hop and poetry jam, you can believe yourself in a world that is getting brighter and more brilliant, not darker and dumber. But here in Stag County, it's getting darker. And it's getting darker still in Dimock, and all over Susquehanna, Johnstown and Juniata counties. There's no soft dome hanging over that dark, hulking, cool coal backbone of Pennsylvania, north and west of the Alleghenies. All that they have out in those parts is the kind of chill that takes a century to set into your bones, the lonely whistle of the train in the night, and the stark rage that comes from being left in dark for too long while other people get to dance with the stars. From the shadows of north and western Pennsylvania, they see the bright lights of New York City twinkling like the eye of Sauron from the TV in living room. But there amongst the TV trays, the sprung sofa, the smell of disappointment and the unpaid mortgages, the spark of longing ignites into stark fury.

It's getting dark now in Stag County. Here in the comfort of Tiny Town, I am not nearly as sunk into the shadows as many others. But now that I have left the shining dome of the Emerald City, I can peer a little deeper into the night and, as winter comes on, I see a dark country.

Coming In From The Cold

2010-10-17T16:39:00.039-04:00

Innocent of the privations of city life.

I just found my way to my friend Jen Block's blog, Pushed Birth. She writes: "Pushedbirth.com is the sister site for Pushed, the book, and was created to provide women with uncensored, unsweetened information about U.S. childbirth care. (I) spent years researching why so many labors are begun by induction, why so many births end in cesarean section, and how modern maternity care is impacting women and their families. " Check out Jen's fantastic June 2010 blog (Yes, I am just catching up on my reading!) about how the closings of Bellevue and now St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan have deprived New York City's women, especially low income women, of the two main facilities that made midwife care feasible (and legal). You must check out Jen's book and blog, if you are planning to have a baby or care at all about women's health issues.

And now it is autumn for sure. In Tiny Town, I have brought in the begonias and placed them on the broad, sunny window sill in the dining room, the window that looks onto the little walled brick patio where they grew so splendidly all summer in their big earthenware pots. There are only two small plants left in the apartment in the city, one rather sad looking aloe and a tropical of some kind that came from a cutting a neighbor gave me. I tend to be unreasonably sentimental about plants, and I feel badly that these two are still living alone in the apartment where I only go now for an hour or two each week to check things out and give these two stragglers a little water.

Urban Plant Exile

One of the begonias I just brought in from the nippy autumn air is three years old: I created it from a clipping I took when my music partner, Mountain Sea, and I got back from our last tour in Europe. I was tired then, a little worn thin in a variety of ways, and I was trying to get comfortable again in the Sugar Hill apartment which had grown dusty and lifeless during my extended absence. It was November and already chill when I saw a large begonia just barely hanging onto a dirty brick wall on 153rd St. and Broadway where it was being blasted by the cold night air. I heard the plant's thin voice calling out to me to save it, so I surreptitiously took a cutting and brought it back to my steam-heated rooms, rooted it in a jelly glass, and later planted it in earth bought from the dollar store. There in my westerly kitchen window, the begonia slowly turned into a plant with oddly transparent leaves that had a fragile, gummy texture, but were stubbornly and defiantly alive. Sporadically it put forth a couple of of anemic light-pink blossoms: They fell almost immediately to the floor.

This June, as FF and I moved things out of the apartment and to Tiny Town, I brought the begonia with me, and clearly it thought it had died and gone to Heaven, for over the course of two summer months it has turned in a bodacious wild creature. It now sports huge, dark, glossy almond shaped leaves, and numerous fleshy red racemes covered with dark pink blossoms. In a couple of country months, the begonia went from being a weak city weed to being a well-fleshed, rainforest beauty.

I take special pleasure in my plant's story: Its start as a wilting, frost-struck cutting in a jelly glass, its survival from a certain urban death, its patient period of semi-wilted stasis in the city, and its recent phoenix-like rebirth in the country summer. This plant is joy and hope, and its greatness is now apparent. I am touched by the begonia, and so I can see that it is really myself I am seeing in it. By saving the begonia I saved myself. I know that these softly rolling hills, this air, this river, these sun dappled sycamore leaves outside my study window are all working their big medicine on me, making me stronger, glossier and more powerful. I have always wanted to supply an Ark to the weak, the lost, and the damaged. Has it been my way of telling the world that I needed an Ark myself to shelter me from my life's storms? From the terrors that afflicted me as a child and then, later, as an adult? The apartment in Sugar Hill was my Ark for a while, but now, I have found a better Ark. The plants come onboard.

This week, I got the good news that one of my songs is playing on a French radio station. I am amazed and delighted that the audience for my little song, heard before now by a half dozen people, has just exploded by tens of thousands. I am touched by this evidence of my own blossoming and I think that the Great Gardener is taking pleasure in me right now.

Dark and Rainy. Alone. Together.

2010-10-03T23:22:00.005-04:00

The dark and rainy Sunday followed the week of tornadoes. It was also the week Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge and I couldn't get him off my mind.

My apartment in Manhattan is 30 blocks from the GWB and you can see the span from my roof. I used to go up there in the early in the morning, around 6 AM just to close my eyes and feel the G-forces of the 40 thousand vehicles that pass over it into Manhattan at rush hour. My friend, the Argentine painter Daniela Mizrahi lived for years almost underneath the GWB in her little studio apartment which always smelled of paint, bread, smoke and car exhaust. The building, which clung like a bat to the black cliffs over the Hudson River, had a perfect view of the terrible and awesome Bridge, all lit up and roaring 24 hours a day.

I remember one particularly emotional night with Danu when we burnt some love letters on the pavement in the street. It was a necessary act, the act of destroying the component parts of a sadness. This is the kind of thing one needs friends to help with: Identify the formerly beloved object as poisonous and dispose of it.

The pages of the letters caught on fire quickly but then, not yet incinerated, were swept down the street by the wind and we ran after them yelling, trying to get them back so that we didn't set a building or car on fire by mistake. Slowly we captured the smoldering pages, ripped them up into smaller pieces and then burned them again (yes, some love letters take forever to burn, especially when written by depressing people.) The small orange embers were taken by the updrafts and swirled into the black sky, disappearing high into the great vacio beneath the GWB where they were extinguished in the nothingness. I thought, that is where love dies, in the darkness, under a bridge. I thought too that this neighborhood was too oversized for my diminutive friend, too cold and too lonely. That place was as lonely as a lost glove on a wet sidewalk, and I always felt afraid to leave her there.

Photo by Karol Du Clos

Perhaps because of that I cannot stop thinking of Tyler, standing on the bridge, hearing the interminable low drone of the traffic, breathing in the intoxicating gasses of the traffic and gazing into the great black vacio below the Bridge. So high, so very high, and so very cold. Did he hear any music in the low drone of the traffic, in the roar of the singing metal? Or did he only hear the beating of his own disappointed heart?

The suicide rate tells a depressing tale: "Throughout the world, about 2000 people kill themselves each day. That's about 80 per hour, three quarters of a million a year. In the U.S., there are more than 80 deaths from suicide every day, 30,000 every year. This is the equivalent of a fully loaded jumbo jet crash every fifth day. From another perspective, you are more likely to kill yourself than be killed by someone else." (Geo Stone, Suicide and Attempted Suicide).

It does not comfort me at all to know that I am more likely to kill myself than to be killed by someone else. Not at all. Such facts are odd and cruel and I am not sure that they even matter.

It does matter, though, that when I sat down on the sofa and told FF that I felt sad, he put his arm around me and understood. Man, do I feel lucky in those moments that I know how to go and say that I feel sad to my husband, and I feel lucky that he is there to wrap his big, strong arms around me. Later that night, FF told me that one of his former tennis students who was a father and husband once parked his car near a bridge, a bridge that FF crossed every day on the way to work in those days; the man took of his shoes and socks, folding his socks neatly inside the shoes, and he jumped to his death. He folded his socks neatly. These are the things we do, even in our desperation. As if somehow a folded sock might leave a quiet fragment of order behind in the onrushing chaos of self-annihilation.

It also matters that Tyler was only 18, in his first month at Rutgers. It matters that he was a talented musician, and that his room mate had been torturing him by spying on his intimate encounters in his dorm room. It matters that Tyler was gay, because if he had been heterosexual instead these encounters would have more likely entitled him to bragging rights than to shame.

"No one can make you inferior without your consent," wrote the fabulous and heroic Eleanor Roosevelt. Why did Tyler consent? Why couldn't he get mad as hell at his torturers, at society and at the people at the school who didn't respond to his call for help? Why did he instead turn his anger in on himself? No one gets to know now, and that is the thing about suicide: It ends the conversation.

More Life Lessons Learned by Releasing Stuff

2010-10-02T22:47:00.003-04:00

In Manhattan, there were tornado warnings this week. This only proves my overall feeling that it is time to get out of this city. There were not any tornadoes in all my days in Manhattan until now, which makes it seem like the End of Times. So I am returning to the task of carefully placing my stuff in the hands of others, sending it in various directions to be re purposed and appreciated anew.

Today's items carefully parceled out and creating whirlwinds of random human contact are:

The fax machine! An excellent Bell South machine that stores 100 phone numbers, works perfectly, but uses heat sensitive paper (an environmental no-no). Also good as a telephone. $15. What a deal! Off it went with its new owner, to 92nd at Second Ave. where, oddly enough, I slept for a week when I first arrived in New York on a former college friend's hardwood floor. That person would still be a friend if the floor hadn't been so, well, hard. I suppose it was better than sleeping in the subway, but just. Lorenzo, an industrial designer, picked up the fax machine (and its extra roll of paper) paying me $15 (the cost of the extra roll) and shuffling out the door with his preternaturally toothy smile, his Guatemalan poncho stylishly flung over one shoulder and an excellent Columbia backpack (containing the fax machine) in tow. Within the hour, the woman who sold ME the fax machine years ago (a former boss in the publicity business) called and said we ought to get together sometime. I had not heard from her in years. Did the fax have to go to someone who lived on the same block where I once slept on the floor? Did the former owner of the fax have to call me the day I sold it? Is the connection between these events more than random? You tell me.

Two lessons were learned from selling the fax machine (cheap).
Lesson 1: Don't make your friends sleep on the floor. They will never call you again.
Lesson 2: When you keep objects circulating and in use, the universe stirs in response.

The Rolling Cart. This handy, mobile, plastic object with drawers costs 24.99 new at the Container Store and it has been holding my bathroom clutter for years. I cleaned it meticulously and posted it with a photo and exact measurements. Within 45 second of posting on Craig's list, out of 12 people only Jasmine had the good sense to follow my directions by including her phone number and a specific time when she could retrieve the item. Well done, Jasmine! You will go far in life and you win the Rolling Cart for absolutely free! In proof of the now obvious truth that Jasmine will become Master of the World, she didn't even spend any energy on her free acquisition, sending her brother to pick up the Rolling Cart for her! Impressive.
Lesson 3: You will be rewarded in life for following directions.

The Television. This TV belonged to my best friend's grandfather, OK? And he gave it to my best friend's father. Who gave it to my best friend, Mountain Sea....who didn't really give it to me, but rather kind of lodged it with me when he left town as New Yorkers sometimes do. I have been watching this TV for years, and it works really well. Being an understanding type, Mountain Sea is letting me give it away now since he is not coming back from Tucson to retrieve it, and it's the old tube kind anyway. Well, I didn't even get a chance to post the TV: Peter, who called for the Rolling Cart (and missed it to quick and thorough Jasmine) asked if I had anything else I was giving away. I said, how about a TV? He said, oh wow, I was burned out of my apartment and I'm disabled and anything would be a big help to me! Peter showed up in a van with his girlfriend to get the TV and was absolutely thrilled with his new entertainment system. My neighbor carried even it down the stairs for him. I told Peter I was sorry for his hard luck, and he actually said "Oh, you've no idea the trouble I've seen," which started up a melody in my mind, Gloria Hallelujah. "I can't tell you how much this means to me," he said, and kissed my hand.

Which made me think that anything I have to give away is, in some way, because someone was once kind to me, too. So thanks Mountain Sea, thanks Mountain Sea's Dad, Thanks Grandad. You've done a nice thing.

Lesson 4: Always remember that there is always somebody who's in a worse situation than you are and that your generosity grows the minute you release it into the world.

Goodbye New York, I've Changed My Name.

2010-09-19T15:13:00.002-04:00

Two big moments happened in the life of the Exile this week: I changed my name officially and I registered to vote in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania! The land of my birth, the home of old money conservatives, cricket club blue bloods. This place is nothing like the edgy Upper West Side Democratic hive of New York City where I've been a citizen for 28 years. I imagine myself a radioactive seed secretly planting myself into local politics here in Stag County: First Tiny Town, then the Nation!

First, though, the name change. My marriage to FF has caused a landslide of bureaucratic tasks which I labored to complete, and even then stopped halfway: These tasks principally concern my new last name, and admitting officially for the first time that I am no longer a resident of New York City. Oh man, this is a lot of work, let me tell you! But that is apparently what falling in love costs these days: Lots and lots of paperwork, lots and lots of hours filling out forms. I want to be officially Mrs. FF, old fashioned girl that I am.

