And North
My affinity for upstate NY began with childhood summers at the Buffalo Colony, and then at the inimitable Frost Valley, both homes away from home, with winding drives through New Paltz, Hurley, Saugerties, Grahamsville, Loch Sheldrake, Woodstock, Bethel, Liberty, Kingston, Hobart, and Phoenicia in between. Now it continues with And North, a curated guide to upstate NY for creative individuals -- a website I am so happy to be contributing writing to. New content is posted each week, featuring interesting homes and artist studios, unique restaurants, venues, shops, farms, and outdoor experiences. Stay connected by liking us on Facebook and following us on Instagram!
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Sylvie
Me, Writing.
I was recently tagged in the Writer's Process Blog Tour Project by fellow neighborhood writer and children's media colleague, Melissa Sarno. I love this project. What a great way to discover, connect and stay connected with writers from far afield. Melissa pens the blog This Too..., a place she comes to muse on life, writing, and books. Her fiction is fantastic and wistful, carefully written, and just right. It's the kind of writing you want to stop mid-page and read aloud to someone. You can read her take on the writing process here and I hope you'll take the time to read mine. At the end of my post, I'll be tagging two writers whose writing processes I'm dying to hear about -- two writers whose blogs I follow, value, and love with all of my heart. xx
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
What am I working on?
From time to time, but every time, a guitarist named Jesse Cohen stands on the platform of the Carroll Street subway station and sings his freaking heart out. He does this bearing no ill will against the racket of Coney Island and Manhattan-bound trains, or the bushed faces of morning’s harmonious onslaught of coffee sips, bag digs, and phone checks, and yet, every two minutes, another train, and I can’t help but perceive each one's arriving interruption as unfair competition -- a vociferous entrant that blows in off the street, opens doors, sweeps his only audience off their feet. I can’t tell you how tired I’ve grown of choosing to be at work on time over hearing Jesse finish up a song, and that’s pretty much why I went to go hear him perform at an oyster bar on Court Street a few weeks ago.
When I got to the bar I took a stool and ordered a beer, but I noticed him off to the side, alone and eating a burger. Now, because he plays in the subway, I assume he is struggling, and because he is struggling, I assume he needs encouragement, and because he needs encouragement, I assume he has none to give. I can make fast and nasty assumptions like these on a daily basis, just you watch. So when he approached the bar for another drink, standing just to the right of me, I couldn’t keep my married self from saying, “I came here for you tonight.”
Jesse’s burger stayed on the plate because I asked him things that required explaining, and he shared with me just one of his life stories, since we don’t have just one, and I listened to him answer all of my questions with a soft frankness that is becoming harder and harder to find in people. That, or I hadn’t struck up conversation with a stranger in a very long time, but even so, he gave me that middle of the night tête-à-tête with the guy not at the party, but the one who knows about the party you went to, and you share cigarettes together on the broken porch with a vanishing light, talking about god knows what until you can finally go pay for pancakes.
When he was done, he bit into a cold burger and said, “Enough about me, what about you?” and I confessed to him I was having trouble balancing my work life with my writing life. I liked writing more, and was that a problem? Should I like them both the same? Shouldn’t I be doing what makes me most happy? Then again, am I taking the stability and flexibility of my work life for granted? If I could share with you my health insurance card, Jesse Cohen, I would.
He told me I had to do both, to find ways to keep doing both, that I’m lucky to have both these options available to me. He encouraged me not to be a lazy—to go to work, to come home and write, and to rinse and repeat, compete with the train if you have to compete. This is what I’m working on.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
It differs little when I’m reading and taking in other writers that I love, especially when I am easily moved and stirred by so many, at times to a debilitating degree. I remember studying Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” for the first time in college, literally running home to toil on my imitation. I loved “Girl” and the style of “Girl” so much – a mother’s nagging list to her daughter of how to do this and how not to do that, and at 20-years-old, clearly it spoke. I was a young writer being told collectively with all my writing classes to “find your voice” and, of course, studying another writer’s language and literary stylings will assist greatly with that hunt, especially a writer like Kincaid, but honestly I still struggle with putting my voice into words. My mom once called me “deep” after a poetry reading but I think that’s just something you have fun saying to someone once they’re finished reading their poem. I have a voice but it lives and breathes somewhat separate from myself, and sometimes I barely recognize it because it is just an impressionable collection of things seen, food smelled, feelings felt, songs heard, conversations overheard, and writings read, sometimes once, sometimes over and over and over again.
Why do I write what I do?
