This Moment

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.

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

x

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

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. 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 in the air and the other foot stretching out to touch down elsewhere.

Today I am giving stuff away for free on Craig's list. I am un-grasping, letting go of familiar objects, 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 with care.

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 watch because I don't care 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 today. 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 asking 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, laborer'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  you can sense when a person is utterly surrounded by a shit-storm of chaos and bad luck, and generally it's best not to get too close to such people.

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 pairs 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)

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?

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.

Cutting Off My 212

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

Truly, there has been no real use for it for quite a few months now, but it was mine, you see, and it has been part of me 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 necessity because of the growing quantities of phone 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 my sister 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 I was small, wherever she was seemed a safe place to be, 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 sally into Midtown trying to get hired somewhere to do anything. Every late afternoon, I'd come home while the hot summer sun set pink and gold on the dirty brick tenements of Henry Street, my blue wash-and-wear all 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 my sister'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 acrylic 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.

Today, as I amputate my 212, I remember my youthful yearning to transform. And as I review every dream I ever had, I cannot help but try to estimate to what extent any of my dreams have ever 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. 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 my fear is my love for FF, as my hunger for my own piece of earth is stronger than my desire for a piece of Manhattan sky. Somewhere there's a tree, a piece of ground and a mountain quietly waiting for me.

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

Love Makes the Earth Move

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

First Breath

I found that I was mightily annoyed this morning after I discovered my cellphone had tricked me into thinking I had no morning classes. So a client was left hanging at 9 AM, admittedly not his usual hour, but darn it when is this thing going to work as promised? Or is it me? My mood did not lighten as the morning wore on and student #2 called in with a migraine, and student #3 said, sorry, she had to cart her brother off to the hospital for an appendectomy.

The structure of my freelance day now a shambles, I started batting around the house like an escaped ball from a pin ball machine. I washed clothes, changed the bed linens, reorganized the CD collection, dusted under the bed and actually ironed pillow cases, the latter being something that never ever happened in New York where I had an iron but no cumbersome board around to take up space. My urban energy bursts from me! I must be busy! But the universe says nothing doing, sit down and have a nice write.

Here's where I reveal that I am in the country, or pretty near to the country, in a small town in Pennsylvania that I will call Tiny Town. Tiny Town is my carefully chosen airlock between my life in the city and my future life Somewhere Else. My fabulous fiancé, henceforth known as FF, is at the root of this. I met him in New Jersey and over the past two years and in each other's company we have been slowly drifting South like two sneaky jaybirds hopping ever closer to the Equator.

I started coming to Tiny Town after we rented The Doll's House, a historic little stone structure that has been sitting at this riverside location for over 200 years. The Doll's House suits us. It suits me so well that long weekends out here with FF  became four days out here and, lately, I am our here five days a week. New York City is catching on. The apartment is a little musty when I get back to it, a little stiller than before. The neighbors begin to be surprised to see me at all. No one really knows yet, but New York is beginning to suspect that I am trying to slip quietly out the back door.

So my day as planned in shambles, I decided to go to Yin Yoga class. Indeed, I have to boot myself out the door still suffering from the nagging feeling that self-care activities like yoga are somehow "cheating". I am lying in an particularly uncomfortable face-down position on the floor trying to breathe my way through my faschial discomfort, when yoga instructor Aurora starts to read from a book called The Anatomy of Yoga. The baby's first breath after he stops receiving oxygen through the umbilical chord of the mother, she intones, is a huge, gasping goodbye to the beautiful weightless world of the womb. The child is now pulled toward the earth, and must breathe for himself. This is called birth.

Aurora reads on. The doctors tend to slice off the umbilical chord right away, rather than letting it slowly throb to a halt, and this shocks the system of the little one. When the first breath is taken, she explains, the  circulatory system of the child actually reverses, veins and arteries switching roles. The lungs expand for the first time like a parachute exploding into the atmosphere, blood rushes to the chest. A person is born.

Birth is a goodbye. So then is a goodbye also a birth?