First I looked for help to organize this task online: There are various sites for brides (not grooms) selling packages for 29.99 to help one go through the process of changing all of these documents to reflect your new life. What the ads don't tell you are two important things: You can get all of these forms and instructions elsewhere for free; there will be more expense, lots more expense, depending on how far you want to take this new identity thing. FF could have taken my name, which we both rather like, but it would have been weird for his parents and, anyway, what's in a name? Exile was quite unfortunately given a 6 syllable hyphenated first name by her parents, and since I didn't want an un-euphonius 10 syllable name, I asked the woman at social security if I could just use the second half of my first name, that is, the one I have been using publicly all of my life. No, she said. You must go to the Courthouse in Doilyville, fill out the forms, pay 299 dollars (where do they come up with that price?), and then appear live in court to tell the judge in person that you want to make a civil name change. Uh, okay, I said. Never mind. So now I have a 10 syllable name, just because I do not want to completely amputate my maiden name which I've always liked just to reduce syllable count. My name is long as a train. So be it.

Sigh.

Next step, FF goes to the the old HR department at Yankee Doodle Bank where he works, and he signs me up to be part of his Cadillac medical and dental insurance plan, the first decent plan I've had since 1989 when I quit my job at The Big Newsmagazine Corp. Whooeee! They also have my 10 syllable name on file.

The next step was to register with all ten syllables to vote in Tiny Town, Stag County, PA. But they let me put my name the way I wanted it, without the first three syllables! No proof of my identity was required, just a mailing address.

Then came changing the passport and driver's license. Exile opted out of this for not wanting to spend the money. It was going to cost serious dime to do it, and they're both good for another 8 to 12 years, for heaven's sake. And by the way, according to All Sources, I will not have a problem with immigration or the police if I don't change them. I know FF will worry about this: After all, if I am detained at Kennedy Airport returning from our romantic trip to Paris, will All Sources come to bail me out? Still, I am not taking on changing those documents right now.

The final step was to change my name on ALL of the credit cards, also not a required step but one I want to do because it is FREE, and it is fun to see my new 10 syllables strung across all my plastic. None of the credit card companies put up a fuss about the new name, either, and no proof of identity was required to borrow or owe money! Whee. As a matter of fact, I found out from the lady at the social security office that anyone can get a copy of my birth certificate from the authorities without proof of a right to possess this document. So I said I to her, sez I, gee whiz, sounds like that would be a great place for an evil-doer to start building a false identity, huh? The social security lady said "Hmph!" but did not otherwise comment.

Now Exile's name change (all 10 syllables) is complete, I am fully insured and I am registered to vote in the Republican stronghold of Stag County. I no longer have any official contribution to make to the political life of New York City. Indeed, I am going incognito. The papers have been filed, the break-up is nearly complete. When I sell the apartment, we will be divorced, New York City and I.

The break-up with the political life of New York City is dramatic for me and provoking the usual psychic disturbance that every step of this slow separation has caused me. In the 28 years I lived there, even when I was touring for three years as a singer songwriter in Europe, I always voted. Always. I remember voting against George Bush from an Irish Pub in Bonn, Germany where I had carefully had my absentee ballot sent in advance. Even then, looking at New York from across the ocean, I kept my hand in because my parents brought me up to take my responsibilities as a citizen seriously, and because as a New Yorker I felt my vote as powerful on a national scale. Now, New York politics will have to get along without me.

I don't know the political scene in Tiny Town or Stag County very well. I have a creeping sense that my vote here will be less important somehow, lost in the less-populated, wealthier, more complacent atmosphere of this land of country squires and bridge club ladies. Somehow I feel like no one really cares what the people of Tiny Town do, think or vote for. Might I be experiencing the first inklings of the resentment that citizens of Tiny Towns all over the country feel? That feeling that nobody cares? Or am I just still suffering from the illusion that my vote in New York City was a lot more meaningful than it ever really was?

My New York City polling places were always edgy, mostly unwelcoming places, even before I moved to Harlem. They tended to be mildewy, none too clean public school cafeterias populated by weary, bag-eyed poll workers who took names, assigned voting booths, and thanked me (with a deep sigh) for voting. My last polling place was the basement of a low-income housing project in Harlem, a linoleum-floored mausoleum of indeterminate color which seemed more suited to housing cots for flood victims, or a feeding station for the homeless than the noble business of exercising one's franchise. Year after year I went and voted, and year after year returned to those unwelcoming places, always leaving with head held high and a sense that pursuing this adventure was important and meaningful. For three years, my name was on the rolls in triplicate, and it took three years of letters to the Board of Elections to get myself to be just one person on the rolls. Ah, good old, dirty old New York City!

But as I near the end of my relationship with New York City, what has really changed as the result of all of all my voting? Charlie Rangel is still a congressman despite all ethical arguments to the contrary. Columbia University is still taking over vast tracts of expensive real estate claiming eminent domain and getting away with it. Homelessness and poverty are still creeping up scarily. The price of a subway ride goes up every year, as does everyone's rent. The buildings at ground zero still aren't built 9 years later (the Empire State building was built in 1 year and five months). And the escalators still don't work. So what has all this voting in the Big Apple gotten me? Maybe we haven't seen a lot of progress, but as Blanche du Bois would remark, possibly my faithful appearance at the polls has helped in some small way to keep us from sliding back to the Stone Age.

With my new name, my new location and my new registration, I now have a chance to begin again. Maybe the center of the world is not the best place to make a difference anyway, all illusions to the contrary. Maybe, armed with the impressive club of my new 10 syllable name, I can sally forth and make my one vote count here in Tiny Town.

Or maybe I will find out that size really doesn't matter after all.

Dreadful Moments and Easy Fixes

2010-09-10T17:22:00.009-04:00

Ah, sucking up free WiFi at Starbucks on a Wednesday morning! Waiting here for the 1 PM bus to Tiny Town, I take advantage of the moment and the caffeine buzz to write to you, dear Reader.

With my bad attitude as expressed in my last entry here, it should come as no surprise that when I arrived in New York City yesterday morning I was confronted by a series of dreadful moments. Yes, I take some responsibility for it, and I suspect that with my own dread and loathing I actually conjured these moments into being.

First Dreadful Moment: The Chinese girl in the "Quiet Car" on the NJ Transit 8:32 to Penn Station who talked the entire time on her cell phone, palidly and smilingly immune to all requests to desist. How can this be?!?!

Drawing: Maurice Sendak

Second Dreadful Moment: Immediately upon arrival at the station, there he was, The Massive Sweating Fat Man, looking much like the scary nurse-baby from Maurice Sendack's Higgledy Piggedy Pop who screamed "No Eat!". He descended the wrong side of the stairway and (I kid you not) actively tried to block me like a defensive guard as I tried to ascend. He moved to the left when I did and to the right when I did, all the while grinning and looking me directly in the eyes. "Walk to the right", I muttered. "Who made THAT rule!" he bellowed, "YOU?"

Third Dreadful Moment: Getting off the A train in Harlem where, walking up the three flights of stairs to the surface I encountered various discouraging artifacts in this order: a poo-laden diaper on the stairs; a wild-eyed man approaching people for "fity-fi' cent t'git tuh Brooklyn"; and finally a raggedy man stinking up a cloud of funk while screaming curses at the ghosts of his id who apparently inhabited the darkened, closed token booth.

Yeah, I know. This kind of whining ain't the best propaganda to sell my apartment. It is however apparent that even if I take a karmic approach to it, these sort of incidents are more numerous in New York City than elsewhere. That is, while I know that the better frame of mind I'm in the better things seem to go, I do not believe that this sort of machine gun-like spray of ugly moments will be apt to occur in, say, Woodstock. Any Woodstock. Anywhere.

So, as I sit here in Starbucks drinking yet another completely unnecessary cup of coffee and about to make my weekly escape to Tiny Town, I decided to write down a few suggestions for you, New York City, a few ideas that might pretty you up a bit and minimize disturbing moments. I have a sense that if I put it out there you may actually take my advice, like you did when I started talking up putting estimated train arrival times on the electronic message boards that were already installed on subway platforms like they've done in Europe for decades already. My suggestions are simple ones, mostly using existing resources, mostly already done in other places, that would make you a better place to be. Take heed New York: Your future depends upon it.

Suggestion #1: In high-traffic areas, paint the word "DOWN" on the right hand side of staircases that go down, and "UP" on the right hand side of staircases going up. Paint the "DO NOT ENTER" symbol on the sides where you should not walk going in either direction. Do this in subway stations and all other major points of public population concentration. I guarantee that over time this will absolutely diminish the number of people walking the wrong way, diminish angry encounters and provide moral support for those who try to move correctly in tight spaces.

Suggestion #2: Put up signs at the bottom of escalators that say "Stand to the right." Obvious.

Suggestion #3: Oh, by the way, fix the escalators. Persistently broken escalators and elevators is not only discouraging and depressing to all and mean to people with baby carriages, but it's also in violation of the Disability Discrimination Act, 4.7, which states that: "From 1st October 1999 a service provider has to take reasonable steps to change a practice which makes it unreasonably difficult for difficult for disabled people to make use of its services." Let me tell you, when Exile's left knee was messed up and she was swinging around on crutches, walking up three flights of stairs to get to the surface from the D train seemed "unreasonably difficult", provoking tears on several occasions. The escalator going to and from the D train platform at 34th Street was broken for over a year! Does this seem "reasonable" to you?

Suggestion #4: Hire a lot more people to clean up around this filthy city, and not at minimum wage, either. Call them something cool like Urban Hygiene Technicians. And train them. Dress them in good-looking uniforms designed by Pierre Cardin. Give them the power to give out tickets for littering at $50 a pop. Send them to less fashionable neighborhoods. Make, don't ask, garbage producing businesses pay for this work force with a garbage tax levied at a rate based upon an estimate of customers or readers served. McDonald's, AM New York, The New York Post, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Starbucks and their fellows will scream but they will not leave New York City if this is done. But all of us will experience a higher quality of life which, as Mayor Giuliani correctly decided, is fundamental to keeping down crime and making New York even marginally more livable.

Suggestion #5: Put recycling cans in every public place. Every public place. Make companies pay for their own collectors in front of their big buildings. In Germany, every train platform and bus station has a neat, well constructed box that contains three enclosures for garbage (black), paper (blue) and metal and plastic (green). The City or MTA could be enterprising and sell the recyclables thus making some money to pay for the Urban Hygiene Technicians (or someone to sit inside that dark, empty token booth). And we can also in this way teach our children well -- and our own lazy selves, too -- to be conscious of the planet.

Suggestion #6: Hire Quality of Life Inspectors for the subway system. These QLIs would also be neatly uniformed (I imagine crisp white suits, like milkmen, and neat little black bowties). They would quickly remove people who beg, play their devices too loud, busk, sell things, or do anything to disturb the riders inside subway cars. Everyone in Harlem knows that when school lets out, the subways in our area become rife with gangs of teenagers who think nothing of scaring citizens minding their own business just for fun. QLI would work primarily from noon to midnight which is when most of this unwanted activity occurs. There need not be many of them, but they will travel in squadrons and appear randomly on the various lines. The gratitude of the paying passenger would know no bounds.

Suggestion #7: Help homeless people. Help them. Not to mention all of the rest of us -- by giving them places to live and people to take care of them. Since we absolutely know from the experience of other cities that doing this is actually a lot cheaper than paying the $800,000 in unpaid emergency room visits that is incurred every year by the average homeless person, one can't help but wonder why you, New York City, persist in keeping these folks on the street and in dire straits. Hm, pay less money to decrease suffering. Now there's a thought.

Suggestion #8: Institute CCZs just like London has. Within Congestion Charge Zones, which are marked with highly visible signs (see left) and on city maps, a payment of $12 a day would be charged either to a driver's EZ Pass or by mail to the owner of the license plate via Automatic Number Plate Recognition. Failure to pay the CCZ charge would result in a fine of $200. With this already proven system, the City would decrease traffic in congested zones AND raise money for the transportation system to pay for Quality of Life Inspectors and City Hygiene Technicians.

The bottom line for New York City is that it's got to stop pretending that the same level of social organization, rights and privileges can exist here as exists in Boise, Idaho. The unnatural congestion and issues of this massive city need to be addressed firmly and quickly. Or I won't be the only one waiting in the station with a one-way ticket to Tiny Town.

Going Back To This?

2010-09-06T21:37:00.000-04:00

Our honeymoon is over and tomorrow early A.M. I go back to New York City for my regular Tuesday as if nothing had happened or changed.

Ugh.

This is the scene (left) I will see when I get to my neighborhood on the Number 1 train.

If I'm lucky there will NOT be a big fat rat running along the tracks.

Ugh.

Exile in Paradise

2010-09-03T18:23:00.000-04:00

Photo by John Dugdale

The Exile is woozy with happiness (and exhaustion) because she and FF just got married.