I hate math but I adore the puzzle of putting together a good piece of writing. It’s the sort of brainwork I find I enjoy. It’s also relaxing. I love taking the time to put anything into words – the words I don’t normally have in the moment, but I know are there – the words that other people will hopefully connect with and think YES. I make my way through life feeling extremely ineloquent and that reflection alone pushes me to recap things both properly and thoughtfully, in an effort to make sense of it all, for others, but especially for myself. When it comes down to it, I write what I do to work on my candor and I come to my blog to practice my writing. Above all, I am just shy of obsessed with my children and my children’s children and my children’s children’s children sitting by a fire on a frosty night sifting through shoeboxes upon shoeboxes, all stuffed with my writings, and feeling like they know themselves better because of a written taste of who I am, who I was.
How does your writing process work?
With a lot of staring, a lot of deleting, and a lot of patience. I take forever to write a single sentence. (Yes, that took forever.) A weekend writer with the occasional weeknight thrown in, I can't write anything without a decent beverage, and I won’t post anything until I’ve read it out loud. If I wouldn’t speak it, I don’t want to write it.
And now, for who I'm tagging...
Lara Dotlich Anderson for her blog Joy, Lovely, Joy.
Carly Sloan Einstein for her blog On Being Unrelated.
Reflection
With building renovations have come months of time spent lying on not our couches, mincing garlic on not our cutting boards, watching the television preferences of not our preferences. We’ve been fortunate enough to snag residence with both Michael’s parents and my parents, as well as a coveted spot in our friend’s Bond Street bachelor pad while he flew his fine bachelor self down to Florida (timed suspiciously with early morning pile driving across the street). There was also an airbnb in Miami. My moods have run the gamut from cheery and content to mellow and distressed to cross and irate about life in all these places. (The airbnb could have used a basket of toiletries, but it was otherwise lovely.) We have lived with others, or amongst others’ things, for the last 8 months and when you live like this you can’t help but observe (or judge) the ways in which everyone else is living. But while I’ve done my fair share of complaining, be it an uncomfortable bed, a lack of privacy, or missing a certain kitchen accouterment, I’ve also taken silent note of those rare things I have liked and appreciated. In a way, we’ve been living not our real lives but the lives of others. We’ve adjusted our preferences to the likes, habits, and routines of everyone else, and now we can tell you what makes them snap, crackle, and pop. We know how they like their thermostat (68 at all times, so please don’t change it), how they like to cook (with an old, faded magazine tear-out set on the counter with some country music playing), how they like to clean (rinsed thoroughly before set in the dishwasher, please), and how they like to get ready for bed (one last piece of dark chocolate in the dim of the kitchen). Witnessing firsthand how others live forces me to reflect on the way in which I have lived in the past and how I see myself beginning to live in the future. A new life that finally feels close. I am easily inspired by others’ styles, schedules, decorative measures, and general ways to be that I see in these magazine tear-outs that are other people’s lives, but I know that in the end, our own tear-out will soon be making its way into the fold. And my moods will run the gamut there as well.
A Hell of a Lot of Food Blogs
I've been reading a hell of a lot of food blogs lately and I'm not sure what to make of it.
I work in publishing but maybe deep down I want to be a chef. A waitress. A girl bagging groceries. A mom feeding children. All I know is that I have this gross hunger to know what other people are making when they come home at night. How the weather, wherever their kitchen may be, is contributing to their appetite. The bites of real life gone amiss but somehow winding up in the pan, close to tears, next to the onions. The secrets, if any, and there are many, to grilling that cheese and scrambling those eggs.
In casual conversation with Michael tonight, I referenced food bloggers. Under his breath and with no regard he imitated my saying it as if it weren't a real thing. "Ha. Food blogger." Like it was some slang I'd picked up outside school. "Why is that funny?" I asked. "Because I've never heard someone say 'food blogger' before," he said, and he was being honest. In disbelief I sat there. Never heard someone say "food blogger"? Am I reading so many food blogs that I am now caught up in the culture of thinking this is the only culture? I know we lie in bed at night reading vastly different feed aggregators but he's heard the word "food" and he's heard the word "blogger" so... really? A rage ran through me. What is one-third of my blog if not a food blog? What does he think I'm writing? What do I think I'm writing?
A Highly-Focused Story Characterized by its Brevity
I judged the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for the first time tonight. High school writings. Twenty-five pieces of flash fiction from the comfort of my desk and each one went down like dessert. Sad, sad dessert. I read about a room, an empty room in a derelict apartment building where a teenage girl goes to be alone because her father is angry and her mother is dying. I read about an old woman living in a nursing home who still pours tea for the daughter who never came home after being pushed out of the house to go play. I read about a boy with OCD who won't leave the house but whose mother thinks is doing just fine. About a kid longing for the day when he won't get beat up. About the mother with breast cancer; the father with lung cancer.
