Breaking up is (so strangely) hard to do.

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.

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"

Night Train

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

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)