Our old-fashioned wedding on an private antique railroad train was marvelous, both by our own account and that of our guests. Some of the finest people in Tiny Town and well beyond took part in our celebration, and everyone at the nuptial shindig was sincerely happy. There is a strong feeling of Mission Accomplished going on in our hearts, not just because we pulled off a rather complex event and not just because we are finally Mr. and Mrs. FF: Rather, we are completed by the fact that our ritual brought joy into so many other hearts and brought our people closer to us. MUE was smiley, and SUE was the ultimate sister of the bride, throwing a top-notch rehearsal dinner with great panache.

In short, we left 'em laughing. That had been our hope and it was why we didn't just elope in the first place. So. Mission Accomplished.

After the wedding, FF and I packed lightly and drove 12 hours South. We spent the last two days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in a small log cabin where there was a nice feeling of privacy, despite the fact that the owners lived just across the way. Last night, a black bear placed his muddy paws on our back window and we feel it as a mountain blessing. Mission Accomplished, said Br'er Bear. I left my beautiful wedding bouquet of cream colored bunch roses, buplurum and royal purple snapdragons (which had survived the car journey pretty well) sitting in a hollow stump in the woods: blessings back to you, Woods. I imagine Br'er Bear's snuffin' my bouquet right now.

So at this writing Exile is on honeymoon with FF. I am sitting in the lobby of the historic Inn in Altamont waiting for FF to finish his tennis game at the Club. I am comfortably ensconced in an arts and crafts leather and wood sofa facing the Brobdignagian stone fireplace at the end of the Great Hall, tickled by the slight piney breeze from the nearby mountains, and I am taking a moment to dash off a note to you, dear Reader.

Does Mrs. FF feel different now that she and FF are really married? Yes, indeed she does! A keystone piece fell into place with a decisive whumph when we said our I do's, a keystone that's been waiting to fall for a good while and which is going to make our home hang together strong. Yes, Exile feels different now that we're married, but the words don't really come to describe it. Just whumph.

FF looked gorgeous this morning in his tennis whites and even more so because he's got a big old smile on his face all the time! I asked him today if he'd rather if I just drop him off, check us into the Royal Suites (where we are staying the next few days), and come pick him up later. He said, “No, it'll be fun to walk in together.” So we walked into the Club together and he introduced me to his pro: “Walter, this is my wife, Exile.” And I realized that it was the first time he had introduced me as his wife. I am absolutely sure we both got the same little jolt of pleasure from this fact. I have yet to have my debut, “This is my husband, FF”, so we have yet more newlywed cherries to pop. Oh, what fun!

Life at this moment is completely happy, and I can't imagine this good feeling ever going away. No matter what happens, he's my FF and I am his Exile. We are a family of two now in the eyes of the state of Pennsylvania, our friends, our family and, yes, ourselves too. It's real.

In all this blissful yumminess, New York City has faded almost completely from my mind. Yesterday, FF asked if I had heard anything from Kalim, our real estate agent, and I replied that I had not and did not expect to think at all about New York City until after our honeymoon. He agreed. New York City doesn't belong on this honeymoon with us.

I haven't gone so long without thinking about New York City in 28 years, and that is a really good sign. It means that with this wedding, with this step into the rest of my life, I thee dismiss, New York City. Get thee gone, big bad old town! New York City doesn't have that old voodoo hold on my mind like it used to. It's as if the words “I do” were the secret incantation I had always needed to break the spell the city has had on me all these years. The nostalgia and the confusion are gone and I can, to quote the song, see clearly now.

You see, for me to want to leave the biggest, baddest city in the world I had to believe that there was someplace worthwhile to go to. And when you're talking about the putative center of the world, that someplace couldn't just be another city: It had to be another heart.

Forest Blessing. Photo: Urban Exile

The Sirens of New York

2010-08-24T23:01:00.001-04:00

New York, you sly devil! I hear your siren song.

Wednesday is the day I return to Tiny Town every week. Urban Exile, as you know, makes her modest living as a Spanish teacher and translator, and is still working in New York City on Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings. I scheduled a Wednesday morning class recently, despite my well-publicized breakup with New York, because my commitment to the client will only last into October, and because the new student is such an extremely interesting person.

I make only short-term commitments to New York these days, and New York is supposed to understand that.

Odysseys and the Sirens by Herbert James Draper

Thalia had her fifth lesson with me at her lovely, bright East Side penthouse while her large, owl-like tiger cat looked on. Thalia is a woman with a laugh that emerges from deep in her belly, and a mane of fantastic blond hair that seems to defy gravity and float every so slightly around her head like an aura. She is wealthy, accomplished and beautiful -- and her husband is a VIP in the art world.

Thalia is learning Spanish for a project she is doing at one of the most important museums in Lima, Perú, and when I found out that the exhibit of which she was going to be in charge was one pertaining to Words, I was profoundly excited. After all, to exhibit objects is one thing, but to design a physical display pertaining to words is something else again! Our hour-long class stretched into an hour and 45 minutes as I surprised myself by giving a pretty inspired extemporaneous talk on Words as Symbolic Illusions and other existential concepts pertaining to language. It is fun to be around high-powered people who are doing major league creative projects and who are interested in what one has to say.

That's New York for you. Heady. The Ego perks up at the attention. Chatting with Thalia that day in her fabulous deco penthouse surrounded by works by major artists, I had that dangerous thought again: I can't leave New York! This is where the cool people are!

But Exile has learned (thank Heavens) that when her Ego feels really happy (or mightily offended), her wise heart would be well-advised to raise the warning flag. I am not saying that the heady chemical spikes that result from proximity to fame, wealth and the high-test creative juice that New York offers can't be handled by a wise person; I am just saying that I am barely wise enough to deal with it. Exile can be made to forget her own resolution, her own journey and destination, when basking in the reflected light of New York's stars.

For you to really understand what I am saying, dear Reader, Exile must now explain that she has been fortunate to meet and work with some of New York City's brightest lights. As an artist, she has sung with some of the icons in the music world, worked with well-known talents in journalism and photography, and has had some memorable conversations with some of the dynamos of the Manhattan arts and literature constellation. Why this has been my fate, I don't know, and I'm not complaining about it. But if I look at my own past with a cold eye, I have to admit that I have allowed this flow of fame to distract me somewhat: Being around famous people can make you feel as if you have accomplished something just by knowing them. Truly, you'd be better off just staying at home practicing guitar or writing a blog, for example, than hobnobbing with people whose work is, let us say, more well-developed than one's own.

My student Thalia absorbed my ideas about language like a cat laps up milk, and those ideas of mine will melt into the great work she will do for the museum in Lima. For humanity as a whole, that's a plus. For me as an individual, it's a kind of ho-hum result, and it begs the question: Why am I better at offering my creative ideas to others than I am at developing them on my own?

There are a lot of possible answers to that question, but one I offer now is that living in New York City for me has been to suffer from a continuous case of Attention Deficit Disorder. And if you add a few distractingly interesting famous people into the mix, the condition worsens. The multiplicity of possible routes to achieve something worthwhile in this city can be mind-boggling, and as a quick-learner I have moved easily from world to world with fair grace, attaching myself to high-achievers without ever achieving for myself the greatness for which I yearned. Dare I say that sometimes I feel rather like an intellectual demimonde?

True Oak now speaks up from her comfortable armchair in my mind, and derails my tirade: "Don't you think you're being a bit hard on yourself?" she remarks, readjusting a gossamer swathe of lavender fabric around her thin shoulders. "You have after all recorded two Cd's and quite a few singles of your own music. You have toured through Europe with your band. You have made your living as a freelance teacher for nearly 20 years, have run a cultural center, and have bought an apartment in New York City. You been a good friend to many and have loved a few. That's not nothing. What kind of greatness were you yearning for, anyway?"

Well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? True Oak has a way of bringing me back to earth with a thump.

Recognition and Greatness, Exile must admit, are not the same thing. Greatness is often found in humble venues, while Recognition is now available to anyone with a video camera and a stupid animal trick. It is humbling and somewhat embarrassing for Exile to realize that there was a good stretch of time in her life when she convinced herself that she was pursuing Greatness, when Recognition is what she really craved.

Ultimately, neither is important, though I write this knowing that the motto of Exile's parents was always "we don't care what you do, as long as you're the best at what you do". That, of course, was not true: they really cared a lot what Exile did, and were often not all too happy with the choices I made. I didn't always try to be the best at what I did, either, to whit the many hours typing poems and short stories when I was supposed to be writing press releases at my first job for Big News Magazine.

As a young sprout and in the ambiance of Big News Magazine I met many important and semi-important people: supermodels, politicians, sports stars and actors. I was wooed by sports writers and once even Dr. Dean Ornish flirted with me. Yes, the atmosphere at Big News was heady, Olympian even, and there I got a solid dose of feeling that I had "made it" just by being there.

So when I finally break up with New York City, I will lose that supercharged umbilicus of Near Fame. I will no longer enjoy the heady illusion of accomplishment by proximity. I dread that. And I also know that it's the best thing for me.

Cut me off. Please.

No Prop 8 Protests in the Streets in New York? Let's Be Fair.

2010-08-15T14:17:00.009-04:00

My sweetheart, known on this blog as FF, and I are actually getting married in exactly two weeks and a few hours. I plan, once we are married, to separate ever further from New York City and soon, to leave it completely. Lately, I have been disappointed in New York's failure to make any public gestures in regard to Proposition 8.

But let's talk about me. I am oddly over-stimulated by the upcoming wedding and it's affecting my dreams which, lately, have been wicked. Many mornings I wake up with kind of shocked, weary feeling, and often the sheets are in a twist. The other night I was awakened by a particularly powerful one: I stumbled to the bathroom, and on my way back to bed, I stubbed my toe badly on the canister vacuum cleaner that FF had left in the bedroom with the full intention of using it at some point to harvest the crop of dust balls under the bed. I gave a loud, pained grunt at which point, startled, he woke up (probably also from a weird dream), waving his arms wildly and shouting, "wha wha wha!" This is what it's been like around Casa Exile.

The reasons for this disturbance are not hard to locate. FF and I aren't inclined to Entertain, an activity for which we are almost certainly hampered, according to HGTV, by the lack of an Open Floor Plan. Also, we have never experienced both of our families and close friends being in the same place at the same time in such numbers. This wedding will be a massive dose of both Entertaining and Family. Furthermore, for FF the threat of being the center of attention is absolutely contrary to his native survival instinct. He is going through this whole shindig basically for me, and also so that our families may meet each other at least once in this lifetime, bless him. What chaos have I brought down upon his dear reclusive head? And on mine?

In addition to this stress, I am fighting off a bit of pointless guilt about the ban on same sex marriage. I am changing everything about my life, including my last name, and I have a case of social guilties too. What, me worry?

I see the lines of excited gay people hunkered down in front of the LA County Courthouse waiting for U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to fire the starting pistol so that they can jump the broomstick. I also hear the talking heads on Fox proclaiming that same sex marriage would wreck the American family. They sound righteous and angry, rigid with unshakeable opinion. I am frankly critical of New York City, with whom I am having a public break up, for having been so silent regarding Prop. 8, and so comparatively non-activist about fighting for same sex marriage. What's that about? Where did the rage of Stonewall go? Where's the flamboyant pride? Apparently it's all gone across the country to California where the weather's better.

I have been thinking lately about my sister, SUE (Sister of Urban Exile). She's been with her beloved partner for over 20 years. They are both going to be at our wedding, and they are even hosting our no-rehearsal dinner. A wave of sadness passes over me, knowing that they cannot have a wedding if they want one and that there are people in the world who think that America needs to defend itself from their love. The most vitriolic opponents of same sex marriage charge that SUE and her partner would be bad parents and would bring up rotten children. They say the reason for marriage is to create a legal framework for the proper care of children. They say that God and the founding fathers (who are only one level apart in the conservative pantheon) want marriage to be only for male/female pairs and no one else. They say it's necessary and proper to relegate SUE and her mate to a sub-class, and deny them the rights and benefits of of legal partnership simply because they are not heterosexual. They state that excluding several million people from the rights they themselves enjoy is both right and necessary in order to maintain what they so hazily refer to as "our way of life".

Well I'll tell you right now, I don't want any stinking way of life where SUE can't play too. Because it's just not fair.

People get married for many reasons that may or may not have anything to do with children, including but not limited to:

getting a green card
getting drunk in Las Vegas
having sworn not to have sex until getting married (and being too horny to wait any longer)
getting pregnant
wanting to get pregnant
because Mom got married at 16 and why not me
wanting to marry the boss
wanting to get oneself some arm candy
wanting to be understood
not wanting to be alone
wanting to be taken care of
wanting to get someone else's stuff
needing to get away from one's own stuff
escaping from the parents / life / oneself / other psychoses and situations
the kids needing a father / mother
the person himself needing a father / mother

...and the list goes on.