I wrote about needing new pants in high school. Pants.
A Food Poem for a Snow Day
Buttered toast is the most
Mac and cheese, Michael, please
Texas chili in my belly
Peanut butter, honey, jelly
Roasted squash for the bite
Sauce and parm will make it right
Tea with lemon in just seconds
Bowl of berries, yogurt beckons
Fish fry, pad thai, take a bite, pizza pie
Soppressata, cutting board, soft baguette, take some more
Saag paneer, a good dark beer, warm the oven would you dear?
Noodle kugel, cottage cheese, don't forget the sour cream
Chocolate cake, it's time to bake
Grill some garlic, hanger steak
Balsamic drizz on brussels sprouts, hot smoked salmon, baked whole trout
Shot of scotch, boiling pot, do you good to never watch
Chorizo spicy with some beans
Wipe your hands right on your jeans
Chinese food, from the carton
Don't you miss the farmer's garden?
Cocoa powder in a cup, heat the milk, you know what's up
Close the kitchen, dim the lamp
Watch some TV like a champ.
New Outlets
After tomorrow, it will have been a year since I put forth the ambitious (and vocal) resolution to write a little something every day for the next 365 days. While it’s clear I didn't keep that resolution, I do feel like I successfully captured some small and big moments of 2013. Moments that meant things to me. And this year was no joke. So much happened. Amid the general excitement of trips and weddings and babies and mortgage paperwork (ehhh, not so exciting), I think I did good on time carved out to gawp at blank screens and words I didn't love and I put in that time even when I felt drained of creative drink. When I found myself staring for too long, I ordered more coffee and I ordered more wine and I sat in more café windows waiting for ideas to materialize, for thoughts to finish and make sense, and I still did that while dying to do anything else (except mortgage paperwork). This pressured New York of a lifetime I was born into isn't going anywhere, so this year I’m going to work on shooing away the contest between my professional and creative self. There’s too much value in pursuing the things in life we care most about, the things in life that make us most happy. Even if the things in life that make us most happy feel so freaking hard. Even if it’s just slipping a single postcard into a mailbox, or a foot into a slipper. I’m going to find new outlets.
A Christmas Carol in Carroll Park
The Carroll Park bathrooms - er, the Robert Acido Park House - got dressed up tonight, all done up and transformed into a Christmastime-lit, cozy playhouse for Smith Street Stage's live radio play adaptation of "A Christmas Carol." I went by myself because Michael had a nighttime soccer game in Canarsie, but also because I really, really like doing things alone.
I slipped into the second row of three rows, slipping back just as quickly to what sure as hell felt like the 1930s. A couple of tall, prop stage microphones, mismatched patterns, brick and brass, chrome wall sconces with milkglass shades, metal pole lamps with beaded fringes, small, round mirrors. There were maybe twenty-five people housed together in just a couple hundred square feet, this including the actors, but not including the characters because seven supremely talented actors played thirty-four characters in ways I can't even begin to describe. Some read scripts, some didn't, some knew exactly when to shake a bell and slam a door, some needed gentle taps on the shoulder to turn around and take this cup. I watched a sixth-grader (Tiny Tim) go quietly, carefully up and down on a step stool to reach the microphone he needed to produce breaths perfect for the mimic of whisking Scrooge to another moment in time. It made the best sense to close your eyes and listen to each sound effect, but you fought to keep them open to witness the grace of the performance. The plink-plinking of a rake's teeth; the flapping of a thin piece of sheet metal; moving fingers across the top of a water-filled wineglass; knives crossing a plate; leather shoes slapping upon bubble wrap. All of it so make-shift, but so perfectly concocted to create that Dickens soundscape.
And there's siiiiiiiinging.
For $15, I can't recommend it enough. Go before you can't go anymore.
Q and J
"Q and J, I told you, Grandma, those are your hints," Michael says while driving, his cadence crawling and intentional. He is really good when it comes to speaking to grandmothers, especially his own. I am sitting in the backseat buckled up in a seatbelt, watching the sky turn pink and blue over the Brooklyn Bridge. We're headed east on the BQE.
"Queens," she says. "I know we're going to Queens."
"Or maybe Quebec. We could be going to Quebec," I gibe. "Hope you packed a bag."
"No, no, no, Canada?" she says. "Why would we be going there?"
"I can tell you now, we're not going to Canada," Michael assures her before the confusion can settle in.
I know where Michael is taking her and, honestly, sitting backseat in the car has me feeling like a little kid being taken somewhere I don't really want to go. Especially on the weekend when I could be "hanging out with friends! just wanna hang out with my friends. ugh, you never let me hang out with my friends" - not stuck going to Saturday night mass in Ridgewood, Queens. Plus, when you're Jewish, it just feels unnatural. All those chimes. All that kneeling.
