I (HEART) NY
Portland is the perfect city. It's progressive, affordable, near the coast, near the mountains, not so near family, but it's full of cool people who are laid back and just so happy to be here. Here's what life is like for us here: On Saturday, AnnaRay took The Boy to our friendly neighborhood lesbian-owned coffee shop for breakfast and to our friendly neighborhood family-owned barbershop for a haircut (#4 - The Airforce Officer.) Meanwhile, one of our new best friends, let's call her Twinkletoes, introduced me to The Rebuilding Center, where we browsed aisles and aisles of used bathroom fixtures, ceramic tile, lumber, light fixtures, cabinets and shingles looking for treasures. Twinkletoes bought a solid little wooden table for five bucks and helped a nice old man haggle a cabinet down from forty to ten dollars; I talked to a stunning woman in a blue wig wearing a gladiator costume (found at the Goodwill Bins) while she shoveled dirt and straw into a wheelbarrow to make a cob house.
AnnaRay and I met up around 11 a.m. and walked The Boy to our friendly neighborhood playground, admiring the spectacular display of varied flowering gardens that seem to grace every single yard in the city. On the way back, we stopped at our friendly neighborhood Irish pub for lunch, then headed home for a nap. This evening, Twinkletoes came over to babysit so AR and I could go out on a date - our first in months - and we rode our bikes to a great little sushi restaurant we'd been meaning to try. Then we biked to the movie theater to see Revenge of the Sith, (totally craptastic - a must see!) and rode home. I think we racked up a whole 3 miles on the round (triangular?) trip.
Life here is good. Life here is easy. And yet ...
And yet I can't stop thinking that before the boy enters junior high, we're going to head back to New York where we belong.
Life is not easy in New York. You have to wait on line for everything; you can't ride your bike everywhere; everybody is wound up tight, and nobody can afford to live there. I haven't even lived there since I was 18, but when I get off the plane and hear those abrasive accents, when I see the snow in the winter or the fiery maples in the fall or the green green green of the Hudson Valley in the spring, when I creep by Yankee Stadium while stuck in traffic on the Major Deegan, when I walk around the streets of manhattan passing people of ten different races speaking ten different languages in a single block, when I watch the sun set over the river from my seat on the Harlem/Hudson line as we roll by the platform billboards advertising Broadway shows and museum exhibitions I'll never have time to see, when I bite into a real bagel that's dense and chewy, I know that I'm home.
You can take this girl out of New York, but she'll always want to come back.
posted by judybat at 5:54 PM
4 Comments:
oh, judy, i am SO with you. the barking cabbies. the street meat vendors. even the green gooey sledge that accumulates on street corners in summertime. it's no idylic portland. it can kick your ass on a tough day. most of the time it ain't so pretty. and yet, i can't shake the place from my veins... of course, we're in lousy boston surrounded by psychologically wounded ny-obsessed freaks who if they'd just shut up about new york and enjoy the cute mid-sized new england-ness of the place they'd be ok, but instead keep tugging on the sleeves of the world's real cities wanting to be included in the cultural reindeer games. so lame. anyway, we'll see you back in our beloved big apple some day before The Boys are in junior high. you've got a deal, babe. in the meantime, we're comin' to visit you in that fabulous portland place with the used tiles and shit. that sounds cool. ts
WHAT??? I was not informed of this plan to move back to NYC!
Um, can I buy your house?
Where do you get your bagels?
I know what you're talking about. Your cousin can attest to how giddy and delighted I was when our plane came in over London, how excited I got just seeing signs that say "Way Out", and how delighted I was to be back int he land where everyone involved in service industry, even the grumpy monosyllabic ones, has to have the last "thank you" (at one hotel I let the manager win after we had exchanged four than-yous each).
I have no idea why I have this deep longing for the UK; I've lived there for, at most, eight months, and that's only if you count in all the time I've spent there on vacations as well as my college semester abroad. But the language, the smells, the wonderful mixture of "oh, yes, that's fairly new, only been there since 1660" and immigration officers in chador, bartenders as red-headed as a Weasley, police officers in turbans, and Highland lairds doubling as hotel keepers, straight out of Monarch of the Glen... something ineluctably draws me to it.
Of course, as a substitute, I'd take Boston, psychologically wounded or not. But I think it will be easier (though nearly impossible) to get a UK work permit than to move the US capitol to New England. :-)
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