None of these reasons are inherently wrong, I judge none of them, and I applaud anyone who has the wisdom to go out there and get what he or she needs in this short life.

FF and I are getting married because we are really, really in love. We want to dedicate ourselves to each other in public and become a family, a family of two. We are likely not going to have any children at this point, and still we want to get married. I accept that there are other reasons for getting married, and that's OK with me because I don't need your reasons to be the same as my reasons.

Society offers heterosexuals like FF and me rewards, door prizes if you will, for getting married. FF and I talked about these things a year ago when the topic of marriage came up. Rational creature and divorcee that he is, FF asked me to delineate some good reasons for getting married. Rapidly I suggested that if one of us has an accident, the other will have the right to make decisions; I can get on your (Cadillac) health insurance policy instead of continuing to go to the clinics I currently frequent with my stinky, poor person's policy; and it shows the world that we are a family, albeit a family of only two. He nodded sagely and said nothing, which is a very FF response.

Is it fair that SUE is excluded from these benefits?

FF and I met as grownups in middle life. We both had substantial lives built up and neither one needed the other around for any compelling material or social reason. Furthermore, we both rather like being alone, which was one of the first things we talked about when we met. "Urban Exile is a natural leader," remarked my kindergarten teacher in my first report card ever, "But she needs to to play with the other children sometimes." FF himself spent a boyhood coming home from school and then heading directly out to the backboard to spend hours smacking a tennis ball around -- alone.Yes, FF and I still like playing our own games by ourselves, he on the second floor and I on the fourth, and then around 10:30 or 11:00 we meet up on the third floor, have a chat and go to bed. That said, we are very different in some other ways. But we trust each other, we believe in each other's goodness, and we have a lot of fun together.

The constitutional arguments for same sex marriage put forward by its proponents are based largely on the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law, and I presume also on that other part of the Amendment which prohibits states from interfering with constitutionally guaranteed privileges. But then there's that sticky Title 1, Chapter 1, paragraph 7 of the US code which defines that "...the word “marriage” means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word “spouse” refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife." This paragraph has that knotty "one man and one woman" phrase that we've heard pronounced so emphatically so many times by right-sided commentators.

I'm not a constitutional scholar: I look up what I need to know about it on Google, something I am not proud to admit. Most people, including the good citizens of California who voted down same sex marriage, are not constitutional scholars either. Let's face it, few of us can recite what's in the Constitution and certainly have only a passing knowledge of what the various Amendments are about. But the folks on the right-hand side of the aisle who claim to stand on every word of that foundational document don't figure to apply the contents of its 14th amendment to gay people. Homosexuals (and "Othersexuals" of all types) should, in their opinion, be squarely denied equal access to the responsibilities and privileges (both social and economic) of the institution of marriage. Just like once black and white couples were. Just like black people in general once were.

But we fixed things for black people and mixed-race couples. Why? Because we realized that the way things were just wasn't fair.

It is hard to square our current legal definition of marriage with the protections of the 14th amendment. We might say that there's a bug in the works, a roaring inconsistency between the two documents. So what shall we do? We are in a country of laws, laws written with words, and our legal words seem to contradict each other.

We could take a step back and acknowledge that our man-made documents are flawed: Certainly the Constitution is flawed or it wouldn't have needed occasional amending, which is a fancy word for "fixing". Documents are static, but life is not, and we Americans have been fortunate to have our consciousness raised up ever so slightly since the Constitution was first penned. We decided it wasn't fair for some people to be slaves, so we fixed that one. And we decided that it wasn't fair that women and people of color couldn't vote, so we fixed that one too. We fixed lots of things, because we got Wiser as a society and realized that being unfair to some people was bad for all of us.

FF comments that if we start changing around our definitions of things, where does it all end? If any pair of people are allowed to get married, then what happens a few years down the line when a threesome shows up and says "We want to get married too!" Legalization of plural marriage, he suggests, is just a definition away.

I have to give him that point. I suppose that someone might show up at some point wanting to marry their cow, too. But I also emphasize to FF, as gently as my progressive heart will allow, that allowing everyone to make up his own rules for the game is not at all the same as excluding some people from the game completely just for being who they are.

It seems to me that when we are faced with inconsistencies in our social "givens", when our x's and y's that seem to cancel each other out, then, the best and wisest thing to do is to make the decision which will bring the greatest good. Considering all the sadness and suffering that there is in the world which we are powerless to address (i.e., hurricanes, droughts, mudslides, heartbreak, dread diseases, and so on), I would be hard-pressed to say that the greatest good can be achieved by denying SUE and her partner the right to stand in front of their friends and families and say "I do". In fact, great good in many forms, both economic and spiritual, might actually be born of it.

My SUE, with whom I played whiffle ball and trolls as a child, was blessed with a hyper-active dorsal striatum. That is the tiny administrative office in the human brain that goes ballistic when business comes up pertaining to altruism, rewards, cooperation , fairness and, yes, punishment too. She has always been almost painfully focused on fairness, ever since she was a little person, and I often saw her child's face screw up with actual suffering when she thought that an unfairness had been committed. That old dorsal striatum can be a tough task master.

"In order for a society to function cooperatively," writes Stephen Hall in his fascinating book Wisdom, "...its members or leaders must sanction those who break the rules. Fairness is the crucial litmus test." So what is fair? I am tempted to state simply as did Justice Potter Stewart (whose dorsal striatum was clearly rather robust), "I know it when I see it." But certainly, fair is making sure not only that the rules are applied equally to everyone playing the game, but also that everyone be allowed to play the game in the first place.

Is New York City, the home of Stonewall, ever going to get off its behind and start publicly participating in this discussion that California seems to be having all by itself? Or is New York too worried about what it's going to wear tomorrow? And is America going to pass the fairness test in the case of same sex marriage?

Urban Exile is a little nervous about getting married in a couple of weeks. But she's more nervous about how America answer that important question.

Photo credits: Josef Samuel, cake by Rascia's Creative Cakes; Lesbian cake-topper by Lily Tsai; Cell Science

Giving Away Free Stuff on Craigslist

2010-08-11T00:05:00.004-04:00

First, dear reader, please accept my regrets that my last post was petulant and not very artful. I do hope you forgive me, because I already have forgiven myself. After all this is not a book but a blog, and you simply cannot wake up everyday ready to write a fabulous, coherent essay. I see my main blogging duty as just keeping on writing about breaking up with New York -- and damn the torpedoes! Pardon if my product comes out sometimes, well, a bit common.

It's Tuesday and I am in the city, still groggy from the Excedrin PM I took last night to take the edge off the sleeplessness that I experience now when I come here. I am just as sleepless as when I first came to New York, though I think I slept pretty well in between times. Now the insomnia feels as if I am lying down in a train station instead of in bed, needing to get going already but unable to do so, with one foot nervously jiggling and the other foot stretching out to touch down. Elsewhere.

Today I am giving stuff away free on Craig's list. I am un-grasping, letting go of familiar things, giving my heart the unfamiliar pleasure of giving stuff away easily to complete strangers. Nice stuff. And I know that even the smallest Stuff comes with responsibility, so be careful before inviting it into your life: You will have to deal with your stuff eventually. I am not the sort of person who can just leave heaps of things I have owned on the curb, things that have me and my life force all over them. For me, everything must be placed.

After FF and I moved most of my stuff out, I had some success selling stuff. And I am still holding out for some money for the fax machine that I think should be at least worth $20, even though it is one of the old heat sensitive paper kind. And I am also still holding out for a few bucks on the great shelf units. But I am giving away everything else, and I have discovered that giving things away can be an interesting and sometimes complicated process. It's never just the stuff, it's the people who go with the stuff.

The Free DVDs: Proof that no gift goes unpunished.

First of all, take the action movie DVDs I gave away. What am I doing with these things anyway? I can't stand most action flicks. A friend, doing me a good turn when I was ill, brought me this stack of bootlegged action movies, two of which I watched and the rest of which I never did because I have never cared for blood-spattered entertainment like Kill Bill and Rambo III. So I tucked them away on a bookshelf and there they sat until I was packing boxes and suddenly this stack of DVDs is staring at me as if to ask What now? I just couldn't see carting them forward with me. So I posted them on Craigslist.

Immediately, I mean within nanoseconds, nearly a dozen people responded, desperate for my free DVDs. I started answering them in order with a phone number, first call first serve, I wrote. But the mails kept coming in, I couldn't keep up, and I was feeling like Mickey in the Sorcerer's Apprentice (what Genie had I unleashed?). So I went to Craigslist to delete the post. I was waiting for the first call, but no one called: They are only emailed me by the hundreds asking when could they pick up the DVDs, like their dialing fingers had fallen off or something. I was wondering, are there people out there who spend all day looking for free stuff on Craigslist and who also coincidentally have forgotten how to use phones? Finally, someone followed instructions, called me, I made an arrangement with him and the DVDs were taken.

Meanwhile, a woman who has been emailing me persistently but not calling, finally calls. I tell her the DVDs are gone, and to my utter amazement, she unleashes her fury upon me, upbraiding me for not keeping the (free) DVDs for her, because she had told me she wanted them and it didn't seem fair that.... blah blah blah.

I just kept saying "I see....I see....I see". And she finally hung up.

Wow.

The Free Clock.

This little brass clock was given to me by the publisher of Sports Illustrated magazine when I was still a puppy working at the magazine wearing linen skirts and pink angora sweaters. I remember that the staff got clocks that Christmas of 1988 when they stopped giving out decent bonuses. As I look back, that was the beginning of the financial predicament we find ourselves in now. Anyway, I've had this clock around for years and I decided to give it away. Again I posted. Again about a dozen people responded within nanoseconds. Wiser this time, I first deleted the posting and then set about responding. This time I wrote, MUST call to get this item, first call first serve.

The phone rang and Lana was on the other end, telling me how cute my clock was and how much she wanted it. It warmed my heart that she was already so fond of my clock so, okay, we set up a morning appointment for today which, she missed because she had lost her phone (and did not have a clock?). So she called me desperate, did I still have the clock, and I became aware of the massive importance my free clock had all at once assumed in the heart and mind of this complete stranger. Yes, I still have the clock I said, still drowsy from the Excedrin PM. I'll be right over, Lana, said.

Lana looked very much like Pam in the TV show "The Office" without the ironic twist. She appeared at my door with a waif-like child with unevenly cut bangs in tow, and she told me she was a painter and was also getting married -- in December. She enthused over my wonderful clock, and how wonderful my apartment was, and then told me about a few serious problems she was having with her boyfriend. As I took in the worry lines on her forehead and around her eyes, I realized that Lana really needed this clock for reasons that I could feel but not understand. I handed it to her gently, and I told her and the waif-child "Remember, you're in charge of this clock now! When you look at it, remember that it's saying 'Have a good time!'" Lana smiled, looking like a lost but hopeful little girl.

Goodbye, Lana. Have a good time.

The Free Tomahawk.

When Joe called, he spoke in that particularly Nuyorican way that seems so gentle, serious and naive, that I could not say no to him. The tomahawk was given to me by my ex at the very end of our 11 year relationship, and I still wonder what that gift was all about: Please kill me with a blow to the head? Anyway, Joe told me he had a country house in the Poconos where he had a whole wall of Native American artifacts including a dream catcher. I could imagine Joe's house: Lots of chatzkies everywhere, and all precious to him. Joe was stout, with thick glasses and and a shirt that read "Orgullo Taino" and he stood there simply and gratefully in my doorway as I laid the tomahawk in his big, outstretched, workman's hands.

You're in charge of this now, Joe, I told him gravely. He held it solemnly and said, Thank you so much. Then after a pause, he said, This is going to look beautiful on my wall. He held it up in the air against an imaginary wall, as if to show me the angle he would hang it at. Thank you so much, said Joe.

You are welcome, Joe, I said. It's yours to care for now. Yes, ma'am, he said, and he stumped sturdily down the stairs.

Free Gig Bags!!!

I should have known that advertising free gig bags would provoke a cascade of desperate threadbare musicians, begging for the break they never got. Within mili-nanoseconds of posting "free: two gig bags, mic stand bag and assorted other bags" I had about 60 emails to respond to, and so once again I deleted the posting quickly and this time I chose the winner randomly.

Within the hour, Roy arrived, head crowned by an Eraser Head-like bush of gray hair and circles under his eyes of Dostoyevskyan proportions. To my surprise, Roy picked up all the bags and then quickly attempted to pick me up at the same time. I am getting married, I said, at the end of this month. Ah, he said, letting go of his romantic idea immediately. Just my luck! he exclaimed, throwing up his hands comically. Well, you really are a marvelous person, he remarked, your future husband is very lucky. And he turned on his heel and exited smartly, leaving me speechless at his fluid ability to change gears.