But Michael had tucked this surprise up his sleeve for a couple of weeks now, knowing full well how happy this bitter cold car ride to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish would make his grandmother. This was where Father Sansone had transferred to after eleven years at Sacred Hearts - St. Stephens. He left two Junes ago, and although the new priest was very nice, he was no Father Sansone. It was a simple act, but a grand gesture for Michael to conceive of reuniting his grandmother with her old priest. I would never have thought of it.
When we get to the church, and it dawns on her where she is, her face lights up like Christmas, an analogy that literally seems appropriate here. We slip into a pew, Michael between us, his grandmother's euphoria spilling out like fragrance, to the point that it starts to feel contagious and all of a sudden, I am excited we are here.
"Do you want me to switch seats with your grandma so she can see Sansone better when he walks by? They're walking now. I see them. See?" I say.
Michael laughs at me from under the whistles of the pipe organ because I sound ridiculous. "Yeah, I see them. No, you don't need to switch."
We stand, we sit, we kneel. In my head, I start the beginning of prayers, but never finish them. I look around at everyone else, in their winter coats and casual shoes, wondering if some of them left the house with a chicken in the oven. Honey, I'm going to mass. I'll be back in an hour. The timer's set for the chicken. Don't touch it."
When John and Anne renew their wedding vows after fifty years, I start to cry, I can't help it. They do it in front of family; they do it in front of Michael, his grandmother, and I. That is a long time to be married. That is a long time to know anybody. I've known Michael and his grandmother for five years. To think that one day I will know Michael ten times longer than that is scary because in fifty years it'll be 2063 and the peace, love, and happiness days will have been 100 years ago. In fifty years, will nights and memories like this one stand out? If I don't write about it, will it disappear?
Michael holds his grandmother's hand because he is not afraid to show love in that way. When it comes time to receive the host, he encourages her to walk up to the front and get it, even though I don't think you're supposed to skip the line. When she comes back, she is really affected by the woman who graciously allowed her back into the pew.
The little things.
As we file out of church, I am nervous Father Sansone won't recognize Michael's grandmother. It's possible, isn't it? Can a priest really keep all his congregants straight?
"Christine!" he proclaims when we shuffle past him. "I thought that was you!"
She is glowing, floating, beaming, gleaming.
It is one of the coldest nights yet, a bitter 20 degrees, but when we get into the car to drive to Jahn's, the "J" of Michael's "Q and J", for an old-fashioned banana split, I'll admit to feeling pretty snug and toasty.
My Blog
"I'm redesigning my blog," I said to Michael on a particularly beautiful day, a day I'd chosen to say it. We were walking briskly across the Union Street Bridge, on our way to Park Slope, to go to a friend's daughter's christening.
"Why?" he asked.
I had my reasons of which I rattled off, as if preparing for a job interview.
"Well, it's been four years on Tumblr. I'm tired of my template. It's too fixed. I can't modify it in creative enough ways. I want people to comment. I want a site that I can look at and like looking at. I want a space to write in that inspires me to write. A space where I can see everything in front of me. I just need a change."
"Okay," he said.
I hate Michael's "Okays." Okay? Okay? It made me feel like I had more to prove.
"Also..." I said, starting to sound a lot like someone desperate to teach a lesson. "I take written histories very seriously. Not everyone can be an oral storyteller. Not everyone can remember the days in and the days out of their short, little lifespans. Life moves pretty fast, did you know that? If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Did you know that? And do you know who said that? John Hughes. Well, John Hughes wrote it. Ferris Bueller said it. Matthew Broderick. I think it's important that one of us, me, pen the history of our life together, of our relationship, our marriage, our faults and our fights, so that our children and our children's children can read written accounts of who we are, who we were, who we became, what we did, where we went, what we loved, what we hated, how we felt, and how we died. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Sorta."
I hate Michael's "Sortas." Sorta? Sorta?
"I think your blog is something that makes you happy, and if it makes you happy then you should find all the ways to continue blogging," he says.
Human beings are not rational, but rationalizing animals. I don't have to rattle off a list of reasons as to why I am making change. If I believe the change to be in my best interest, then that's why I'm making it. I've been writing in diaries since the 80s / journaling in notebooks since the 90s / blogging online since the 00s. It's my favorite outlet, my favorite form of exercise. It's not always fun to do, but it's always fun to have done it.
And he's right. It makes me happy.