Tears spilled down my cheeks as I crucified myself in butterfly position against the wall, and I felt a dull ache in the spot where I was trying to heed Aurora's advice to "open up my heart chakra". Every moment is a goodbye to the one before it, every moment is a birth. I felt very vulnerable lying there in butterfly position with a salty tear on each cheek, tears that I do not wipe away.

I wonder. Has New York been like some kind of iron lung for me, breathing for me, making me feel alive just because it seems so very alive? Have I felt unjustly accomplished just for living there? Yes, I remember the glow of pride I felt when I was touring in Europe and Europeans would breathe in admiration "Oh, New York! It's my dream!" Sure, if you can make it here, you'll make it anywhere, so they say. But what is making it after all? And when did "making it" start being equivalent to owning a little fourth floor walk-up and managing to pay the bills each month?

Let me out of here, Mama. I want to breathe on my own.

Pushing Off

The feeling has crept on me slowly, like a river rising in the rain: It is time to leave New York City.

This blog is about this one simple question: What happens when a person who has spent all of her adult life living in Manhattan, decides to leave?

For 28 years New York City has been my home. I have spent most of my life here with parenthetical absences in Latin America and Europe, and I have pounded these streets for nearly three decades trying to become Somebody, trying to create Something, trying to discover that Big Secret that New York City, owner of the title The Greatest City in the World,  surely possesses. A few times, I almost thought I had it.

New York will get to you, get in you, get it over on you, and really take it out of you, too. New York pulls you in, makes love to you and then the next day doesn't know who you are. New York introduces you to really famous people at after-parties, and then she dumps a wet pile of stinky garbage at your front door. New York is like a question that you wake up every single day trying to answer, and then can't sleep at night for thinking about it.

I have guardedly started letting people know that I am plotting my escape, and the reactions have been nothing if not extreme and varied. A few friends, New Yorkers all, simply sigh and say as quietly as if they were afraid that an abusive spouse might be listening: Good for you. Then there are the shocked and appalled. "Oh, no, you can't mean it!" shrieked my dear friend G. from Stuttgart. "You can't mean you're selling The Apartment!" The Apartment. That's when I realized that people all over the world thought of my apartment as The Apartment. When G. first saw The Apartment, it had large fissures in the plaster walls, several of the doors did not close and I badly needed to get the tub refinished, among other things. But to her, The Apartment was a key component of her New York Dream, fissures, messed up bathtub and all. How romantic! That is if you don't have to live there on a regular basis. For her and others like her, the name New York is whispered like a prayer, and their sense of awe for my city is comparable only to their enthusiasm for all things Native American.

My city. There, I said it again.

The series of events that have pushed me to the precipice of decamping from the Center of the Universe include 9/11, touring with my band overseas, coming home again because I missed it, and falling finally and completely in love with a great man. It's amazing how long it takes just find out where you belong on the Earth, especially if you're a card-carrying citizen of this country of pioneers, backpackers and space travelers. And once the seed that I needed to leave New York started to irritate my mind, it was inevitable that I would have to go before long. But actually doing it? Well, that's another matter.

Synchronicities blossom all around you when your heart makes a really big decision, and I'll tell you about some of them as they happen to me. For now, I am in-between in all things. Between here and elsewhere, between single and partnered, between the known and the unknown, between the shadow of the New York City dream of my youth, and a less shiny but more coherent dream that is as yet a total stranger to me. I am stuck at the moment between the tiny persistent voice in my heart that has always yearned for forests, fields and waterfalls, and the brasher, louder siren song that still lusts after a really big collection of shiny, brass rings. The new dream, still gestating, feels more sustainable, more real somehow. And I am thinking now that I cannot give birth to it in this place.

This story isn't just about leaving the biggest, baddest city in the world: It's about finally learning to say goodbye in general. It's about learning to call it quits when things don't work. It's about leaving the middle for the sides. It's about sliding that long needle into the shiny red balloon of one's biggest illusions. It's about unloading a ton of stuff. It's about saying goodbye to these people, places, smells and tastes and all their sweet and funky gifts. And it's about me, groping my way half-blind but full of a new sense of hope, as I stumble forward to find out who I will be after I break up with New York City.


(Photo by Rebecca Chiappone)