Then there was Emily, poor Emily. She sooooo wanted the acoustic bag, but she woke up late. And then, she told me, she lost her phone and found it again (what is it with people losing phones? Don't they have alarm clocks any more?). And then she had to go to her freelance job in Grand Central Station (?), and couldn't come until next week, because she had to cat sit in Queens, and more stories end upon end that I quickly forgot. Poor Emily! I had to give those bags to Roy. When I counted, I saw that Emily had written me close to 20 emails in her mad confusion and hot desire for my free gig bags, and I felt really bad about having to give them to someone else. But sometimes you can sense that a person is just surrounded by a whirlwind of chaos, and generally it's best not to get too close to such beings.

Disappointed though Emily was, however, she wrote in her last missive: ty so mucho Dorothy :-) Appreciate, gracias tan mucho -- gotta go not be tooo late, TY true, Em.

TY True. Wow.

The Free Bureau.

And so did I drop in the garbage a few pair of worn out cotton undies that had somehow survived previous purges, a few pair of socks (elastic shot), and a very old bikini. Thus did I empty and write upon the list of Craig under New York / For Sale / Free Stuff my good old wooden chest of drawers.

This chest of drawers was given to me by music producer and friend who I'll call Nacho. He had produced Ricky Martin, along with a bunch of other stars -- and me, too, once. Indeed, he had carried this big wood box up the stairs and placed it in my bedroom as one of the last acts he ever did on my behalf before he placed me firmly in his past and disappeared.This chest of drawers is not coming with me for the same reason I never saw Nacho again. It belongs here in New York City, it belongs in my past.

It took longer, about 10 minutes, for a free, real wood chest of drawers to find a taker and when it did, it was one single person who wrote me with her phone number. I called her.

Hello, I said, you wrote me about the chest of drawers? Ah, yeah, whancooneye kuhmn pikitoop? She said. What? I said. Ah, fahkin Metro PCEhssss! She hissed. Um, I am only here today, I said slowly as if speaking with a cobra, can you come today? Ahhhh, she sighed exasperatedly, eefeye fine ma boyFREN tookum ELP may, ah kin kuhm TOOdeh! she cried. Good, good! I encouraged her. How about three o'clock? Ahhhhh, yisssss! she exclaimed, zeeess PURRhops ees fur may PUSSIbell. Ahhhhh....

And she hung up.

At approximately 3:30 she called back. Yissss, ah kin kuhm now. Ahm findin mah boyFREN! she remarked. OK, I said. What is your name anyway? MAHree, she said, and hung up.

When I opened the door to Marie and her boyfriend, Melvin, you could have knocked me over with a feather because she looked like me. I mean ALOT like me, except she was thin as a rail (as I was 28 years ago) wearing a thin muscle shirt over her bra-less torso (as I did 28 years ago) and had a pale, slightly hectic look about her round, pixie-ish face. Wow, I said.

Ehhh, yeah, we kuhmin fur dee byooROE? She asked. You look familiar, I said, have we met before? yew ever beaneen pahrEESSS? she hissed questioningly. Yes, I have been, I said. Come on in.

And Melvin, who was a tall well-built black man, easily hoisted most of the drawers on his shoulder and glided off down the stairs. (goodbye, goodbye). Marie and I experimented with hoisting the rest of the bureau and carried it to the front door where she put down her end of it. Ahm afraid uhv mah shooossss, Marie sighed, rolling her eyes and pointing down at the floor where her stick thin white legs jutted into insanely high black wedgie booties. But fortunately Melvin reappeared magically and hoisted the rest of my bureau onto his shoulder as if it were a book bag, and took off down the stairs without a word followed by the wobbling white stick of Marie.

I listened to the sound of their footsteps fade away down the stairs and I waited, standing at the open door thinking they would come back up, say something like thanks for the free bureau, we'll take care of it -- or something like that. I thought I'd get to say to them, it's your responsibility now. Or maybe tell Marie that Ricky Martin's producer hauled that bureau up these very stairs for me. Or something. Instead, it was just dead quiet in the hallway. So I closed the door and came in.

Sometimes, to some people, stuff is just stuff.

Dear John Note to New York City (No. 1)

2010-08-08T23:19:00.000-04:00

Dear New York City,

You have perhaps noticed that I have been becoming somewhat distant. Or perhaps you didn't notice at all? Yes, I know I still sleep over sometimes, but when you're not looking I have been hanging out with other cities. Yes, other cities, not just towns and hamlets. It's time you knew that I spent a week in Asheville North Carolina and -- I really don't care if you are snorting with laughter -- and I enjoyed myself very much. Size isn't everything, you know. No, I know you don't know. That's a concept that you will never understand, New York.

This is the first of several notes I am going to write you over the coming couple of months to explain to you why I just can't take our relationship any more. There are things about you which, over the course of our 28 years together, I have suffered and endured, and which at long last I have decided not to suffer any more. Yes, I know, it takes all kinds. But there really are cities on this planet that are simply nicer than you are, and I have at long last come to understand that I will never be able to change you. So...here goes.

The first annoyance that I will bring to your attention is the following: What's with the New York men who, when you are humming to yourself on the street or simply smiling because you are happy, feel compelled either to puncture your mood by shouting, "Happy today?" or, worse, imitate you by tunelessly singing "la la la la la la"? What's with that? Like I can't hum on the street without some Goombah deciding to interrupt my ongoing musical conversation with myself with some pointless, ugly noise? I am a songwriter and I get some of my best ideas while walking, but there's nothing that kills a new melodic or lyrical idea faster than a goony comment like that. Nothing. For me it's like a personal attack, and it happens all the time in you, New York.

What's worse (because it's more confusingly pointless) is that I do not believe these are pick up lines. Nor is this music appreciation. This kind of random street jabber is a clumsy attempt to start a conversation that could never start and has never started. It is an oafish bid to grab a bit of someone else's happy space, to put a screeching stop another person's creative flow, and to parasitically inhabit if only for a millisecond another person's hard-won peace of mind. It is a kind of pointless, mean mockery of anyone who would dare to be a little happy instead of stressed out, angry and slightly sick looking like most of your inhabitants. And I resent it, really I do.

Have I fully tested Asheville on this point? No, I have to admit I have not. I was walking around with FF -- yes, I know you blame him for our breakup, but it has nothing to do with him -- and because I was talking with him I wasn't singing much. But I did smile a lot there and -- guess what? -- nobody mocked me, not once! And, by the way, a lot of people were smiling at me too, for no apparent reason whatsoever except just the joy of being alive. I almost freaked out, there were so many people smiling there, sometimes not at me at all but just smiling for the hell of it. I guess because they are happy, can you imagine that? No, I bet you can't.

Look, I just want you to understand that I understand you have to be the way you are, and I don't blame you for it. I'll write you again soon and give you more concrete reasons to explain why I am leaving you. And please be aware that I'm not crazy enough to think you'll ever understand, or even care what I think of you. But I'm doing it anyway, and you can take it or leave it. After 28 years, maybe you could try listening for once.

Now wipe that smirk off your face.

The Train To Nowhere? Or Train from Nowhere?

2010-07-29T18:26:00.002-04:00

Urban Exile awoke a few mornings ago in the dawn's early light making desperate croaking sounds. In her dream, she was saying "No, no, no! don't leave me here!"

FF and I are vacationing at a fabulous little bed and breakfast called the Princess Anne in Asheville, NC. We have a nifty little suite in this Victorian building that was once owned by Johnny Mercer. We eat apple smoked bacon and eggs in the morning to the tune of "Moon River" and everybody's smiling at us. We've got a cute kitchenette in our suite, a sitting room and a lovely bedroom, all tricked out with ceiling fans, AC and lots of comfy pillows. We are vacationing, but we are also looking for a place to live together when we get married.

Yes, FF and I are pondering whether living here in Asheville might be a good idea.This Saturday is an open house for the New York apartment and Exile's real estate agent, Kalim, sent a brief note indicating there was "interest". As soon as the Exile sells, there will be a little pile of money that will be added to FF's little pile and we will buy a house to live in for the rest of our days. Certainly there is great beauty here in the Smokey Mountains: My dear friend from college days Emily Jane is here, and you can really get a lot of house for the money. Furthermore, Exile has had log cabin wet dreams since she was a little Exile, and there are a lot of those in them thar hills. And did I mention apple smoked bacon?

So this vacation is also a kind of hunting expedition. We have an agent here too, an ex-New Yorker who attended the girls boarding school right across the street from the girls school I attended, who speaks our lingo and knows the area. She drives like a demon, was recommended by Emily Jane, and she's been combing these Smokey Mountains with preternatural energy for a suitable house for us. Everyone is sanguine about this project, including me. The area is lousy with little colleges and water falls. And it has a young, organic, sustainable bounciness to it while still conserving a certain savory, gracious, slightly worn at the corners vibe that suits me to a tee.

So why, in this idyllic setting with so many happy possibilities unfolding before me, why am I waking up from a nightmare gasping and screaming?

Could it be the apple smoked bacon?

In my dream, I was on a train, an old commuter train, on which were passengers who seemed to have been there for a very long time. So long had they been on this train, indeed, that their possessions were scattered about, their suitcases open, as if all tension about the moment of arrival and descent to the platform had disappeared in favor of a resigned knowledge that they would never, ever get off that train. I began to argue with these passengers, trying to convince them that getting off the train at some point was absolutely essential. They listened politely but it was evident that my words meant nothing to them. Somehow they were in possession of a secret knowledge or resistance that made my desire to arrive somewhere, to get off the train, utterly nugatory.

At last, the train pulled into a station. I raced to the space between cars, and I saw everything suddenly in full color: The bright yellow diamond-plate treads of the train steps; the red brick platform coming into view; The old fashioned black iron street lamp illuminating the bricks; the brown wood and warm copper fittings of a luggage cart waiting nearby, empty. I did not know what stop it was, but it was a stop, a real stop, a good stop, and I called to the people on the train to get off the train with me. Quickly, quickly! I called. Before it's too late!

They sat still and staring surrounded by their piled up fragments of luggage and, when I saw that they would not come, I leapt alone from the train onto the platform, accepting the fact that I was leaving my own luggage behind. But when I landed on what I thought was the station platform, the landscape changed, horribly: For all at once I saw that there was nothing there but a flat, beige, featureless plain that stretched out in every direction eternally. I saw that there was no there there, and I began to scream as the train pulled out, leaving me behind. Nowhere.

This screaming is where we find ourselves as I woke FF at around 5:30 in the morning and he kindly pulled me close and said "there, there" and put me back to sleep wrapped in a bear hug.

What in heck is this all about? What is my subconscious trying to tell me?

As FF and I look for the place that we are going to live together, the fundamental question we ask of all places is "Why here?" And then we wait quietly for an answer. We know that granite countertops, stall showers and crown moldings can be found in their hundreds of thousands everywhere. The primary question is whether or not the land itself has a purpose for us and calls us to come. So, as we weave around these Smokey mountains and valleys, we ask the question: Why here? Why here, and not somewhere else?

This is the first time I have searched for a home based entirely on a sense of place rather than some other professional or personal exigency. This kind of search is hard for real estate agents (and our families) to understand, because it is so internally driven and apparently impractical. We must accept that our answer to the question "why here" may not ultimately make sense to anyone but ourselves.

It is hard move away from the Northeast where I have spent my whole life. Sister of Urban Exile (SUE) and Mother of Urban Exile (MUE) live there, and MUE is getting on in years now. All of FF's siblings and his parents are deep in Central PA, and his parents are of course also getting on, too. Nobody wants us to move farther away, and we fear it will be hard to help them understand that we are not moving away from them: We are moving to something else. FF and I are moving toward something that we have been piecing together from the sun-cat scraps of our oldest dreams, our shared vision, and the numinous space that has filled the air around us ever since we fell in love.

FF, who is not apt to express preferences of any kind, did quietly say that once in his life he'd like to live somewhere other than Pennsylvania or New Jersey. I've had a lifelong jones to live in a cabin in the mountains and to have a little land to care for. Both of us would like to be a little warmer for more of the year. And both of us want to live somewhere that inspires us to do our best work.

So here, in a Victorian house a few blocks from where Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can't Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel, FF and I ponder where our home might be. Does this place feel like it might be it? Or could we take the leap, despite the warnings of the other "passengers", only to find ourselves in a tremendous, scary Nowhere?

All of us who live in New York have imbued our urban sufferings with the tangy perfume of magnificent arrogance. Crowded, dirty, stressful, expensive place that it may be, New York is the Center of the World, is it not? And we who live there are supposed to be, by association, the center of humanity itself. We resent with a white fury the idea that better ideas, better clothes, better views, better art or better anything might exist elsewhere. And we grasp that belief tightly because if we did not, who could make an argument for putting up with the daily insults that New York dishes out? But there is a qualitative difference between pride and arrogance, between loving an illusion and being downright deluded.

Still, the New York illusion has a piece of me. I am afraid to loosen my toes from the edge of the diving board and fling myself into empty space. I am afraid to sell my own miniscule speck of the Center of the World and trade it in for...what? I have been so loyal to New York. I have given her my heart. But has she given me hers?

Thomas Wolfe, who wrote "You Can't Go Home Again" four blocks from where I am sitting now, wrote that "One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years." Yep, she's an easy girl, New York. Accepts all comers. And when I'm gone, she'll take on another without missing a beat. So why do I care after all? Who can lament the loss of such a friend?