Second Floor Columbia Street
Consider what all your old apartments would say if they got together to swap stories. They could piece together the starts and finishes of your relationships, complain about your wardrobe and musical tastes, gossip about who you are after midnight. 7J says, ”So that’s what happened to Lucy; I knew it would never work out.” You picked up yoga, you put down yoga, you tried various cures. You tried on selves and got rid of them, and this makes your old rooms wistful: why must things change? 3R says: ”Saxophone, you say? I knew him when he played guitar.” Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers of your reinventions.
“The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found” by Colson Whitehead, Published in the NYT Magazine on November 11, 2001.
***
When Michael and I left second floor Columbia Street a month ago, we left hurriedly and without regret. There was no dimming of the lights, no slow close to the door, no thoughtfully chosen song playing in the far-off distance. We left like we were just… leaving, to go to work, to catch a movie. I missed the acknowledgment, the pause, of what this apartment had been for us, had done for us, had heard, had seen. Because if walls could talk, what would ours have said? Isn’t it worth noting the address where the readiness of marriage had finally felt equipped and outfitted?
Second floor Columbia Street fulfilled a fantasy of mine. The fantasy where I am finally older, with a job and a boyfriend, tiredly dropping keys on a counter, unzipping skirts and pulling on socks, pouring wine with sighs, writing rent checks in a flurry, hitting spacebar at a farmhouse table, with no television, just music and books and radio and windows, watching Brooklyn sunset light flood dark honey wooden floors, listening to rain, to hurricanes, to Jalopy banjos, to foghorns, to church bells.
I romanticize life - I will be the first to admit it! Yes, shitty shit, like scary silence and arguments and crying into pillows so he won’t hear me but probably did, made its way into this second floor Columbia Street fantasy, but that is just what lies behind a closed door. Yeah, there were nights we were too hot, days we were too cold, afternoons of resentment, mornings of insecurity, et cetera. #lifeproblems
I turned 32 over a week ago and I can barely remember conversations I’ve had thirty seconds ago. I can’t stand the idea of looking back on my life in foggy recollection. So what, so many people think. And they move on. But I can’t. I want my future histories, my children, to find written morsels of our genetic similarities so that their feelings, the intuitive way they handle themselves, my quick lip or quiet chariness, feels more endowment than bug.
I know I am just one writer contributing to the long narrative of (low-scale) human suffering, our half glasses full, then subconsciously dipping like an old man’s bank account, or like eyesight or like time. Optimisms mottled. Considering our injuries with broken hearts, thoughts reeling like a broken fishing line. Leisurely I learn that nothing can ever be like it was. And why should it? I don’t want to stay locked in time, reliving the same awesome things. I want to move on and feel everything! The late Seamus Heaney wrote, “Capstones shift; nothing resettles right.” Not to say that it wrongly resettles; it resettles.
In the past, our energies have burned on Union Street, in a full bed, eyes open, jumping madly (me) and purposefully (him) into what we always felt would be the rest of our lives. In the top floor apartment of Marie and Norman’s house, we’ve sat opposite sides of a reclining couch, watching The Jersey Shore in fun horror, paying closer attention to Ronnie and Sammi’s dysfunctions than to the ones we, ourselves, were cooking up. We’ve since broken up and written long emails; we’ve since connected over ices and gone for long walks. On Craigslist I found our clean slate - second floor Columbia Street – where just a few short months later, Michael penned a message to me in the Red Hook Star Revue that read: “I’m so glad that we have Columbia Street together.” Second floor Columbia Street was a saving grace from its aggravating landlord who I secretly took lessons from in how not to be. I took Italian language classes. He started juicing and running. We spent lots of time with grandma. We learned a million things about a million things in this apartment. My name changed in this apartment.
We’re in transition now, living at Third Street and Sackett Street, but we’ll resettle on Summit Street in the year 2014, on a date that exists because it will arrive naturally with the calendar, but on a date I can’t write down yet. I’ll have to work to treasure the meantime. Otherwise, our story will let pass the romance. And that’s not how it goes or looks in my fantasy.
Steve Katz
On Court Street, Michael and I tore away from each other, without words, like a wishbone minus the luck. We’d taken our argument outside the apartment and into the evening hot, walking together for a few blocks before embarking on separate runs. He was taking the train to Greenpoint for a long run home, and I was taking my legs to the air-conditioned gym for mindless release. I don’t know how Michael ran that night, but I ran fast, fueled with all sorts of emotion, a state of running I will admit to missing sometimes just because of the naturally aggressive, effortless pushing it warrants. For 40 minutes, without music, I ran uphill. Then I went and cried at the mirror, ten pounds up and down behind my head.