And what about this place? Thomas W. thought rather more kindly of Asheville and these great Smokey mountains around it. This old red clay Cherokee land may grow to love you truly if you stay a while, but it's going to take years of your life. And don't you imagine that eating shrimp, grits and apple smoked bacon for breakfast and saying "Hey" instead of "Hello" will get her to love you any faster! No, ma'am, the south will make a slow approach. But I've a sense that maybe, just maybe, once she gets to know me, however many years that takes, she'll be just a little sorry when I go.

A Hot, Sleepless Night in Harlem

2010-07-20T14:17:00.002-04:00

So they tell me that this is the hottest New York City July in recorded history. The warm, humid bed didn't hold me last night, and I ended up dragging my comforter to the couch in the living room, right across from the AC and right under the ceiling fan. But still, no sleep came.

Was it the heat? Was it the coffee I had at 3:30 right before my afternoon web class? Or was it that nagging sense of loneliness that I feel in my now mostly emptied apartment and that comes on me like a bank of thick fog? Yes, yes and yes.

Nothing feels emptier than a place you've lived in for over a decade suddenly denuded of everything personal. FF and I have moved the personal things out in boxes, and I had spent yesterday evening preparing the place for Saturday's open house. I vacuumed (again), washed the bathroom tiles (again), and wondered aloud (again) where the grime comes from that coats everything in Manhattan after even just a week, even when all the windows are closed. I thought (again) how many of my elderly neighbors in the building have lost or are losing their ability to remember things, how they seem so lost sometimes, and I thought (again) how I don't want ever to be an old lady living alone in a big dirty city where the soot makes you lose your mind.

I spent an hour and a half with Soft Scrub and a butter knife peeling away every burnt crust of a reminder of former meals I made on the burners of my gas stove. I became ashamed in advance of any flaws my apartment might have in the eyes of the Open House people, and I tried to protect us both, my Friend and I, from their imaginary criticism.

I went mental.

And so I could not sleep last night. I lay on the couch swaddled in my last remaining blanket, turned on Jimmy Kimmel, poured myself a glass of milk and felt around in the couch cushions for my beat up Beanie Baby, Fidelis. Can it be that I can no longer rest in New York? The constant hum, the constant light nag me. The constant low vibe I feel that there's something I should be doing that I am not doing is a feeling that I now know comes from outside of me, because when I am in the country I simply go to sleep in the blessed starry darkness next to FF. The country has a different hum, but its hum is alive: it is the melodious hum of the cicada, not monotone mumble of the generator. But on this hot New York City night, I am right back to where I was that steamy July 28 years ago when I first moved here.

Dad, send me some valium.

But Dad is gone now these 10 years. I am getting married in five weeks, and I am going away with FF somewhere, I don't care where, and we will be together and sleep in the soft darkness together. Forever. That thought alone makes this sleepless night different from the sleepless night of the girl that came to New York in 1982 and slept on the lopsided blue foam coach in her sister's apartment in Chinatown, because then nothing was for sure, I knew nothing, and I was just at the beginning of my self-proclaimed mission to conquer this big, bad city.

I've given up on conquering New York. And it's not because I can't but because it cannot be tamed and, if it could be, it wouldn't be worth it anyway. It was worth every sleepless night and broken romance and hard knock I ever got here to realize that the only one that needed taming was me.

I turned off the TV, pulled up the blanket and snuggled my Beanie Baby up against my chin. And, at last, I slept.

Photo: "Finestraa" author unknown. Taken from Ani Glaser's blog space. If anyone knows the artist, please advise me.

Race, Intolerance and The Selling of New York

2010-07-18T20:01:00.020-04:00

This is Urban Exile's day to do a Self-Criticism.

First off, Urban Exile castigates herself as a bad blogger. It's been a week since my last post, and you have kindly returned to see...absolutely nothing. I am sorry. And not just for you either, but for me as well. The pace of life (or was it just the pace of my mind?) has been so rapid, that there has not been a pause to ponder. And the worst is knowing that I have had some really cool ideas, and I have either forgotten them or lost my enthusiasm for writing them down in the midst of just doing too much.

One of the things that has interrupted my flow is the marketing of my Friend, the beautiful co-op in Sugar Hill, Harlem. First of all, let me say that I have been touched and comforted by those of you who commented on that blog and understood my angst about selling my Friend. Your comments and the empathetic tears you have reported to me have made me feel accompanied and a little less lonely here in my nimbus of impractical, nostalgic, animistic feelings. You have made me feel a little less weird and so I thank you.

My Friend has officially been on the market for a week now, and on Friday my slow-burning anxiety culminated in spending the entire morning searching for my apartment on line, not finding it, freaking out that my real estate agent was not on the job, and starting to post it everywhere I could think of including, yes, Craigslist. I guess I really want this to be over soon and not have to live through a protracted goodbye. I hate goodbyes. I am bad at goodbyes. Let's get this over with, I say, and not spend too much time waving on the platform.

So I posted furiously for three hours, and if you're curious about my Friend, try googling the MLS # which is 818576 and see if you find my place (in New York, of course) -- or some former listing of an apartment in Boulder, CO which is what I found on Friday, hence the freak out. You can be assured of seeing my Friend on my Postlets site at www.postlets.com/res/4126432.

Besides condemning myself as a bad blogger, here is my second, and more serious, self-critique: Am I racist, or just equal opportunity intolerant of others in general?

UE's real estate agent is a tall, rangy, good-looking, glasses-wearing, long-braids-done-up-neatly-in-a-bun-bearing African American man who I will call Kalim. Kalim is nice and soft-spoken, and I chose him and his small, boutique agency to sell my Friend because they know Harlem, know HDFC co-ops, and because I thought my entirely black Board of Directors might feel more at ease with him than some perky blonde from Prudential Bache. Good reasons, all.

One week after signing paper and getting this amputation on the road, however, I started to doubt my decision. Kalim was moving too slowly! I couldn't find my apartment listed anywhere on line, and when I Googled it, not even Kalim's agency's web page came up. I wondered if he was a pro or was he not? Was I socked into a four month exclusive contract with an incompetent? Where was my perky, efficient blonde from Prudential Bache, the agent I had not chosen but in whom, sight unseen, I suddenly had more confidence than the guy who had referred me a great contractor to do the renovations and had taken hours of his time to talk with me about the apartment? The home team guy? Yes, it took almost no time at all for me to lose the faith and doubt the creds of my local Harlem real estate agent.

When I informed Kalim about what I had done on Friday he sent back a short, slightly weary little note asking me to desist because he was posting in the same places and it would confuse people. And, by the way, he had an open house planned for Saturday at 1:00 PM.

I felt abashed.

I don't honestly think that race had anything to do with my panicked reaction to not finding my listing online. I come from a liberal, East Coast background and have made a career of teaching educated, often socially insulated white Americans about Latin American culture and language. I have lived in Harlem for 11 years, and New York City for 28, none of which makes me immune from racism, but the trajectory of my life has kept race and community in the forefront of my consciousness. But after my little anxiety attack, I felt that I had to investigate whether or not Kalim's classic red velvet, Barry White baritone, loping walk, and Striver's Row style inspired in me some sort of automatic doubt in his professionalism. If the imaginary PruBache girl were my agent, would I have doubted her after a 10 days and no searchable listing? I think so, but I am not sure.

A question to ponder in future posts: Where did I score on the Racism Scale (if there is such a thing) when I arrived in Harlem, and where do I score now after 11 years living there? Glinda the Good will have to ask Dorothy the all-important question before she clicks the red shoes: "And what have you learned, dear?". That question will have to be answered bit by bit in future posts.

For now, however, Urban Exile must launch into her third (and thankfully, last) self criticism of the day: Generally, I do not trust anyone to handle my business -- or even his own -- as well or efficiently as I do myself. Really. I am a control freak.

My impatience with other people's ways and speeds of doing things has sometimes marred my relationships. I am sure others close to me have seen me as intolerant and impatient and a real pain in the a** at times. As an artist, I am aware that there are many pathways to a good result because every one's mind solves problems a slightly different way. The shortest path to the result is not always the best, the most creative or the most fun. Yah yah yah. But often that hasn't short circuited that hot surge of impatience that rises in me when I see someone doing something "the wrong way". It hasn't stopped me from stepping in and just doing it my way with, perhaps, a bit of a look on my face and an edge to my voice.

At this moment, True Oak gently glides in and sits down in the worn, comfortable easy chair of my mind. She is wearing one of her trademark soft, flowing outfits punctuated on the pedal extremities by that pair of comfortable, solid Danskos she sometimes wears that remind me what a practical, grounded person she is. "Aren't you being a bit hard on yourself?" she says in the low, even tone that lets me know that the most rational answer is "yes" but still leaves the question open to argument. I love the way she pulls me back from the mental edge.

Yes, I am. Way too hard.

The Exile is rather talented at getting things done. And I did grow up in a house that was in such frank disorder so regularly that no one could come over to play. I cleverly recreated that unpleasant atmosphere for myself over the course of several relationships, too, by falling in love with depressive and/or just filthy men. So it's no big surprise that when I see what I perceive as disorder or inefficiency, I bristle and take over with an energy that must be slightly scary for those around me. Making order is a "fight or flight"response for me, and disorder feels to me like threat to my survival.

So am I a racist? No, I don't think so. Am I a control freak? Definitely. I don't like other people's ways of doing things sometimes. Urban Exile is working on that.

When I doubted Kalim's professionalism this week, there was a problem with my frenzied "Oh, I'll just do it myself then!" attitude. It was lacking in faith and respect. And I am truly sorry. I'll try to learn to sit on my hands the next time I feel like meddling.

Now excuse me, as I need to go fold FF's t-shirts. My way.

Diagram of how to fold a t-shirt by www.Tickledbylife.com

Violence in Tiny Town

2010-07-09T09:49:00.000-04:00

A violent act, or at least so it seemed to me when the owner of the house that abuts ours on this historic row of stone homes in Tiny Town cut down the old pyracantha that had graced our common garden wall. Our sturdy fire thorn, with its big pomes that were firm and green and ready to become a rich orange by fall when the birds abandon our feeder for its nutritious berries, is gone.

I came home from teaching in the city and found it cut to the root of its thick trunk, its healthy branches stacked up like garbage in back of the house. My tibetan chime, which had hung from one of the lower branches, was also gone and nowhere to be found. My nemesis, Scrappers the Squirrel (Knight of the Plumey Tail) stood in protest on the now ragged ivy growth on the wall, chattering his anger. The birds flew about, confused.

Firethorn is known as a pleasant place for birds who nest in its protective, sturdy branches and feed off its nutritious berries. Firethorn is used as a protective barrier because, despite its beauty, it is sturdy and its 3/4" long thorns are sharp as sewing needles. For Scrappers the problem is that the branch he had used to leap onto our bird feeder is gone, though I am sure he will figure out how to redress this temporary setback. I am not sure if I will be as resilient.

We had a Firethorn when I was child, and it splayed itself against the beautiful quartz-filled fieldstone walls of our family home. Its strength, its color, and its annual cycle of growth and color display was a seasonal marker for me. When FF and I came to visit the house in Tiny Town for the first time, I saw the Firethorn, I smelled the sweet, musty odor of boxwoods like Grandmama had grown in her Idaho garden and I was charmed. These plants, so nostalgic for me, filled me with a peace and a sense of Home that was immediate and irresistible. We saw the house on a Saturday and we agreed to rent it on Sunday.

The woman who cut down the Firethorn owns at least two of the seven houses on the row and at one time she owned three of them with her late husband. She is not a bad sort in general terms, just a widow with too many properties to manage left to her by her spouse. She told me she just wants to sell some of the houses, and not have to deal anymore with the headaches entailed by managing rentals. She is square-built and not tall, with a head of short, strong gray hair that gives her a tough, official look as if she might be a policewoman or a bailiff.

This woman is a different breed from me, one of those who prefers neatness over beauty, quick cutting over careful pruning. She suffered not a qualm, I believe, when she cut that huge healthy bush to a stump in the ground with a cold, chainsaw efficiency that is utterly foreign to my nature. She did not advise us she was going to do it either, perhaps because she does not live here and she has no sense of neighborliness with us. She is one of those territorial, legalistic types who would point out if questioned about it that the tree grew on Her Property, while ignoring the important truth that it shaded and graced ours as well. In one fell swoop she changed my partial shade garden into a full sun garden, two months before my wedding and in a heat wave where the temperature has reached 103 degrees.

So my whole garden plan, based around hydrangeas, has been put in jeopardy. Every morning I stand there with a hose in my hand, watering the ground, forced to gaze upon the ragged hole in the ivy where the Firethorn used to be. It's a loss, a friend gone, and I am reminded that breaking up with New York City does not mean that I will be able to break up with pain, loss, insensitive acts and sorrow. There is no Pure Land, as the sutra says, except in my own heart.

So, as my dear little apartment goes on the block and I prepare for that farewell, I also say goodbye to the Firethorn. I keep thinking that this breaking up with New York is all about entering a phase of my life when I had better learn to say goodbye to people and things with grace. FF says that seeing each day as the First Day, with only the day's tasks ahead and no memories of the past, might be a way to approach such losses. He is, of course, right. Why hang on to something that saddens me when I cannot redress it but only mourn its passing?

I have a neighbor, a spicy slightly thorny woman who is perhaps 10 years my senior. She is a writer and a gardener and someone who you would never miss in a group of people because her words, bright gaze and smile are arrow sharp. I like Aden, and I refer to her sometimes when I need a new thought about something. Her ideas are often precisely the ones I wouldn't have, and that's why I like the way they mix with my own, bitter against the sweet. Let us just say that the brief verbal explosion I had on the patio when I discovered the chopped Firethorn reached her ears, and a day later she came to offer some words.

"It'll grow back", she said. "It always does."

Photo: Iryna, Flickr

Night Train

2010-07-08T13:49:00.001-04:00

Tuesday night and I am on the 9:07 to Trenton. This is the first time I have gone back to Tiny Town on a Tuesday night, the first time I have played commuter. My New York City bed will be empty tonight.

Two women in my car are talking too loudly, first on their cell phones and then to each other: They do not recognize that they are in an enclosed space with other, tired people. The man in front of me is a commuting pro: He has earbuds on and is reading a very big book. The fresh, masculine scent of his cologne drifts over the seat, blown by the AC in my direction, and I am grateful. The last scent I experienced, on the A train from Tribeca, was the rank odor of a rag-swathed homeless man. Homeless funk always makes me sad.

"I hear e-commerce....my web site.....over-saturated....you're trying to fill your business....I didn't lose....I minored in Russian...I...I....I...I..."

The women chat and chat, oblivious. They make a loud, ping- ping-pinging in and out of my mind.

On this 100 degree night I am escaping Manhattan early. No sleepover tonight: I am trying on a new identity as a day-tripper. FF will pick me up at the station at 10:15 and then we drive the good stretch through suburb then countryside to Tiny Town, whose charm lies partly in its near inaccessibility to public transportation. Soon enough FF and I will slowly evaporate into the misty forests of the South, but for now we crouch cosily in Tiny Town waiting for the New York apartment to sell. When it does, we will spring into action.

Waiting for the - my - apartment to sell. My old friend. My shelter and refuge for 11 years.

The nicely scented man gets off in Metuchen and I reflect about the first time I met FF, right there on the platform in Metuchen. Metuchen helps me remember why I am doing this, why I am prosecuting this dramatic plan to break up with New York City.

This morning, I felt content riding the Transbridge Line into Manhattan with a light backpack instead of a suitcase. I got to my apartment, helped the real estate agent take photos, used Mop n' Glo on the floors to make them more photogenic, and then strode off to teach in the 105-degree of heat bouncing off every mile of steel, glass and cement. I was still content, as I slid carefully among the masses of sweaty people in this massive urban convection oven, evading the crowds, letting people enter subway cars and escalators ahead of me. It was easy to be generous: after all, I was leaving by day's end.

This is not the last goodbye, New York City, but it presages the last goodbye. And though I was feeling great all day with my little secret shining inside of me, now that I am here on this late night train sliding through the night, feeling alone with myself in the way I only do on trains, content has morphed to mope.

I experienced a stab of guilt leaving my apartment this afternoon to go teach my 5 o'clock class. Can you believe, dear Reader, that I left, backpack on, locked the door, and then actually reopened the door to whisper to the quiet, now nearly empty apartment, "I'll be back soon"? Well, I did. As if I were comforting it, as if it were sorry to see me leaving again having only just arrived. I animate things, as does FF (or did he only start since we met?), and my apartment is now animated beyond what is prudent for my own emotional well-being. It is an old friend wondering why I don't visit anymore.

("Wasserstein.....does bankruptcies....sounds SO familiar!.....Call me.....Divorce....technical action....now THAT'S a good attorney!...Philly?....ping-ping-ping...)

Tonight Urban Exile's real estate agent will post those lovely new photos on the internet and thus formally lead my old friend naked up to the auction block to be at the mercy of all comers. And I am running away to the country. Oh, what a bad friend I am!

What if someone comes to buy who wants to rip my arts and crafts beauty to pieces to achieve the dreaded "open concept"? What if they offer my asking price? What will I do? Will I hand over the keys and a complimentary crowbar and leave my old friend to the ungentle mercies of this appalling person? Really?

I've worked so hard to preserve my apartment, its beautiful architectural details, its solid oak-wood doors, its old glass door knobs, its thick, cool plaster walls. When FF came along, my friend perked up quite a bit: FF worked with me, adding impetus, spirit and purpose to the renovation, kindly adding his credit card to the mix as well. What I know about FF is that he would have helped whether or not I was going to sell. He just likes to help, which is one of the aspects of his character that won him my heart.

"The next station is... Jersey Avenue...." says the machine voice. I can still smell Metuchen man even though he got off two stops ago. Thanks for the memories.

It is true that my income did not suffice for some of the renovations that we did, nonetheless I could have afforded some of the work myself. When FF and I met, though, things that had never fallen into place before somehow starting falling nicely. Like the $165 custom wood radiator covers which always before had been priced over $400 apiece. Like the new windowsills throughout the apartment for $500, when always before it had cost thousands. When I was a woman living alone I presented as raw meat to ravenous contractors, dry cleaners and plumbers alike. When a nicely muscled man was standing next to me, saying absolutely nothing, the prices went down.

So now, my friend is looking pretty sharp which makes it even harder to say goodbye. Only my friend and I know what it felt like that hot summer day I moved in with nothing but a hot plate, some ugly wood end tables, a refrigerator and a mattress. Only my friend heard me cry all night when that relationship didn't work out, and the next one didn't either. And my friend watched me come and go, nose to the grindstone, working and sweating and sleepless, and also witnessed those rare times when I stumbled in, too late, too happy and maybe too drunk. My friend alone witnessed the hours of vocal and guitar practice to learn over 300 covers songs for the Finnish cruise ship gig. Yes, we have a lot of history together, my friend and I. And no matter where I wandered in the world, my friend was always here, waiting quietly for my return.

"Princeton Junction, next stop...." "So you need a kidney transplant?....Intense...My cancer is rising in Leo...ping-ping..."

One of my favorite students, who I'll call Aquaria, said to me comfortingly, "After all, it's just plaster and bricks. It's just a thing." Aquaria is older and wiser than I, and I know that she understands that her message to me is not as much true as it is necessary to believe. For we have to agree with ourselves to think certain things, true or not, in order to move on in life. I must not allow myself to think about my friend all alone, waiting still and darkened in the hot Manhattan night.

Yeah, it's just one of those things.

I hope I reach my stop soon.

Interested in Urban Exile's Manhattan apartment? Go to http://www.harlemhomes.com/sale_details.asp?listing_id=1758

Cutting Off My 212

2010-07-02T23:39:00.031-04:00

It was a quiet amputation, and I had to do it. Alone. I sat at my desk while FF was still at the office, and the afternoon was hot and still.

Truly, there has been no real use for it for quite a few months now, ever since I've been spending more time in Tiny Town than in the city, ever since we found ourselves some trustworthy cell phone service. But it was mine, and it had been part of my identity for so many years. I was attached to it and reluctant to let it go. But it was time. I took a breath, picked up the phone and called Vonage.

I cut off my 212.

I have had a 212 number for 28 years, ever since I moved to Manhattan with my shiny new college diploma. I have had this exact 212 number for 11 years, ever since I bought my own place in Harlem. Erika Jong points out to me that my beloved 212, my coveted-by-many 212, is pale in nostalgic and poetic value alongside such antique exchanges as her own childhood ENdicott2, or John O'Hara's fictitious BUtterfield8 (Huffington post, Sept. 8, 2009). But those were exchanges, not area codes. It was not until the booming 1950s that the area code started becoming a necessary part of the telephone number because of the growing quantities of numbers needed, especially in densely populated areas.

212 was the original Manhattan area code, distinguishing it from the not far away but more suburban 718 of Brooklyn. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language informs that originally "Area codes were assigned based on the length of time a rotary dial phone took to dial the area code. Densely populated areas like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit had huge incoming call volume and were assigned numbers (212, 312, 213, 313) that could be quickly dialed from a rotary phone." So, the fast-talkers in Manhattan and Chicago were evidently in a bigger hurry to dial than the rest of the country. With their cumbersome 7 and 8, the Brooklynites demonstrated that they had way too much time on their hands.

But analog rotary efficiency aside, there is an elegance to the twin swan-necked 2's that flank that single skyscraper of a 1. It's an elegance, almost architectural, that goes well with that deco diva, the Empire State Building; it complements the Tiffany cigarette box lines of the Chrysler Building and the savoir faire of Bing Crosby tap dancing up a wall without wrinkling the crease in his pants. 212 belongs in the MoMA. 212 remarks to no one in particular, "I am the crème de la crème."

There is another aspect of 212, however, that makes me suspicious that the Masonic Order, not dialing speed, might have been behind this choice of area code. At 211 degrees water is, of course, very very hot, but at 212ºF (100ºC), it boils. Let us be exact: fresh water (not saline or impure which boils at a higher temperature) at sea level boils as 212ºF. Life is different on Mt. Everest where water boils at at 156.2ºF (69ºC) or in Grandmama's kitchen in Twin Falls, ID in the high desert where it boils somewhere in between. But for all intents and purposes we can say that if one wishes to make tea in Manhattan, 212 is the temperature that must be achieved.

What are we to make of this, since we are indeed of a mind to make something of it? 212 indicates a tipping point, the exact point at which a liquid becomes a gas. 212 marks the transformation, the graduation from one level to the next: Up, up and away! We who come to Manhattan, this island of glacier-pressed Manhattan schist, Fordham gneiss and Inwood limestone, come to be transmogrified. No one comes to Manhattan to remain exactly what they were in Dubuque: We come to change our feathers and rise up; we come to become the people we dream we might be.

I remember when I came to New York I lived with SUE (Sister of Urban Exile) in Chinatown on Henry Street with her rabbit and her skylit, pink-tiled bathroom. I don't think I had any idea what I was doing there except that since she was there, it seemed a safe place to start and anyway I had no intention of going home to the parental units. Every morning, I would put on my blue wash and wear suit and some sort of white polyester shirt and I would sally into Manhattan trying to get hired. Somewhere, to do Anything. Every late afternoon, I'd come home while the hot summer sun setting pink and gold on the dirty brick tenements of Henry Street, my acrylic wash and wear wrinkled and smelling sour under the arms. I would pick up a can of Campbell's mushroom soup for dinner, and I'd try to make myself as invisible as possible at SUE's place.

I figured out right away that the goal of this Manhattan game was to rise up, like a vapor, to the pure land where smelly wash and wear interview suits, mushroom soup and couch surfing were a barely remembered nightmare. But how to get from street level to there? How was I to shape shift and blend in to the point where I too could live in taxi cabs and penthouses without my feet ever touching the sticky pavement? How could I rise above it all and live where happy little bluebirds fly, beyond the rainbow, why oh why?

I was too awkward, clueless and lost in those days to even imagine grabbing for any brass rings. But the thought was there, as if the island itself had radiated it into me, that the only life worth living was the life of transformation, of refining oneself into something better and lighter than the clumsy, ordinary flesh suit one had been born into.

As I amputate my 212, I remember my youthful yearning to rise. And as I mentally review every dream I ever had, I cannot help but try to estimate to what extent any of my dreams have come true. Good friends are better at seeing my successes than I am, and I try to learn to see myself through their kind and loving eyes. But I never quite made it to that frothy upper level in Manhattan, perhaps because my desires and fears were far too earthbound to allow it, or perhaps because my real element is water and not air. So instead of looking up, I am now looking out and I find the view so much less vertiginous, so much more reassuring and calm.

I am afraid that I will cease to strive when I break up with Manhattan. But stronger than that fear is my love for FF, and a hunger for my own piece of earth, not a piece of the city air. Somewhere there's a tree, a piece of ground and a mountain quietly waiting for me.

The conductor comes up the aisle on the train bound for Tiny Town, just as we pull out of Newark, and asks for my ticket. I ask him, "When do we arrive?" "2:12," he remarks, taking my slip of paper and punching it full of holes.

The end, in translation

2010-06-28T17:12:00.014-04:00

Two days ago, I was called to interpret at a law office in Mercer County and went to the meeting with no idea about the topic except that it did have something to do with a certain Ecuadorian man whose divorce documents I had translated only a few weeks before.

It turns out that the Ecuadorian man had done something bad, really bad, to a woman and now she was dead. The dead woman's father and her brother, neither of whom spoke English, entered the lawyer's book lined conference room looking spectacularly uncomfortable and out of place: I asked them to be seated.