As a writer it seemed the perfect night to be hot and bothered; everything looked and felt personal. The sky, a mean summer orange, had given the brownstones a sick glow as if they’d been slapped on the stoop more than once, and the old, Italian ladies sitting sticky in their chairs could tell you exactly what they’d seen. I thought about the rest of my night, how I wanted it to go, how I could make this Friday night mine and no one else’s. I thought about not showering and just grabbing my bike for a night-ride. I thought about walking through Brooklyn Bridge Park and setting myself down on a bench to think about my man and our mishegas. I thought about buying a pack of cigarettes, something I have not done in years, just to blow smoke for once. As I got closer to my apartment, and closer to the idea of just showering and going to bed, I saw two girls sitting outside Jalopy, the bluegrass, folk, and banjo venue next door.
“Who’s playing tonight?” I asked them.
“Steve Katz,” one girl said. “He goes on at 9.”
I didn’t know who Steve Katz was but I didn’t really care.
“I live next door,” I pointed out. “I’m just gonna go take a shower and then I’ll be back down.”
As soon as I said it, I felt weird for saying it, as if we were people living in a small, country town and I had just moved into the barn down the gravel path.
“Sounds good,” the other girl said.
The whole thing did sound good, and as I showered and shampooed my hair, I felt more and more satisfied with the night’s plan. Before I left, I texted Michael: “@Jalopy.”
A ticket to hear Steve Katz play cost $25. I paid that up, and while I was at it, paid cash for a stocky mason glass of wine, which I took with me to the 3rd row pew, just short of the stage. There were maybe 12 people there, mostly older people, like a few years older than my parents. Around 9:10, Steve Katz walked down the aisle and got up on stage. He looked close to 70, with a belly and a plain, wrung out dark blue shirt. He didn’t say anything; he started to play. My eyes got hot immediately. It had nothing to do with what he was singing about (a jug band tune called “take your fingers off it, don’t you dare touch it, you know it don’t belong to you”) but it had everything to do with feeling touched by sound. Sometimes music hits me and I feel like it’s the first time I’ve been hit with it, ever. Behind me, under their breath, a man and woman sang along. In between songs, while tuning his guitar, Steve Katz told stories as if we already knew the most of it and here we were, just sitting around a fire, sharing more, and adding to them. Later on, in another pew, during a memory about the Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street, someone helped him remember the name of a guy they used to know. I thought about a million different things as Steve Katz played his guitar and sang his songs. His age, for one thing, and how the 60s were so long gone for him. I thought about his memories - the songs he would write about women leaving him; the joints he would roll and the bourbon he would pour. He sang a song to his grandchildren about prostitution and when he tried to explain what prostitution was to them, one of them looked up at him and said, “I don’t think that song is about that.” Steve Katz said, “Okay, it’s about drugs then.” I really liked his banter. I really liked that he was out on a Friday night playing in the cool of a friends-only crowd. Even though he also sang a song about most of his old friends being dead or having gone away. I liked the wooden tap of my wineglass hitting the pew each time I took a sip.
“… And that’s when Blood, Sweat, and Tears was formed.”
Suddenly, Steve Katz said this and all I could think was… Dad…
My dad loves Blood, Sweat, and Tears. He loves lots of bands, but his love for this one has always stood out for me. We used to have a couple packed drawers of cassette tapes, so many of them scribbled in my dad’s lefty handwriting, I see them in my head. Almost 15 years ago, when I was showing him how “Napster” works (that is so crazy to write), I asked him to name me a band he wanted to look up.
“Blood, Sweat, and Tears,” he said, immediately.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Oh man, you don’t know who Blood, Sweat, and Tears are?” Disappointment shrouded his face. “I have so much to teach you.”
Listening to a guy my dad listened to for so many years rounded out the rest of my night.
It’s those small surprises that can turn your night around.
Parties
A couple of nights ago, while cleaning out my inbox, I clicked open an old-fashioned party email invitation I’d sent out for New Years Eve 2007. Rereading it, I couldn’t help but feel flushed at the wordy attempt to sound casual and cool (subject was entitled: “laid-back, no expectations kind of new years eve party at Sylvie’s”) but when I read through all the reply-alls (my life was filled with so many people who knew and knew of each other back then that the reply-alls weren’t a bother the way they are now), it was clear no one found my proposal grating. Everyone had equally dorky / clever-attempting things to write back (i.e. “zero expectations = my middle name” and “I call dibs on Becky’s bed”) not to mention they all could come, everyone was free, unfilled, ready to buy a container of hummus and their own something to drink. These days it is task enough making plans with another couple for dinner… let alone ten of them and at less than a week’s notice. It made me miss the whole party-throwing shebang.
A week before July 4th, I asked Michael if he wanted to throw a BBQ party in my parents’ backyard since they weren’t going to be there. In my mind, it was the perfect opportunity to get back to my party-throwing roots. I’ll write up a guest list! I’ll make mini quiche! I’ll make a playlist! I’ll forgo the urge to concoct a trendy summer cocktail and instead, with one foot up against our chairs, we’ll drink our leftover wedding beer, eat watermelon and wrinkled hot dogs, and stay outside talking / laughing until my responsible adult voice breaks the news about needing to whisper now. Neighbors, I will point up, down and around. Everyone will have fun.
“Not really,” Michael answered.
I knew Michael didn’t have any better ideas for how we should celebrate July 4th, so I decided not to listen to him. I told him, enthusiastically, “We’re throwing a party.” And then I made him invite his friends, the ones he has left, because mine are otherwise dwindling. Seven years ago I could rattle you off tons of names – from camp, high school, Hebrew school, college, jobs, friends of friends, the entire band of a friend, boys I’d gone on two dates with – it was so easy to cull these bodies together in a room. It was the age of wanting to be where everyone was, her legs dangling off a fire escape, his back against a wall – ready to hook-up & make our connections, tell a story, and be seen. Social networking hadn’t reached that high a level of time suckage, and so we hadn’t yet begun confusing real conversations with the comments we now leave on status updates. We took cute people to parties to get them into a context, to show them who we knew and who knew us. No one was married yet.
Like most things in life, your parties will evolve. You’ll become picky about what you’re drinking, sticking with what you like best, what won’t get you drunk. You’ll want people over in the afternoon so that you can clean up that night and still get to bed as if the whole party never happened. Without the smoke, a 2-year old baby will have you laughing. Would it be nice if that guy I used to laugh with at Thursday night poker games at my friend’s ex-boyfriend’s apartment in Park Slope came to my July 4th BBQ party? I think he’s of another time, not really meant to come back.
I miss the old parties but can’t seem to throw them the way I used to. Why does this have to happen? What gives?
Suburbicity
For me, the (adult life) distinction between suburbia and the city was always clear-cut. In the ‘burbs you were older, affable and humdrum with a genuine taste for strip malls (you didn’t just go there, you liked going there) while in the city you were young (at heart), at one with cultural significances, and typically looking for and finding creative ways to stay out late. In my bubble, your move to the ‘burbs meant you were turning into (your) parents, grown-ass parents – or retiring. You wanted to cut the grass, you wanted to bake the cookies, you wanted to stop walking and start driving. Moving to the city meant you wanted big(ger) things for yourself – jobs, dreams, love – and you thirsted for difference. Different backgrounds, different things to say about the same things, and while I do know the differentiation line is thinning – many towns are now reconstructed to include walkable shopping streets, good transit, mixed uses, and green spaces - I am still intractable on the old-fashioned suburbs the same way someone who hasn’t been to Brooklyn since 1960 would comment on its “bad reputation.” Suburbs: bad. City: good. I’ve read too much fiction in which my suburban woman is bored, depressed, neglected, wiping her cookie-cutter hands on an apron; I’ve watched too many TV shows in which the “little boxes” all look the same, window-shuttered and monotonous; I’ve seen too many movies… actually, I haven’t… but I am conditioned to know that it is the role of the suburbs to conjure up that pejorative place, and because of those depictions, I rely on them to exist on a purely selfish level - for the pleasurable cartoon comic strip of it.
We visited friends this weekend in West Hartford, Connecticut. On a short jog through the neighborhood one morning, before I crossed the street without looking both ways (twice), before I heard the hum of the lawnmower, before I sniffed the (“I have time to make”) pancake syrup wafting down driveways, before absolutely nothing happened, a complete stranger waved to me. Forget the nod of acknowledgment or the smile of acceptance. This here was a wave that I could have stopped and counted with fingers, lasting an entire three seconds. There is energy involved in lifting one’s hand, moving it from left to right, right from left, and when you don’t even know that person’s name (or care to know it), the energy is that much greater. I’m not not a waver – I grew up waving to my own neighbors, people I recognized and felt some sort of trust for, but it was more of a one hand up, do you solemnly swear kind of wave, except a little higher up. Ah, yes, it is you, I know you, I see you there. And so you wave. But this guy didn’t know me. I reciprocated the wave and almost immediately my jog picked up its pace. On a strangely chilly Memorial Day Weekend, in a town I felt no connection to, all of a sudden I felt warmth. All because a stranger, someone I would never see again (maybe…) waved at me. The city prides itself on broadening our connections with other cultures and other people (like our neighbors), but in small, suburban towns we are taken aback by the friendliness, by the interest. Today I feel like we are excluding ourselves from everyone and everything. Michael’s car windows are tinted; I am engulfed in various newsfeeds, my eyes turned down; we all want to ride the elevator alone.