The father was an indigenous-looking man also from Ecuador: short, strong and impressively built despite his years, he had no expression at all. The brother of the dead woman was also short of stature, but softer and somewhat lighter-skinned than his father and on his skin there were none of the marks of hard labor and suffering that there were criss-crossing every inch of his father's face and hands.

The lawyer proceeded to explain that we were here to sign papers to finish the case against the person who had killed their family member in a terrible accident seven years before. After costs, lawyer's percentage and everything else, they were to get 80 thousand dollars. They were to speak about the case to no one and this was to be the end of it, the lawyer said. We have worked on this case together for seven years, he said, and now I will probably never see you again. I translated this too, and there was a silence: No reaction whatsoever.

I had to explain to the family of the dead woman that there would be estate taxes to pay, and that there might be another bill from the lawyers in Delaware also. They nodded, careful of their reactions, guarded. I explained what would happen next, how the money would be distributed, and how their amount would be disbursed to them. The lawyer, through me, asked the father to sign several papers as administrator of his daughter's assets and estate, bienes y sucesiones, and he did, with the elegance and flourish of the simple man who aspired to a certain cultivation. I commented on the beauty of his signature. He smiled.

The lawyer repeated urgently: Tell him this is the end of the case, tell him it is over. Tell him I will send him a check within the next couple of weeks. I translated this. The man nodded. His son nodded. They understood completely: It was over and this was it, here and now. Do they understand? asked the lawyer. Yes they do, I responded. The two men were not flustered in the least, not jubilant, not sad, not anything at all.

When the papers were collected and the family had gone, I walked out the door to my car. The lawyer and his assistant thanked me, and I said no problem, I'll send you an invoice.

A woman killed, a document signed, money changing hands. There could there be no sense of real closure in that quiet, book lined room where the sound of shuffling papers was the only punctuation on the end of a long legal struggle to obtain a kind of justice for the kind of people who never get justice, no matter how many papers are signed. I wondered if 80 thousand dollars seemed like a lot to the Ecuadorian family. I wondered what they would do with the money. I wondered if they might send a child to college with the money, in which case this would not be an end but perhaps a beginning.

I waved goodbye to the lawyer as he slid into his BMW. And I drove home alone, sobered and emptied.

Photo: Angel from La Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Love Makes the Earth Move

2010-06-27T12:56:00.001-04:00

It's Sunday and I am staying in the country because of a strong urge not to face the city, and the dust balls and remaining apartment clutter that needs to either be boxed, or given or thrown away. I want to relax here, under the hot overcast Pennsylvania skies, to stay here in the little house in Tiny Town with FF and the AC turned way up.

I have to recognize that FF is a huge part of my wanting break up with New York. That is to say, I have not only a "moving away from" feeling, but also a really strong "moving towards" feeling in me. After two years and four months, I am still utterly smitten with FF: His kindness, his generosity, the sweet Central Pennsylvania music of his voice, and his graceful body that still makes a knot in my throat sometimes when I look at him, are just a few of the reasons that I draw close to this good man and to his comforting, slow-burning fire.

I met FF online via one of the better matching services in what felt like a last-ditch effort to try something different to find a mate. When I first saw his photo on the computer screen, in the solitude of my New York apartment I exclaimed loudly and to no one, "Now THAT'S what I'm talking about!" I then saw he lived in New Jersey, not far from Princeton, and I felt a little drop of disappointment. Too hard, I thought, to have a long-distance relationship. Odd that for me, a world traveler, New Jersey seemed like long-distance, but it did then. As we all know, there are Lower East Siders who boast that they never go above 14th Street, Upper West Siders who grimace at the thought of having friends on the East Side (where they have more closet space than bookshelves, as the saying goes). For a global city, we New Yorkers are a disturbingly super-provincial species, generally unwilling to roam outside our own chosen barrios.

But then I had a completely different, new thought: Perhaps a man who does not live anywhere near this over-stimulated city full of climbers and strivers is exactly what I need.

So I wrote to him. He was one of a very few potential suitors who I immediately hoped would write back to me after the first onslaught of 500 or so "matches". After we started "free communication", that is, not checking off boxes anymore, but rather exchanging unprompted thoughts, his first cascade of sentences had me hooked: I was starting to think of it as a Relationship, and I started to pray he wanted to meet me. You have to know that FF writes beautifully, with such sincerity and such a poetic sense, that I've kept just about every word he's ever sent me: emails, sms'es, and cards. Not long after we started writing, in the boyscout style of his that I have come to know well, he started a special email account just for our communications "in case of catastrophic server error". And so we started falling in love on the page, via our "squiggles".

When we finally met, on a snowy brick train platform in Metuchen, he felt so comfortable to be near, so right that my memories of that cold day are mostly warm and weightless. We walked up and down the Main Street of Metuchen (which is only four blocks long) countless times, until our frozen fingers forced us to enter a café where he drank hot tea out of a tea pot (for the first time, he told me). We talked about important things right from the start. He gave me two Moon Pies and a box of Earl Gray Oolong as a present, based upon a story I'd written him about a full eclipse of the moon that I had watched from a sidewalk in Harlem. He suggested I name my band "Tea and Moon".

When I got back on the train to New York, my mind emptied of all but one, long, humming Om of a thought: So this is how it happens.

Since then, I have wanted him as near me as possible as often as possible.

I knew in my gut that one of the big reasons this was working for me, besides that fact that FF is my soul mate and jewel of man, was what he was not: he was not a New York City man. I had figured out two years earlier I was not going to find my principe azul (Spanish for Prince Charming) in Germany. Then I realized I wasn't going to find him in New York City either. Finally there he was, on a train platform in Metuchen.

Place matters. Location counts, and not just in real estate, either. I never would have found FF buying fresh fish at Citarella or waiting in line at MoMA. It never would have happened. Because a shy, quiet, good, hard-working, Central Pennsylvania man like FF would simply never APPEAR in that spot, or at least with enough regularity to make a blip on my radar. You don't find deer in the desert. You don't find seagulls in cornfields. So figure out what kind of animal you seek, then go to where it grazes. It took an slick algorithm to help me find FF because, like many of the deracinated children of the striving American middle class, I had prioritized the unquantifiable virtues of career and achievement over the more fundamental joy of finding a lover who suited me, body and soul. Before meeting FF, I wasn't even conscious of what I had done to myself: I just thought I must be lacking in the womanhood department, or that artists never get to be happy. Or something.

Had the an algorithm not found FF for me, would I ever have understood that I needed to put New York City on notice to find him? Or would I simply have continued mistakenly grazing the same urban pastures and coming up hungry?

Love makes the earth move. I am going with it.

Photo of Metuchen train station on a snowy day by Grant Saff

The Perils of Metamorphosis

2010-06-24T08:51:00.000-04:00

UE tried to Google her own blog this morning. A bit premature it is, considering that I have only three entries and no followers. That said, I was still disappointed when I couldn't find myself. (New moment of existential angst: If I google my blog and it isn't there, do I really exist?).

I did, however, find a handful of blogs and online diaries with the words "Breaking up with New York" in them (why, oh, why did I think this was an inventive title?), usually somewhere in a post and not the actual title of the blog. From the style and tone of the texts, it sounds like all these bloggers are all women and they also tend to call NYC "he". I never felt NYC as a "he", despite Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees, the phallic skyscrapers, the roaring subway and all the other testosterone-charged aspects of the place. I have always felt NYC as a "she", and still I am breaking up with her, though I am not the lesbian in the family.

The only thing I can point to that makes this blog different from these other blog/diaries is that the whole point of this blog is leaving New York City after 28 years, the feelings that dredges up in me, and how this move seems to fit into the trends of modern American life. It's not just an episode in a larger text leading to another point: It is the point.

As I write this, now safely ensconced in the rafters of my little studio in Tiny Town on a bright Thursday morning, there's a buzzing going on. No, I mean a real buzzing, not just something in my head or on Page 6. I have tracked it down and it is definitely coming from the ceiling rafters. Furthermore, if I listen carefully, I can tell it is live buzzing, that is the sound of an insect, the kind of buzz followed by dry little pings of wings on hard surfaces, like flies stuck between the window and the screen. It's probably another stink beetle that's been born inside the wall trying to find its way to freedom or, put less subjectively, to the outer surface of the 200-year-old beam in which it was hatched by the hot, incubating summer air. For this beetle, freedom will be just another word for getting smashed in a paper towel and flushed. That said, I am amazed at the get up and go these critters show from the moment they are born! How do they know that the cramped space they are in is not where they are supposed to be? Where do they get that energy to struggle like Hell to get out?

Butterflies are in metamorphosis, inside the cocoon changing from caterpillar to butterfly, for anywhere from two weeks to even a couple of years. When they finally emerge from their cramped pods they can easily die, either because they are eaten by predators while still weak, or because they don't fully escape from the chrysalis and the acid substance they emit to penetrate the walls of the chrysalis starts to burn and deform their vulnerable, new wings.

With no visible signs to signal the emergence of the butterfly from its chrysalis, the chrysalis suddenly cracks open and out comes the monarch butterfly. Its wings are tiny, crumpled, and wet. The butterfly clings to its empty chrysalis shell as hemolymph, the blood-like substance of insects, is pumped through its body. As the hemolymph fills the monarch's body and wings, they enlarge. Right now, this monarch is extremely vulnerable to predators because it is not yet able to fly.

Buzz, buzz, buzz. Ping, ping. Tiny, crumpled and wet.

It took me 28 years, not 14 days, to achieve this metamorphosis. And as I escape the chrysalis I feel the possibility that I might not make it. Every time I go into the city now, I feel a sense of impending doom. Will my own poisons destroy my wings? Will some predator get me just as I am about to fly?

Buzz buzz. Ping ping.

It is summer, and UE's student population has fallen off horribly. I begin to worry about money, even though FF tells me I don't have to. After a lot of years on my own, worry about money is just something I do by reflex: I am not really convinced that FF has my back primarily because my longer, harder experience is that no one, ever, has had my back when it came to paying the bills.

So I don't know what to do with myself. Go to yoga class. Write this blog. Take on a legal interpreting gig and hope I know enough legal terms to explain to the poor Peruvian guy trying to prove he got divorced in Peru what his lawyer is doing for him. Weed the garden. Feel rather out of character in this role of suburban almost-wife. Perhaps I could practice guitar and get back to being the songwriter I was before all of this happened? Perhaps.

FF and I went into the city on Sunday and I placed things in boxes, mostly books and blankets which I tried to layer up so that FF did not break himself walking down the four flights with ten ton boxes of books. We rolled up the carpet like a Yankee Doodle, taped it, and threw it last into his SUV on top of all the other things. I decided to travel back to Tiny Town with him instead of staying in the city, and the spoken reason was that I didn't want him unloading all my stuff alone into the storage space. But the unspoken reason was that I was suddenly terrified of being left alone in my now much emptier apartment.

I slept here in Tiny Town Sunday night, and then on Monday drove myself to the station and took the train back into the city, feeling rather like a child not wanting to face cleaning her room. I had no students on Monday, all gone on vacation, so I humped back up to Harlem and opened the door. The sunlight poured in through the beautiful big, living room window and it showed all the mounds of dust that had been lurking beneath the carpet. The air was stuffy and still. It was breathlessly quiet, waiting. The bookshelves in my study showed only dust and bits and pieces that were too unwanted or too small to pack in cardboard boxes: an analog guitar tuner, some old backup CDs in plastic cases, a seed pod, a feather.

What do I do with this stuff? "Throw it out!", you scream. No, but I am obsessed. I want it all placed somewhere. I want all of these things placed in good hands, hands that need them. Some things will escape New York with me, others must stay behind and await the Apocalypse with their new owners, fresh-faced middle school teachers and dewy Master's candidates at Columbia. I go on to Craigslist and continue trying to sell things: The old fax machine, $35; the bootleg DVDs someone gave me when I was sick; the blue file cabinet (sold). I post things in the "Free" column: file folders, stacks of paper, envelopes, a puzzle. I feel like I am begging: Please take my stuff, please take care of it, I can't haul it where I am going.

Last night, UE's Best Friend (BF) surprised her by commenting that he had noticed how carefully and cleanly she always made such transitions. BF now lives far away in AZ, having escaped in body from New York though his spirit still figures on coming back. I wish I could sell my cocoon, er, apartment to BF, but he and his girlfriend don't have enough money to do it and she's not too excited about living in Harlem being more of a Brooklyn gal. But that would be the ultimate for me, really: To leave the apartment safely in the hands of a friend.

And where am I going? Like the stink beetle struggling in my wall, I have no idea really. This beautiful, rented stone house in Tiny Town is just a stop on the way, and I am conscious that everything I move now will have to be moved again, so I am being harsh with the cut. But like the beetle, I want out. And like the beetle, I am batting my wings, ping ping ping, against the hard surfaces of my material life, inspired by the clear, interior mandate that I must get out of New York City as soon as possible.

Wait. The buzzing has stopped for a moment. I stop typing and listen, breathless. The beetle is resting between efforts to escape.