A part of me is OK with this, and a part of me really does fear the worst, but tomorrow, on Columbia Street, in my own little suburb of the city, I am going to wave to someone. For the pleasurable pleasure of it.
Being Neighborly
There are many things pleasant about the springtime stoop-sale.
While the weekend sunlight weaves through the open spots in the cherry blossom across the street, we garbage bag clothes, unfold the card tables, dust off my grandfather’s old theater posters, and artfully arrange mismatched mugs, old jewelry, vases, and candlestick holders. We position furniture like living rooms, hang coats in trees, remove pictures from frames. We break our twenties, then take chalk and draw big arrows on the street corners. All other days, when we are shredding our junk mail, afraid to advertise our address, it is today that we want to be found. Someone, go get coffee from Caputo’s.
On the one hand, when our things finally begin to feel heavy, purging is cleansing. After my last blog post on how Michael only wants to wear/own two shirts, I assessed my own (gym) t-shirt situation and tossed what felt like 100 t-shirts. How fast we accumulate the same shit is kind of shocking. How fast we attribute keeping the same shit due to made-up sentiment is equally as shocking. But this t-shirt was my dad’s; but this t-shirt was a gift; but this t-shirt is so soft; but this t-shirt says UMass on it. I now have a neat stack of about 10 t-shirts on my shelf. (8 too many for Michael.) Most of them say Brooklyn on it (the pleasure of words and home rolled into one).
And then on the other hand, setting up shop and/or perusing through a neighbor’s shop rejuvenates the spirit of “buying local.” The stoop sale is the baby of small businesses and by perching ourselves outside our own, we’re not only inviting community into our nest, we’re creating a sense of new adventure on familiar streets. We’re meeting the new family across the street that speaks French; we’re having a longer conversation with the old lady down the block who is always with the broom. Carroll Gardens had character(s) long before the neighborhood saw specialty stores for ramen noodles and smoked fish. But it’s the people that have character, that bring the character, and not the things we are looking to sell.
We make use of the stoop and watch the traffic. The vans that slow and roll down their windows. The bicyclists that ask us to watch their bikes so they can leaf through books. The kids who inadvertently take plastic things off tables and just leave. But we say hello and thank you to everyone because there is no day better than stoop-sale day for being neighborly.
Of the Ilk
Michael is of the ilk that clothes don’t matter, if you care about your clothes, you should be ashamed of yourself. I attribute this extremism to a few things: a) the farmer’s mentality that is all up in his blood; his dad was raised on a farm in Funks Grove, IL where a lone pair of coveralls was enough to get the land tilled in time to ring the cowbell. b) the years after grad school living in Islamorada, FL where it was perfectly acceptable to go talk business in Kino Sandals and a shirt donning palm trees. c) Little Lanky Michael Brown in the 80s and 90s did not come to class wearing the latest anything. If that (truly) bothered him at the time, I wouldn’t know, because today it is only referenced with pride. I should also mention that he is 100% colorblind, a guy who sees most things, both literally and figuratively, in black and white, a familial trait inherited from his mother’s father. Sometimes, when I feel like choking myself up, I will stop to think of Michael in a colorless world, unable to appreciate the green of my eyes, the blue of the sky, the red of the radish. That is, until he says something like: “I think I can get away with owning 2 shirts.” This statement brings fury and depression to my door. No, you cannot get away with that, I think. While I know the self-effacing t-shirt is a go-to wardrobe item for most men, I imagine most men like to at least rotate through a decent selection of them. Plus, the t-shirt you wear to the gym is not the same as the t-shirt you don’t wear to the gym. Am I right? To my disadvantage, I failed to marry someone who believes in adhering to what the wife says and wants. I suppose that’s fair considering I’m not going to just do what the husband wants either, but in this case, I really think he should consider wearing wear more than just 2 shirts. When we first started dating in ‘08, he had just returned to Brooklyn from Islamorada, and I couldn’t get him to stop wearing shirts with fish on them. But at this point, I would die for the return of the fish shirts, because those shirts at least boasted a collar. What I’d give to see a collar again, and not a shirt featuring sweat-wicking or odor-reducing fibers. With color-limited vision, I imagine Michael knows his limitations when it comes to dressing himself and/or buying new clothes, which is why, as his wife, I am happy to dress him. Sadly, he won’t allow for that. What makes this difficult is that we’re talking about an attractive man who can wear just about anything and still look good. He’s like a paper doll cutout I am forced to set aside while I stare longingly at the templates for hats and pants. Let me dress you, Michael Brown!